titsay
AnasAbdin
Cosmic Funnies
Mike Driver
Sweet Seals For You, Always
d e v o n
★
roma★
izzy's playlists!
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
i don't do bad sauce passes
NASA
almost home
art blog(derogatory)
we're not kids anymore.
todays bird
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Kiana Khansmith
@theartofmadeline
$LAYYYTER
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
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seen from Algeria
seen from Japan
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
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seen from United Kingdom
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seen from Singapore
seen from Iraq
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@antholoji
i know i'm on a carousel spinning around, floating up and down, nowhere to go. will you break the spell?
amada luz 𓏲 ๋࣭ ࣪ ˖ ⭑.ᐟ 𓊆 twentiesㅤ༉‧₊˚.ㅤshe / her 𓊇 nsfw content ahead. mdni. not spoiler free. ㅤ⤷ ゛multifandom ⋆˚࿔ ˖⭑.ᐟ toji’s scar enthusiast ˎˊ˗ ㅤㅤ⤷ ゛byf ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ 𝜗𝜚 .ᐟ anthology ㅤㅤㅤ⤷ ゛about me ㅤ⊹ ࣪ ˖ ໒꒱ㅤ#recs <𝟑 .ᐟ 𝜗𝜚 ⋆˚࿔
i’m more sociable on @amadaluz © 2026 antholoji. all rights reserved.
MUSUBI: TALES OF THE GOLDEN ERA. ₊ ˚ 𓈒 ༉‧₊˚. masterlist .ᐟ Collection of JJK oneshots based on the Heian Era ໒ @kldgo x @antholoji ꒱
MUSUBI (結び) represents the divine, cosmic force of creation, becoming, and the invisible, energetic bonds that connect people, things, and moments in time. It is the power that brings two separate elements together to create something new.
SYNOPSIS. “The Heian Era flourishes under the grace of ink brushes and ruminations. The strokes of these flickers dragged pathways across each region of Heian-Kyō—and within these regions— of silk robes, red and blazing; burning eyes seen through the cracks of blinds—would hold lush, dainty histories of its own.”
CW/TAGS. 18+. au/no curses. tba.
PARTS.
kldgo ♡⸝⸝ ㅤ⤷ ゛fushiguro toji. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. forbidden love, rivals. tba.
ㅤ⤷ ゛geto suguru. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. opposites attract, childhood pact. tba.
ㅤ⤷ ゛gojo satoru. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. bodyguard, forced proximity. tba.
ㅤ⤷ ゛nanami kento. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. enemies to lovers, royal consort. tba.
antholoji ♡⸝⸝
ㅤ⤷ ゛higuruma hiromi. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. arranged marriage / marriage of convenience, fake dating. tba.
ㅤ⤷ ゛kong shiu. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. secret relationship, first love. tba.
ㅤ⤷ ゛kusakabe atsuya. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. epistolary, second love. tba.
ㅤ⤷ ゛ryomen sukuna. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. love at first sight, friends to lovers. tba.
TAGLIST. comment to be tagged! @adettee @mimicosmos8 @tulipfyy
© 2026 kldgo x antholoji. all rights reserved. ✾⋆.˚ we do not give permission for our work to be translated, copy or edited in any way. do not repost our full works on any other platform. do not put our work in ai. reblogs are appreciated, but please do not steal. lace dividers by @/cursed-carmine! RESEARCH ACC: @kidokigo
soooo excited to post these fics!! (ㅅ´ ˘ `)♡
man i love laufey
Hi, everyone. I really hate to ask for help but my cat Zoe stopped eating and drinking a couple of days ago and started breathing very heavily. Turns out she has been diagnosed with pleural effusion. She needs emergency care and extensive testing to find out the cause (which could be CHF, cancer or FIP). Unfortunately, the cost of initial care amounts to R$3,500 (around US$700) and I've run out of funds caring for her sister with IBD in the past few months, so I could really use some help right now. Any little bit goes a long way. Please share and help us if you can.
Pay*Pal: [email protected]
(Unfortunately, I can't use other crowdfunding options since I'm based in Brazil)
hey guys! how are you? ₍₍⚞(˶>ᗜ<˶)⚟⁾⁾ since guilty as sin is coming to an end (i'll be updating this week 😳), i wanted to ask which of the following wips i've been working on you'd like me to post next.
i've started mapping out all the ideas, so whatever you choose will be fine!
which fic do you prefer
"deeds of desperation" with divorce attorney!higuruma and ex!reader
"like sunlight..." with single dad!toji and single mom!reader
"untouched" with priest!higuruma and nun!reader
i'm indecisive and don't know what to choose / show me the result :D
i also wanted to ask if you'd prefer longer fics, maybe more than 10 chapters but with shorter chapters (under 5k words), or shorter fics, maybe fewer than 10 chapters but with longer chapters (10k+ words).
either way, thank you so much for your support and love! i love you all so much! (っ.❛ ᴗ ❛.)っ 💗 mwah
babe! 💗 thank you so so so so much for your tips, i found them very useful! honestly, i had never written before, so you have no idea how much i appreciate it! i'm going to bookmark the post 😘 and i will let you know how it goes 💋 love you
NONNIE! 💗 i'm glad they were helpful! best of luck with this new project. i'm confident you'll do well ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧ !
pleaseeee let me know how it goes!!
hi babe, do you have some writing tips? 👉🏽 👈🏽 love you 💋
hi, love, how are you? yesss, i'm happy to share the things that work for me when writing!
i tend to daydream and ruminate on ideas for a long time, so first i try to put what's in my head into words. personally, it helps me to explain the whole idea, with the beginning, middle, and end if possible, and i write it in spanish, which is my first language, as if i were explaining what happens in a movie to a friend. i don't care if it reads well, sounds poetic, or is aesthetically structured. what i need is to create as much mental space as possible. so the first thing would be to write down what you have in mind as if you were telling a friend about a movie or book.
from there, i break down the main idea into more concrete ideas. what is the main conflict? what conflicts arise from it? it might be very overwhelming at first, and you might feel like giving up (i've been there :c), but the more you break down the main idea, the easier it will be to address and develop it.
if you want to write something with multiple parts or chapters, give each part a goal. i find it helpful to map out the parts of a fic with situations or events to address in each part. in guilty as sin, for example, i knew the main idea, and in part 1 i wanted to address their first encounter.
for oneshots or fics that have only one part, it's helpful to divide them into "sections" (i also do this in guilty as sin because the parts are very long). each section then has a goal or a question to answer, a question you might ask yourself but that doesn't necessarily have to be explicitly stated to the readers.
that's when i start writing, tackling the goals of each part or section. the first draft is always… questionable. you'll cringe when you read it, and you'll eventually read it so many times you'll know it by heart. don't overthink it, it might be messy, unhinged, it might not cover everything you want to cover, it might have plot holes. it's the first draft, after all; perfectionism only ruins your mood for writing. write it, and write it badly. the important thing is to write.
if writing the beginning is what's holding you back, then start somewhere else. i don't always start by writing the beginning; often i begin by writing the key scene of the chapter or the scene that inspires the main idea. from there, things fall into place, or i arrange scenes or descriptions.
i like to describe what the character perceives with their physical senses and what's happening in their mind. generally, what happens in our minds is a consequence of the stimuli we perceive. so i ask myself: what is character feeling at this moment? what does x see, what does x feel through touch, what does x hear, what does x taste, what does x listen to? what does x feel in their body? how does x process this in their mind?
you can play with the senses depending on the situation. in a tense situation, you might feel certain senses heighten, like pressure in your ears or a stinging in your eyes from wanting to cry. in a more romantic situation, perhaps your sense of smell becomes more acute, your heartbeat is more noticeable, or you feel the touch of something against your skin.
use your human experience to your advantage. while the characters are fictional, we want them to evoke something in the readers, and what unites us are bodily experiences and how we process them mentally. if you were in the same situation as your character, how would you react? and how would a friend of yours react? this helps me prevent the characters from feeling flat and allows the reader to empathize with them (an excellent technique, in my opinion, for x reader fics).
don't be afraid to do research. it's logical that we aren't walking encyclopedias and we need to research a topic if necessary. personally, i see it as an investment. i don't care if i didn't write a single word that day; if i spent five hours researching something related to the plot, then it's not a "wasted day."
speaking of which, i don't believe there are "wasted days" in the writing process. don't stress about not sitting down to write or not having made any progress. this is something i'm working on, but i've realized that the more pressure i put on myself, the less i feel like writing. so don't pressure yourself, just go with the flow. there might be days when you write for four hours straight, and other days when you just think about things and go to sleep with a question you don't know how to answer.
have fun! use words to your advantage, because you are describing something that only exists inside you. also, keep a water bottle next to you lol because when you're writing you're too lazy to get up and get water.
i hope these help, nonnie! if you want more tips, ask me or send me a dm and i'll help you however i can! ily ( ˶˘ ³˘)♡
YOU HAVE A DATE ˚. ᵎᵎ with nerd!armin arlert (,,>ヮ<,,)
Words from our Hostess: Congratulations! You've been selected for our Host Club. After reading your application, we decided that your best pairing for you might be Armin Arlert. We created an scenario in a summer location of how you and him might've met
nerd!armin arlert x hopeless romantic!reader ╱ meeting the cute boy at a bookshop and spending all evening talking with him
art creds: latteoo16 on x
It’s the first time you go on vacation alone, a well deserved trip to treat yourself after a long year of working and heartbreaks. You pack your favorite dresses and your digital camera and get on a plane to the coast of Italy. It’d be a lie to say that you weren’t thinking about the cute people you might meet on this trip, you’ve always had a wandering eye, maybe being a little too flirty because it just comes natural to you.
Walking the streets of Florence after lunch, you find the perfect spot to rest a little, a tiny book shop with soft jazz music and blue painted walls. The bookshelves reached the ceiling, almost looking like the columns of the shop.
At the counter, there was a man that made you look twice. Pale skin, blue eyes and blond hair tied back on a half bun, he had glasses resting on the top of his head while he was scanning books. You couldn’t understand how a man can be that effortlessly pretty. He was wearing a flowy green t-shirt and some shorts, perfect for the summer heat.
He finally notices you when you get closer to the counter without thinking of it.
“Hi,” he says, smiling kindly. “Welcome. Let me know if you need help finding anything.”
You smile back, leaning against the counter a bit. “Thanks. I’m just browsing for now. This place is adorable. Do you get a lot of tourists in here?”
He nods, pushing his glasses down from the top of his head onto his nose. “Yeah, quite a few. Especially in summer, people come in looking for souvenirs or something light to read by the pool.” He pauses, then adds with a shy little laugh, “Though I always try to convince them to take something better than just a beach read.”
You tilt your head. “Oh? Like what?”
His eyes light up a little. “Depends on what you like. If you want something atmospheric, there’s this Italian author who writes these quiet stories about old families in Tuscany. Or if you’re into history, I just got some new translations of ancient Roman stuff. Super interesting, actually. Did you know the aqueducts they built are still functioning in some places?”
You can’t help grinning. He’s clearly passionate about it. “You sound like you know your stuff. Are you studying literature or something?”
Armin rubs the back of his neck, a faint blush creeping up his cheeks. “Yeah, actually. I’m doing a program here for a few months. History and literature double major back home.”
“Cute,” you say without thinking, then laugh softly when his eyes widen. “I mean, it’s nice. Most people don’t get that excited about books anymore.”
He smiles, looking down at the counter for a moment, after that, the conversation flows easily. You tell him you’re on your first solo vacation, trying to relax after a rough year. He listens so attentively, nodding along and asking gentle questions.
“What kind of work do you do?” he asks, leaning forward on his elbows.
You explain a bit about your job, keeping it light and he seems genuinely interested. In return he tells you about some of the books he’s been reading lately, a mix of classic philosophy and modern fantasy. “I just finished this one series about explorers in a fictional world. The world-building is insane. I stayed up way too late because I couldn’t stop.”
You laugh. “Total nerd, huh?”
“Just a little,” he says with a sheepish grin. “My friends tease me about it all the time.”
Time passes without you noticing. A couple of customers come and go, but he handles them quickly and comes right back to talk with you. You end up sitting on the little stool by the counter, flipping through books he recommends while he works. He points out passages he loves, reading them out loud in his softest voice, and you find yourself hanging on every word.
Eventually the clock on the wall hits closing time. He flips the sign on the door and lets out a small sigh. “Shift’s over. I didn’t mean to keep you here so long, sorry if I talked your ear off.”
“You didn’t,” you say honestly. “I had fun.”
He hesitates, fiddling with his fingers as his cheeks go a little pink again. “Um… this might be forward, but would you… maybe want to grab a drink? There’s a nice little place just around the corner. They do really good spritz. If you’re not busy, I mean. No pressure at all.”
You smile, feeling a warm flutter in your chest at how sweetly awkward he looks asking. “I’d love that, Armin.”
His face brightens instantly. “Really? Okay, cool. Let me just lock up.”
As you step back out into the golden evening light together, he walks beside you, already starting to ask what kind of drinks you usually like. The conversation picks up right where it left off and you think this might be the best decision you’ve made all trip.
a/n: i love a meet cute omg and armin is such a sweetheart to write i love him<33 this was for my girlie @antholoji i hope you liked it
taglist: @nalyarrr @lalalalastacy @bewitched-pearl @beesonhoneytoast @fr3shsqueezed-tj @arminslutss @omw2paradis @ttoxicity @carinemylove @vanillakirstein @kh4dij7 @kamislop
LOOK WHAT NORA WROTE UWUWUWUWU me encanta! muchas gracias, guapa 💗 vení que te doy un beso MUAK MUAK
MUSUBI: TALES OF THE GOLDEN ERA. ₊ ˚ 𓈒 ༉‧₊˚. masterlist .ᐟ Collection of JJK oneshots based on the Heian Era ໒ @kldgo x @antholoji ꒱
MUSUBI (結び) represents the divine, cosmic force of creation, becoming, and the invisible, energetic bonds that connect people, things, and moments in time. It is the power that brings two separate elements together to create something new.
SYNOPSIS. “The Heian Era flourishes under the grace of ink brushes and ruminations. The strokes of these flickers dragged pathways across each region of Heian-Kyō—and within these regions— of silk robes, red and blazing; burning eyes seen through the cracks of blinds—would hold lush, dainty histories of its own.”
CW/TAGS. 18+. au/no curses. tba.
PARTS.
kldgo ♡⸝⸝ ㅤ⤷ ゛fushiguro toji. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. forbidden love, rivals. tba.
ㅤ⤷ ゛geto suguru. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. opposites attract, childhood pact. tba.
ㅤ⤷ ゛gojo satoru. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. bodyguard, forced proximity. tba.
ㅤ⤷ ゛nanami kento. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. enemies to lovers, royal consort. tba.
antholoji ♡⸝⸝
ㅤ⤷ ゛higuruma hiromi. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. arranged marriage / marriage of convenience, fake dating. tba.
ㅤ⤷ ゛kong shiu. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. secret relationship, first love. tba.
ㅤ⤷ ゛kusakabe atsuya. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. epistolary, second love. tba.
ㅤ⤷ ゛ryomen sukuna. ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ .ᐟ soon... ㅤㅤ SUMMARY. tba. ㅤㅤ CW/TAGS. love at first sight, friends to lovers. tba.
TAGLIST. comment to be tagged! @adettee @mimicosmos8 @tulipfyy @leafington
© 2026 kldgo x antholoji. all rights reserved. ✾⋆.˚ we do not give permission for our work to be translated, copy or edited in any way. do not repost our full works on any other platform. do not put our work in ai. reblogs are appreciated, but please do not steal. lace dividers by @/cursed-carmine! RESEARCH ACC: @kidokigo
hermana que sepas que cada vez que escucho lux ahora pienso en ti y en tu perfil
NORA SAJHHSDJHDJASHS ese es el mayor elogio que me pueden decir <3 te amo reina
help i'm having impure thoughts about priest!higuruma
luz. i think higuruma needs to grovel more. And he also need to practice aftercare /hj /srs(i jsut like seeing men on their knees heheh)
he really needs to be on his knees, i agree 🙂↕️🙂↕️ you're giving me ideas, nonnie, ideas that it would be very sinful of me to say priest higuruma oops, who said that?
i think higuruma is one of the best at aftercare out of all the jjk men, but he's too emotionally constipated to worry about it 🫢
GUILTY AS SIN? ₊ ˚ 𓈒ㅤׂ 𝜗𝜚 masterlist .ᐟ
SYNOPSIS. Order is a fragile thing. Higuruma Hiromi spent his life defining the boundaries of right and wrong, but within the walls of his office, those boundaries are nothing but smoke. She was his finest apprentice: disciplined, sharp, and lethal. Or so he thought. For five years, they existed within the rigid confines of the law, until the line between mentorship and mastery blurred and finally snapped.
One confession, whispered against the backdrop of a relentless storm, turns a mentor into a master and a lawyer into a devotee. When the brilliant, cold-blooded associate finally confesses her hunger for a leash, the hierarchy collapses. And Higuruma, the man who built his life on verdicts, finds the only one that matters: her absolute submission. No witnesses. No appeals. Just the heavy silence of a room where power is taken and freedom is found in surrender.
Beneath the weight of his gaze, the law of the land fails, leaving only the raw, visceral law of desire. They've stepped out of the light of justice and into a world where the only order is his command, and the only plea is for more.
STARRED BY. boss!higuruma x lawyer!reader
WC. 128.4K
CW/TAGS. 18+. au/no curses. smut. workplace romance. forbidden relationship. psychological angst. power dynamics. angst (hurt no comfort), age gap, bdsm & kink, bóndage, dóm/súb dynamics, explicit language, light sadism, slow burn, sexual content, vóyeurism, workplace sexúal misconduct, yearning, more tba...
artwork credits to verazpberry!
PARTS. part 1. without ever touching his skin, how can i be guilty as sin? part 2. why does it feel like a vow we'll both uphold somehow? part 3. i'm seeing visions, am i bad? or mad? or wise? part 4. what if the way you hold me is actually what's holy? part 5. oh, what a way to die!
EXTRAS. moodboard. playlist. higuruma playlist by @kaienxi (thank you so much kaienxi!!)
DISCLAIMER. this story is intended for mature audiences only (18+). it explores complex power dynamics, including bdsm themes and authority play. reader discretion is strongly advised as the narrative contains explicit sexual content, depictions of psychological tension, and a deep dive into the blurring lines of professional ethics and personal obsession.
the legal setting and professional environments depicted are purely fictional and used for narrative purposes. the behaviors and relationship dynamics shown between higuruma and the protagonist are not intended to represent healthy or standard professional conduct in the real world. this is a work of fiction exploring the darker, more visceral side of desire.
this is an alternate universe (au) where the characters of jujutsu kaisen exist in a world without curses, focusing instead on their roles within a legal and psychological framework. character motivations and actions are explored through a dark, cinematic lens that may deviate from canon personalities to fit this specific narrative.
this fanfiction is written for entertainment purposes only. all original plot points and specific characterizations within this au are the product of my creative work. that said, enjoy!
© 2026 antholoji. all rights reserved. ✾⋆.˚ i do not give permission for my work to be translated, copy or edited in any way. do not repost my full works on any other platform. do not put my work in ai. reblogs are appreciated, but please do not steal.
new playlist by @kaienxi! it is so higuruma coded 😭
hii bbs, how are you? first of all, thank you so much for all the support! i just want to give you all a big big hug 💗🫂
i've been seeing who's interacting with my work and which accounts follow me, and while i appreciate the intention, it makes me uncomfortable that blogs without a stated or visible age, or blogs run by minors, are interacting with my work!
on my profile, i've stated several times that minors do not interact, and i hope that will be respected, please!
my favorite higuruma headcanons .ᐟ ⋆˚࿔ pt. 2 wc. 1.3k | cw. nsfw under the cut. mdni. part 1 here!
higuruma doesn't know how to truly relax, he can't help it, this man is on the verge of a constant nervous breakdown. but wearing his loungewear helps him a little, because it's high-quality linen trousers and cotton tees. though if someone knocks on the door, he immediately throws on a knit cardigan or a hoodie because he feels "naked" without a layer of formality.
i'm pretty sure he owns a high-end air purifier because, as i said before, his nose is sensitive. if higuruma spots a single dust mote dancing in a sunbeam while he's reading, he'll stop everything to clean
after a trial, higuruma enters airplane mode. he can sit on the sofa staring at a wall for 20 minutes in total silence. he's not sad, his brain is just defragmenting the day's files. if you try to talk to him, he'll respond with a soft mmh that has at least five different meanings.
because he reads so much international literature, he's picked up the basics of several languages. if you're at a restaurant and the menu has a typo in spanish or french, higuruma will stare at it with a furrowed brow. he won't say anything to avoid being that guy, but the vein in his forehead will give him away.
even though he spends a fortune on books, higuruma loves libraries for the absolute silence. he has a very worn-out library card and gets genuinely offended if the librarian asks him if he wants to renew it.
i'm a firm believer that higuruma likes movies where "nothing happens" but the production design is flawless. he would be one of those people who would leave the cinema last, always staying through the credits until the very end, out of pure respect.
when you argue over something small, like who didn't wash a mug, higuruma subconsciously starts using terms like "circumstantial evidence" or "burden of proof". if you laugh at him, he gets very dignified, crosses his arms, and says: "i'm trying to reach a logical resolution, i don't see the humor," but inside he's fighting a smile because he knows he's being too much.
higuruma expresses love through retention. if you mentioned in passing months ago that you missed a specific candy from your childhood or that a certain scent makes you feel calm, he catalogs it. he won't give you a gift just because it's a holiday; he'll give it to you on a random tuesday because he just happened to find it, when in reality, he spent three weeks tracking down that specific item.
if higuruma buys you a book, it won't just be a bestseller. it will be an edition with a specific texture of paper he knows you'll like. sometimes, if he's feeling particularly vulnerable, he'll leave a single, tiny pencil mark next to a passage that reminded him of you. it's a very blink-and-you'll-miss-it gesture, but for him, it's a massive confession.
if you are stressed or sick, his affectionate side goes into overdrive. higuruma will give you a survival kit that you'll find on your counter: the exact medicine you need, a thermos of tea at the perfect temperature, some cooked, cozy meals, and perhaps a handwritten note saying that you should rest, please.
even when the gift is purely romantic, he still includes the receipt and the warranty. but it's not because higuruma is being cold, it's because he wants you to have the security of knowing that if the item fails you, he has already provided the solution. to him, providing you with a hassle-free life is the highest form of devotion
occasionally, higuruma will see something, a piece of jewelry with a gemstone that matches your eyes or a scarf in your favorite color, and he'll buy it instantly. he'll present it with a stoic face, saying nothing, but the way he won't look you in the eye tells you he just wanted to see you smile.
higuruma would never walk into a florist and pick whatever looks nice. he would spend at least an hour cross-referencing botanical books or hanakotoba manuals to ensure the message is precise and hear me out here!
if higuruma made a mistake or was too cold during an argument, he wouldn't bring you generic red roses. he'd bring white anemones, which symbolize sincerity and truth, or purple hyacinths, a formal plea for forgiveness. he wouldn't say much when handing them over; he'd just wait for you to look up the meaning, watching you with that silent, heavy intensity.
also, along with the flowers, there is always a small card written in his impeccable, fountain-pen calligraphy. higuruma is a man who is better with written words than with spoken words.
if he's deeply in love but still too dignified to be cheesy, he'll give you red camellias. in the japanese flower language, they symbolize deep love, passion, and admiration. because they look so elegant and structured, higuruma feels he can maintain his serious lawyer persona while secretly telling you something incredibly intense.
nsfw under the cut
higuruma has a prosecutor's stare that intimidates everyone. in bed, he uses that gaze to analyze you. he's not being cold; he's absorbing every detail of your pleasure. if you ask him to stop looking, he'll probably lean in closer, whispering that he needs to see exactly how your body reacts to him
he's obsessed with the feeling of his skin against yours. since he's a hygiene freak, sex with higuruma sometimes starts with a shower or bath. it's a transition ritual: leaving the lawyer behind and becoming the man who just wants to worship your body.
if you have him between your legs and you stroke his hair while telling him how good he is or how much you love him, his fingers will dig into your thighs, his breathing will become a total mess because higuruma has a praise kink
if your into bdsm, higuruma won't go for rough ropes immediately; he prefers his own silk ties or pocket squares because they are soft, they smell like his cologne, and they are a direct symbol of his professional status being used for something sinful. watching him take off his tie to bind your hands while keeping that deadly serious expression is... a religious experience imo
higuruma adopts a very professional attitude to his legal duties, but when you visit him late at night at his office when he's stressed over a case, he might just snap. there's something about being surrounded by evidence and official documents that triggers a need for visceral control. he will clear his desk, pressing you down onto the case files, blurring the line between his duty and his desperate need to unwind. he'll eat you right there, trying to release his stress.
higuruma can tolerate a suit all day, but as soon as he gets home, he needs to be touched. he'll shiver when you undo his collar or trace your fingernails down his back. his skin flushes remarkably easily, especially when you use dirty words or laugh softly during serious moments. he hates this lack of composure, which, of course, makes him even more reactive
higuruma likes explicit instructions for order. but if you take charge, like grabbing his tie and pulling him down, or ordering him to stay still, his brain stalls. all that legal structure collapses. sub!higuruma briefly reappears. and if you praise him, his eyes go dazed, his muscles lock up, and he will follow any direction with silent, frantic obedience.
when higuruma is giving pleasure, he approaches it with the focus of a surgeon or a judge reading a complex ruling. he won't rush. he wants to know exactly what works, registering your breathing and every subtle hitch in your voice. he aims for maximum efficiency. if you tell him exactly what to do to make you cum, he'll implement it immediately, satisfied when he successfully wins your release
as soon as you both finish, his first instinct is cleanup. not just a casual wipe, higuruma will carry you to the shower, meticulously washing you with gentle, efficient care. it's his transition ritual back into civilized higuruma. he needs to ensure you are both well and clean, before he feels comfortable cuddling.
things that have been on my mind lately (,,>﹏<,,) oh, what a curse it is to be a lover girl 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Guilty as Sin? pt. 5
What if he's written ‘mine’ on my upper thigh only in my mind? One slip and falling back into the hedge maze, Oh, what a way to die!
SYNOPSIS. Five years of professional order, and on a rainy Tuesday everything collapsed. When the brilliant, cold-blooded lawyer confesses her hunger for a leash, her mentor, Higuruma Hiromi, ceases to be her boss and becomes her master. The verdict is in: silence is a gift, and surrender is the only truth.
WC. 28.1K | smut. workplace romance. forbidden relationship. psychological angst. power dynamics.
CW. boss!higuruma, lawyer!femreader, age gap, dóm/súb dynamics, explicit language, angst, high sexual tension.
A/N. previously on guilty as sin? ! here | series' masterlist ! here | next part ! soon?
The air in Tokyo was a heavy, shimmering veil of heat, a thick, stagnant layer that clung to the skin like a fever. It was perfumed by the sweet, fresh bloom of hydrangeas, clusters of light-blue and violet that smelled of damp earth and slow decay. It was a season of transition, a deceptive threshold where every beginning felt as urgent as a heartbeat and as fragile as a glass.
Inside the recently established offices of Higuruma & Nanami Assoc., the atmosphere was a sharp, clinical contrast. It smelled of expensive oak, the metallic tang of fresh ink, and the sterile scent of success, a scent that usually acted as an aphrodisiac for a man of his ambition. Higuruma Hiromi sat behind his desk, his silhouette a dark, immovable monolith framed by the blinding midday sun. To anyone entering, he was a figure of shadow and gold, a man whose relentless logic was already carving a bloody path through the legal elite.
He felt the weight of his own authority like a physical pressure in his chest, a familiar, cold satisfaction. His fountain pen scratched across the paper, a rhythmic, grating sound that echoed the friction of a mind that never rested. He was a creature of statutes and iron-clad arguments, a man who believed that everything, even desire, could be cross-examined and subdued.
He didn't look up when a knock came. He didn't look up when the door opened, or when Nanami Kento's rhythmic, heavy-heeled stride crossed the threshold. But then, a second sound fractured the silence.
It was the sharp, erratic clack of high heels, a staccato rhythm that didn't belong to the office's seasoned pace. It was a sound that felt like a needle skipping on a record, a sudden, violent pulse of heat that crawled up his spine.
"Higuruma," Nanami's voice was a baritone anchor, grounding the room. "The interns for the summer program have arrived. This is (y/n). She'll be joining the civil department, per her preferences."
"One moment…" Higuruma murmured.
His fountain pen scratched across the paper, a final, decisive signature on a motion for summary judgment. His hand stayed poised over the document, his fingers tightening around the pen until his knuckles turned a ghostly white. When he capped the pen with a slow, deliberate click that sounded like a pair of handcuffs locking into place, Higuruma finally raised his gaze.
The world didn't just fracture, it dissolved.
Because the light hitting the woman standing in front of him was too bright, too clinical, washing over the sharp lines of her blazer and the soft curve of her throat. In that split second, the logic he prided himself on didn't fail, it simply paused, a gear skipping in a perfectly calibrated machine.
He didn't recognize the feeling, and he didn't seek to name it. It was just a sudden, quiet displacement of the air in the room, a phantom heat that settled under his skin and refused to dissipate. She stood there, a vision of professional restraint, yet there was a vitality to her presence that felt like a low-frequency hum vibrating against his own ribs.
Looking at her wasn't an epiphany, it was a disturbance. He saw a variable he hadn't accounted for, a flicker of something raw and unscripted that tasted faintly of copper and sea salt. It was the first hairline fracture in his carefully constructed world, the kind of microscopic break that you don't notice until the entire structure begins to lean.
You were dressed in a charcoal suit that was a fraction too stiff, a shield of wool and polyester that looked more like a suit of armor you hadn't yet learned to inhabit. Hiromi's gaze, trained to spot the smallest rupture in a testimony, immediately caught the way you shifted your weight from heel to heel, a subtle, restless tremor that betrayed the raw agony of those new, unforgiving shoes.
He tracked the movement of your hands, noticing the way you gripped your briefcase; the leather was pristine, unscratched, and held against your body like a barricade between your pulse and the world. It was the posture of someone expecting a blow, yet refusing to flinch.
And then, his eyes climbed to your face. Your hair brushed your shoulders in a soft, mocking contrast to the rigid line of your blazer. Your smile was a thin, respectful formality, but your eyes, clear, intelligent, and startlingly direct, met his with a predatory calm. There was no deference in that look, no fear of the shadow and gold he projected. In the heavy, humid silence of the office, that gaze felt like a cold blade sliding between his ribs, a silent challenge that made the air in his lungs feel suddenly, inexplicably scarce.
"I am (y/n)," you said. Your voice was steady, a tempered blade of sound despite the visible, frantic tremor in your fingers. "Second-year law student. I'm here for the summer internship program. It's a privilege to meet you, Sir."
In that second, something inside Hiromi didn't just change, it suffered a violent, silent amputation.
For years, he had lived in a self-imposed twilight, a vacuum of cold statutes and colder victories where everything was gray-scale and predictable. But looking at you, really looking at you, was like a sudden, blinding flash of light in a darkened interrogation room. It didn't warm him; it exposed him.
He had spent his life seeking a justice that was sterile and distant, but in the depths of your gaze, he found something far more lethal: a sanctuary he hadn't asked for. It was a clarity so sharp it felt like a sickening jolt of intuition, a premonition that settled in the pit of his stomach like lead. He knew, with the terrifying precision of a man who calculates risks for a living, that if he ever allowed himself to touch that light, he would eventually be the one to extinguish it.
He didn't just want to mentor you. He wanted to possess the source of that light, to see if it would burn his hands or if it would finally melt the permafrost around his heart.
Nanami stepped forward, the deliberate weight of his presence momentarily eclipsing the sun. He placed a folder on the desk, a crisp, white dossier that felt like an indictment, sliding it toward Higuruma with a silence that could scream.
"I'll leave you two to it," Nanami said. His gaze lingered on Hiromi for a second too long, his eyes narrowed behind his frames as if sensing the sudden, violent shift in the room's barometric pressure. "Take care of her, Higuruma."
The door clicked shut with a finality that echoed in Hiromi's bones. Silence reclaimed the office, heavy and suffocating, save for the rhythmic, clinical hum of the air conditioning.
Hiromi looked down at the resume. The ink felt fresh, almost wet to his heightened senses. Twenty-two years old. The number was a jagged blade. Nine years. A lifetime of scarred experience, of calculated cynicism, and of darkened, lonely rooms lay between his thirty-one years and your twenty-two. He felt the vast, cold chasm of a decade separating his world of weary truths from your world of untapped potential.
The air in the room felt thick, charged with a static that made the hair on his arms stand up. He didn't look at you yet, he couldn't. Instead, he stared at your name on the paper until the letters blurred into a dark, indelible stain.
"Sit down, (y/n)," he said.
His voice was lower than usual, a rough, granular sound that seemed to vibrate from the very bottom of his lungs. It wasn't the voice of a mentor; it was a low growl of a man trying to steady himself before a fall.
As the interview began, and you dismantled his grueling technical questions with a brilliance that was both clinical and devastatingly empathetic, Hiromi felt a visceral pull in his gut, a low, rhythmic thrum of blood that he couldn't litigate away. It wasn't just admiration for the sharpness of your mind, it was a sudden, ragged spike of desire, raw, unedited, and utterly prohibited. He watched the way your lips moved, molding the complex legal jargon into something that sounded like music, and the guilt hit him like a physical blow to the sternum.
He tracked the nervous, unconscious way you tucked a stray strand of hair behind your ear, exposing the pale, vulnerable line of your neck. To him, you were a child of the law, a soul not yet corrupted by the grime of the courts, and he was the high priest of a crumbling temple. Desiring you felt like a desecration, a stain on the only thing he had left: his professional integrity.
"Your analysis of the liability clause is… impressive," he said. He leaned back, the high-noon sun beating against the glass behind him, casting a harsh, unforgiving glare that washed out the colors of the room. The light was meridian, invasive, leaving no place for shadows to hide the sudden, dark intensity in his eyes. "Most students your age lack the stomach for the human cost of these cases. They prefer the safety of the statutes."
"The law isn't just about winning, Sir," you replied. Your voice was soft, yet it carried a weight that seemed to anchor the entire room. You looked him dead in the eye, stripping away his rank. "It's about the people left behind when the verdict is read. It's about the wreckage we're supposed to clean up."
The word wreckage hung in the air, thick and prophetic. Hiromi felt a dry ache in his throat. He realized then, with a terrifying surge of heat in his veins, that he didn't just want to teach you. He wanted to be the one who ruined that purity, even as he yearned to protect it.
He stared at you, his pulse a frantic, rhythmic thrumming in the hollow of his throat, a sound only he could hear, like the ticking of a countdown. He wanted to reach across the expanse of the mahogany desk, to shatter the professional distance and trace the trembling line of your jaw with his thumb. He wanted to test if your skin felt as feverish as that daylight made it appear. The thought wasn't just a lapse in judgment; it was a crime, a violation of the very order he lived to uphold.
Even then, in the sterile heat of that first meeting, he was already beginning to sharpen you. He could see the potential in your eyes, the way he would eventually turn your empathy into a weapon for the system, tempering your spirit until it was as cold and lethal as his own. But simultaneously, he was already laying the foundation for the cell where he would keep his hunger for you locked away, a cage of statutes, silence, and self-denial.
He had just met you, and he was already terrified of the day you would leave. He could taste the abandonment in the dry air, a bitter aftertaste to the high-noon sun.
"Welcome to the Civil Department, (y/n)," Hiromi said.
He forced the words through a throat that felt like it was filled with glass. His face was a mask of professional indifference, a masterpiece of stoicism that cost him every ounce of his soul to maintain.
"I hope you find exactly what you are looking for here."
As you turned to leave, the light in the room didn't just fade, it began to bleed out, the clinical white of the office dissolving into a murky, suffocating gray. The sound of your heels on the floor grew louder, more distorted, echoing like a heartbeat in an empty cathedral, until the noise became unbearable.
The two weeks of that first summer internship were a fever dream of agonizing efficiency. You were everywhere, a constant, quiet haunting at the edge of his vision. While the other interns fumbled through the archives like blind cattle, you moved through his world with a terrifying, silent intuition that bordered on the invasive. You didn't just organize his files; you dissected them, arranging the chaos not by date, but by the crushing weight of their emotional evidence. You left neon-colored post-its on his briefs like small, glowing landmines—, noting obvious reminders about his schedule or case law that he usually dismissed as beneath him. Yet, he found himself following them with a submissive precision, tracing your handwriting like a map through a labyrinth of his own making.
Then, Monday came. You were gone. And the air in the office didn't just still, it died.
The silence was no longer a sanctuary of logic, it was a vacuum, a cold, pressurized void that made his ears ring. Hiromi found himself staring at the corner of his desk where you used to sit, the space there feeling thin, depleted of oxygen. He tried to appeal his way out of the feeling, telling himself it was the mere loss of a capable tool, a logistical hiccup in a busy season.
But then, he found himself at that cramped, grease-slicked ramen shop two blocks away, the one you had recommended with such unvarnished earnestness. He sat in the sweltering heat, surrounded by the roar of the lunchtime crowd, and ordered the exact bowl you'd described. He didn't eat for hunger; he ate with a desperate, irrational focus, trying to see if he could taste the ghost of your presence in the salt and the steam. He wanted the broth to burn his throat the way your direct gaze had, searching for a phantom hit of the dopamine your proximity had provided.
He was a man who prided himself on his autonomy, yet there he was, scavenging for the scraps of a law student who had dismantled his peace without ever touching him.
He kept the post-its until the adhesive failed and the neon paper curled like dead skin. He kept the habits. He kept the memory of your light locked in the back of his mind like a forbidden piece of evidence, a stain on a clean file that he couldn't stop reviewing in the dark.
Two years had passed. Two years of sharpening his own bitterness against the stone of the Tokyo legal system until his heart was as jagged and cold as a silver dagger.
The morning was crisp, the streets of Chiyoda carpeted in the brittle, gold-and-russet corpses of fallen leaves that crunched under his expensive shoes like breaking bones. Higuruma approached his office door, his mind already calculating the day's litigation with a detached, hollow precision, when the air in the corridor suddenly turned to lead.
The girl from that first summer was gone. In her place stood a woman who had clearly been baptized under the unforgiving, sickly hum of library fluorescent lights. Your hair was longer now, falling in waves that you tucked behind your ear with a practiced, weary grace, a movement that felt like a punch to his gut. Your gaze was heavier, shadowed by the soul-crushing reality of the Bar Exam; those eyes, once clear, now held a darkness he recognized. Your briefcase, once a shiny shield of naivety, bore the honorable scars of the trade: scuffs on the leather, a worn handle, the physical proof that the world had already begun to claw at you.
He looked at you and felt a surge of something primal, something that tasted like iron and a forbidden fruit. You weren't just an intern anymore. You were a survivor of the same machine that had chewed him up, and for the first time in two years, the vacuum in his chest didn't just ache, it roared.
"Good morning, Mr. Higuruma," you said. Your voice had dropped an octave, losing its youthful, frantic tremor and replacing it with a soft, dangerous steadying, a low hum of confidence that vibrated in the marrow of his bones.
"Good morning…" He barely recognized the sound of his own voice. It was an irregular, gravelly thing, less of a greeting and more of a confession dragged out of a reluctant witness.
"I'm here for my practical training. I was assigned to this firm, and Nanami told me to come directly to your office."
In that moment, the hollow in Hiromi's chest didn't just fill; it overflowed with a dark, torrential heat. It was as if the law itself, the cold, impartial god he served, had finally delivered a favorable verdict, a miracle he didn't deserve. He reached for your papers, his fingers brushing yours for a fraction of a second; the contact was electric, a searing jolt of reality that made the air in the corridor feel flammable.
He signed your documents with a hand that fought the urge to tremble, the ink bleeding into the fiber of the page like a blood pact. With that single, decisive stroke of the pen, he was legally tethering your career, your future, and your very soul to his.
The weight of the obsession he'd buried for two years roared back to life, cruder and more ravenous than before. You were his once more. His apprentice. His shadow. His to sharpen, his to break, and his to keep hidden in the sanctum of his own desires.
He looked up at you, the predatory glint in his gaze finally meeting yours, and for a heartbeat, the picture was perfect. The synergy between you returned, more potent and volatile than before, a chemical reaction that made the very air in the office feel heavy and combustible. He became the architect of your mind, a dark surveyor mapping out every instinct, every fear, and every strength you possessed. He taught you how to take that raw, bleeding empathy of yours, the kind that made your heart an open wound, and temper it into a blade. Cold, precise, and lethal.
He showed you how to dismantle a witness with a single, quiet question that felt like a sharp wire tightening around their throat. He taught you how to look a prosecutor in the eye with a terrifying, hollow calm until they were the ones to blink, and how to navigate the filth of civil disputes without letting the mud stain your soul, even as he felt himself sinking deeper into the mire just to keep you afloat.
As he watched you grow, as he saw you take the jagged tools he'd given you and reshape them into something uniquely yours, a savage, aching pride took root in his heart. It was the pride of a creator staring at his finest, most dangerous masterpiece.
But beneath the pride, the rot of desire was festering, a slow-spreading infection that turned his mentorship into a long, drawn-out act of foreplay. Every lesson was a touch; every correction was a caress. He was sharpening you for the world, but he was also preparing you for himself, feeding a hunger that had long ago abandoned the boundaries of the law and entered the realm of the visceral, the carnal, and the absolute.
He would watch you across the expanse of the oak desk, the late-afternoon sun catching the delicate slope of your neck, and he would feel a hunger so visceral it felt like a felony against his own soul. He wanted to possess the brilliance he had nurtured, to claim the fire he had helped stoke. He wanted to strip away the stiff wool of the suit, the suffocating weight of the laws, and the cold professional distance, until there was nothing left but the raw, unedited pulse of the only light he had ever known. He wanted to ruin you and save you all at once, to break you into pieces just so he could be the one to put you back together.
The guilt was a constant, suffocating pressure in his lungs. Every time he looked at your tired eyes, shadowed by the grind he had forced upon you, he saw the nine-year gap not just as a canyon, but as a great abyss he could never cross without dragging you down into the dark. He had turned you into a weapon to protect you from a world that ate the weak, but now, the terrifying truth settled in his marrow: the person you needed protection from most was the man holding the hilt.
He was terrified. Not of the law he had mastered, nor of the scandal that would shred his reputation, but of the inevitable moment he would finally reach out to touch the light and find that his own darkness, the isolated cold void he called a life, had finally, irrevocably put it out.
Spring in Tokyo arrived with a deceptive, sickly softness. The streets were painted in violent, beautiful shades of pink as the cherry blossoms began their brief, tragic dance toward the pavement, a mass execution of petals that smelled of rain and fleeting life. To the city, it was a season of celebration, but for Hiromi, every falling bloom felt like a grain of sand disappearing from an hourglass. It was a countdown he couldn't stop.
The phone call had come on a Tuesday, cutting through the sterile silence of his office like a honed blade. Your voice, usually a tempered instrument of logic under his relentless tutelage, had fractured into a frantic, melodic pitch that vibrated against his ear, heating the skin there until it burned.
"Higuruma… I passed. I passed the final exam!"
He stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, watching the petals drift like radioactive snow, and felt a surge of pride so potent and visceral it nearly choked him. He felt the possessive thrill of an architect; he had built this. He had taken the raw, bleeding pulp of your potential and forged it into something brilliant, sharp, and undeniable. But as the pride settled, a cold, predatory fear took its place, coiling in his gut like a parasite.
He was terrified. Now that you were complete, now that he had polished you into a mirror of his own excellence, he feared you would finally escape his orbit. He could already see the trajectory: you in another firm, your brilliance sold to the highest bidder, or worse, crushed under the bureaucratic wheels of the Public Defender's office. He imagined you becoming another casualty of the system, your light extinguished by the same rot that had already turned his own soul into a graveyard of lost causes.
The thought of you belonging to the world, and not just to the shadows of his office, felt like a physical violation.
But you stayed. You chose Higuruma & Nanami Assoc., tethering your destiny to the very man who was already mourning you. For months, he lived in a state of high-functioning denial, a precarious legal fiction he constructed to keep his sanity intact. He lied to himself with the same surgical precision he used in court, convincing his conscience that his obsession was merely professional interest.
He watched you navigate the halls as a licensed attorney, a creature of his own making. He felt a dark, possessive thrum in his veins every time he remembered your salary was paid by his hand. Your desk was just a few meters from his door, a distance that felt like a mile of live wire. He hid his hunger behind a mask of stern, impenetrable mentorship, a hollow shell of a man convinced that as long as he didn't reach out to touch the light, he would never be the one to extinguish it.
The office was bathed in a sickly, ethereal glow, the pale, clinical light of a moon that didn't belong in the sky. Hiromi left his desk, a stack of files clutched in his hand like a shield. It was an excuse. There was always an excuse, a pathetic, calculated reason to be near you, to breathe in the scent of your sweet perfume and the ozone of your brilliance.
He approached your station, his pulse erratic, expecting to see his apprentice, the girl with the scuffed briefcase, the nervous smile, and the eyes that still believed in the sanctity of the law.
But when he reached the desk, the world suffered a violent, silent stroke. She was gone.
In her place sat the woman you'd become, the woman who had just dismantled his life in the silver shadows of the Imperial Hotel. You were no longer the intern in the stiff charcoal suit; you were a vision of lethal, dark elegance. You wore that black, sleeveless dress, the fabric clinging to your curves like a second skin, a silken shadow that exposed the delicate, tantalizing expanse of your shoulders. A scent he hadn't recognized until that night, something dark, citric, and intoxicating, filled the stagnant office air, making his head swim with a sudden, violent vertigo.
You were staring at the monitor, your fingers flying across the keys with a cold, mechanical precision that mirrored his own.
"Counselor?" He called out. His voice was a thin, ragged thing, stripped of all its usual authority.
You didn't move. You were inches away, so close he could see the erratic pulse thrumming in the hollow of your neck, yet you remained as still and unreachable as a marble statue in a graveyard. The heat radiating from your skin was a taunt, a reminder of the friction he had craved for two years and finally tasted, only to lose.
"(y/n), look at me."
The command was a plea, a desperate motion filed to a court that had already adjourned. Nothing. The silence in the office became deafening, a high-pitched ring that vibrated in his eardrums.
Then, with a slow, deliberate movement that felt like a sentence being carried out, you stood up. You didn't look at him; you didn't even acknowledge the air he breathed. You packed your things into your briefcase. Your movements are fluid, dismissive, and final. You turned away from him, your heels clicking against the floor with the cold, rhythmic precision of a ticking clock, and began to walk down the long, darkening corridor of the office toward the exit.
Hiromi tried to follow you, but the air in the corridor had turned to thick, stagnant glass. He screamed your name, the sound tearing through his lungs, but his heart was hammering against his ribs like a trapped, frantic bird, drowning out his own voice. He wanted to run, to shatter the distance between you, to grab your arm and finally spill the words he'd kept buried under layers of cold statutes, suffocating pride, and self-loathing. He wanted to confess every sin he'd committed in the name of professional distance.
But his feet were fused to the floor, anchored by the crushing weight of his own choices. The polished office floor had turned to molten lead, pinning him in place as a permanent fixture of the room he had built for himself. He watched your silhouette grow smaller, the black fabric of your dress bleeding into the shadows, as you retreated toward an exit that looked like the vile mouth of a void. He was paralyzed, a master of the law, a man who could dismantle an empire with a closing argument, but who could not even command his own body to move an inch toward the only thing that mattered.
He saw you reach the door, a flicker of light on your shoulder, and then, nothing. Total, absolute darkness.
Hiromi bolted upright, a strangled, raw gasp tearing from his throat as if he were surfacing from deep, freezing water. His lungs burned, and his heart thrashed against his chest, still echoing the agitated rhythm of the dream. He sat there in the oppressive silence of his bedroom, his skin slick with a cold, feverish sweat, the sheets tangled around his legs like the very lead that had held him back. The silver, pre-dawn light of the city filtered through the curtains, clinical and unforgiving, confirming the only verdict that remained: he was alone, and the bed beside him was as cold as a grave.
He glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand, the glowing numbers bleeding a toxic, neon crimson into the dark. 5:08 AM.
He had been asleep for barely three hours, a shallow, fitful unconsciousness that had offered no reprieve, only a vivid reconstruction of his own failure. It had been exactly eight hours since you had stood in the silver shadows of the Imperial Hotel library and shattered his world with the surgical precision of a high-stakes verdict. Eight hours since you had looked him in the eye and bared your soul, stripping yourself naked before him with an I love you that didn't sound like a promise. It sounded like a death sentence, a final, guttural closing argument that left him with no room for appeal.
And then, you had walked away. You had left him standing in the wreckage of his own design, the scent of your skin still clinging to his palms like an accusation.
The dream he'd just fled wasn't a nightmare; it was something far more cruel. It was a witness statement from a past he had never properly filed away, a visceral memory of the future he had systematically built, brick by brick. He had spent years tempering you, hardening you, preparing you to be the perfect weapon of the law, only to realize too late that the blade was now lodged deep in his own chest.
He sat there, the silence of the room pressing against his eardrums until it felt like physical pain. He could still feel the phantom heat of your proximity, a ghost-limb sensation that made his skin crawl with a desperate, prohibited hunger. He was a man of logic, of statutes and iron-clad precedents, but as he stared into the gray pre-dawn light, he realized there was no legal remedy for this kind of ruin. He had won every case that mattered, yet he was currently serving a life sentence in a room that smelled of nothing but his own regret.
He closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the cold headboard, and the darkness behind his eyelids immediately betrayed him. The familiar scent of his apartment began to warp, curdling into the heavy, expensive aroma of old books and the lingering, floral ghost of your perfume. Suddenly, he wasn't in his bed anymore. He was back in the suffocating stillness of the Imperial Hotel library, the echo of your I love you still vibrating in the air like a death knell.
When Hiromi finally managed to drag himself up from the indigo carpet of that room, his legs felt like leaden weights, barely capable of supporting the hollow, trembling shell of the man he had become. The air in the library was stagnant, thick with your scent, a fragrance that didn't just haunt the space; it mocked his victory, clinging to his clothes like an accusation. He had rewritten history for Okkotsu, dismantling a corrupt prosecution with surgical brilliance, but in the suffocating silence of that room, he had only succeeded in signing his own death warrant.
He burst through the mahogany doors, the heavy wood groaning under the violence of his touch. His breath came in broken, desperate hitches that burned his throat, a sharp contrast to the impersonal logic he usually projected. He needed to find you. He needed to tear down the fortress of pride and professional distance he had spent years obsessively building. He wanted to bury his face in the crook of your neck, to breathe in the heat of your skin until the world finally made sense again, until the static in his brain was silenced by the rhythm of your pulse.
But when he reached the grand ballroom, the world was empty. The opulence of the space felt obscene, a gilded cage with no exit. Yaga was gone; the shadows of the legal elite had dissolved into the night. And you, the light he had tried so hard to contain, had vanished into the Tokyo dark.
The celebration of the year had turned into a funeral. The champagne in the glasses looked like stagnant water, and the music that had once signaled his triumph now sounded like a dirge. He stood in the center of the vast, hollow floor, a man who had won the case and lost the only verdict that ever mattered. He was a master of the law, and yet, he was utterly, devastatingly alone.
Nanami Kento remained, standing like a monolith of stoic, unyielding judgment near the central staircase. He was a pillar of gold and clearance amidst the wreckage of the night, his presence a silent testimony to the order Higuruma had just set on fire.
Hiromi didn't stop. He pushed past, his eyes unfocused and glazed with a feverish desperation, heading for the hotel's main exit with the frantic, staggering energy of a man who had forgotten how to breathe. He was halfway to the stairs, the cold marble floor slick beneath his feet, when a hand, heavy and absolute, clamped onto his forearm.
The grip was a shackle, an importunate arrest of his momentum.
"Yaga said to leave her alone," Nanami's voice was a low, guttural vibration, stripped of its usual professional warmth. It was the voice of a man presiding over a crime scene.
"But… I can't… I have to tell her…" Hiromi's words were frayed at the edges, bleeding into the silence. He was trembling so violently that the expensive fabric of his suit seemed to rattle against his frame, a hollow sound of a man coming apart at the seams. He didn't want to say it. He didn't want Nanami, the only man who truly respected the fortress of his intellect, to witness the raw, leaking mess of his heart. But the strength he had used to dominate courtrooms, the dominance he had used to claim your body, had vanished, left behind like a stain on that carpeted library floor.
"Higuruma…" Nanami warned, his grip tightening until it bruised the skin beneath the sleeve, a physical reminder of the boundaries he was about to cross.
"I can't, Kento… I have to… You don't understand!" The dam finally shattered. Hiromi's voice cracked, a sound of pure, unadulterated agony that echoed through the marble hall like a gunshot. "I love her… I need her…"
The confession hung in the air like a thick, suffocating smoke, a toxic residue of years of suppressed hunger. Hiromi looked at Kento, his eyes wide and pleading, searching for a solution, for a statute, for some hidden loophole that could fix the void in his chest. Instead, he found only the cold, hard clarity of a final ruling.
"If you truly loved her," Nanami said, his eyes reflecting a pity that felt more agonizing than any legal condemnation, "then you would let her go. You've already done enough damage, Hiromi."
The words were a blade. Nanami let go of his arm, the release feeling like being dropped into an abyss. Hiromi stood there, paralyzed, watching the ghost of your presence vanish into the dark Tokyo night, realizing that for the first time in his life, he was the one being judged, and he had no defense left.
He stayed there, anchored by the weight of Nanami's gaze, as the realization finally set in: he had sharpened you into a lethal weapon so you could survive without him, and you had done exactly that. You had used the very strength he had forged in you to walk away from his darkness. You were his finest achievement and his most devastating loss.
The memory of Nanami's hand on his arm, the bruising, unyielding pressure of it, felt so real that Hiromi reached out in the oppressive dark of his bedroom, his fingers grasping at the empty, freezing air. His hand closed on nothing.
He was back. Back in the clinical agony of his own design.
The silence of his apartment wasn't just quiet; it was a verdict, a final ruling from which there was no escape. He had spent his entire life believing that the law could provide order to chaos, that every crime had a statute and every debt a price. But as he stared at the ceiling, watching the blurry shadows of the early morning crawl across the plaster, he realized there was no legal remedy for a heart that had been hollowed out by its own cowardice.
He had won the war for the truth, but in the process, he had successfully litigated himself into a solitary confinement of his own making. The bed, the room, the very air he breathed, it was all evidence of a life lived for a justice that had finally left him behind.
It had been eight hours. Eight hours since he had become a ghost haunting the ruins of his own life. He closed his eyes, but the darkness offered no sanctuary; all he could see were the cherry blossoms of his dreams, falling like pink ash over the woman he was too terrified to hold and too broken to let go.
The memory of Nanami's words, if you truly loved her, you would let her go, struck him with the sudden, blunt force of a physical assault, a blow to the solar plexus that left him gasping.
Hiromi lay there. His breathing was shallow, a series of ragged, desperate hitches. In the hollow silence of the pre-dawn hour, he felt his soul split in two with the violent sound of a verdict being read.
The logical half, the part forged in the relentless fires of the Tokyo Bar and tempered by decades of clinical jurisprudence, agreed with Nanami. That cold, impartial judge within him knew with absolute certainty that he was a sinking ship, a vessel taking on the dark water of a corrupt system. To tether you to him would be an act of murder; it would be to drown you in his own shadows. Letting you go was the only moral verdict left, a final, agonizing sacrifice he was prepared to make, even if it meant tearing his own heart out with his bare, bloodied hands.
But the other half, the raw, bleeding animal born in the feverish shadows of Suite 1221 at the Gran Celestia Hotel, screamed in primal protest. That part of him didn't give a damn about legal ethics, professional boundaries, or the sanctity of the law. It only knew the searing heat of your skin, the way your voice fractured into a thousand pieces when you whispered his name, and the terrifying, carnal truth that without you, that version of him would simply cease to exist.
Letting you go wasn't just a sacrifice of his happiness. It was a slow, deliberate suicide of the soul. And, in that moment of feverish weakness, the human won.
His hand, pale and trembling with a restless instability, reached for the phone on the nightstand. The blue light of the screen slashed through the dark, blinding him, a sharp, hard contrast to the oppressive shadows of the room. He navigated to your contact, the name he had stared at a thousand times in the secret hours of the night, a digital ghost he hadn't dared to summon outside the safety of his office walls. His thumb hovered millimeters above the screen, shaking with a violent, pathetic rhythm that betrayed the master of composure he pretended to be.
What could he possibly say? I love you too? The words felt like ash in his mouth. To say them now, through a speaker, stripped of the heat of his breath and the weight of his touch, felt like a final, cowardly insult. Doing it in the middle of the night, hiding in the dark like a beaten dog, was a humiliation he couldn't stomach.
You deserved the world, and all he had to offer was the hollowed-out shell of a man sitting in a silent room. You deserved a sanctuary, a place of peace and uncorrupted light, and he was nothing but a gathering storm, a vortex of litigation and bitterness. You deserved someone better, someone who hadn't spent years meticulously turning your heart into a lethal weapon only to leave you bleeding and discarded in a hotel library.
"You deserve more than this," he whispered into the empty, stagnant air. His voice cracked, a raw and granular sound that made the silence of the apartment feel even more absolute. "You deserve more than me."
The judge reclaimed the bench. He didn't press the button. He couldn't.
He looked at your name, the letters blurring as his vision finally fractured, and with a broken, self-loathing sob, he let the phone slip from his numb fingers. It clattered onto the floor, the screen flickering once before going dark, leaving him once again in the cold, unforgiving verdict of the shadows.
He rolled onto his side, curling into a tight, defensive ball as if to protect the jagged void in his chest from the freezing loneliness of his apartment. The cotton of his expensive sheets felt like ice against his skin, a mocking reminder of the warmth he had possessed for one fleeting night and then thrown away.
He closed his eyes, desperately trying to force his mind back into the black oblivion of sleep. He found himself praying, a frantic, contradictory plea to a god he had long since abandoned in favor of the law. He prayed that he would never have to see you again, because the mere sight of you was a forensic reconstruction of everything he had destroyed. And then, in the same ragged breath, he prayed to see you in his dreams.
Because in the dark, behind his eyelids, he could still maintain the lie. He could still pretend the light hadn't gone out. In the sanctum of his subconscious, he was still your mentor, and you were still his light, and the world, cruel and efficient, hadn't yet learned how to break you both.
It was a refined torture he welcomed, a haunting he preferred over the absolute, terrifying silence of a life without you. He would rather be flayed alive by the memory of your touch than endure another second of this hollowed-out reality.
Higuruma, the man with all the answers, the architect of a thousand verdicts, finally surrendered to the only evidence he had left: the ghost of a girl in a new suit and the fading, agonizing echo of a love he was too late to save.
—
For the first time in a career built on iron-clad discipline and surgical punctuality, Higuruma Hiromi did not go to work. The Tokyo legal world continued to spin, oblivious and cruel, while he spent the remainder of the week paralyzed, a grotesque mirror image of the seclusion you had once sought when the weight of the world became too much.
He stayed in bed, the high-thread-count sheets tangled around his limbs like a damp shroud, smelling of sweat and the fading, phantom traces of a heat he could no longer claim. He spent the hours staring at the ceiling, watching the sun track indifferent lines across his walls, marking the passage of a time that no longer held any meaning.
All his formidable intelligence, every intricate statute he had memorized until his brain bled, every legal precedent he had mastered to dominate his peers, it was all obsolete. It was nothing but useless, dead data in the face of a problem that possessed no logical solution, no loophole, and no room for appeal. He was a master of the law who couldn't even negotiate a basic truce with the raw, screaming rebellion of his own heart.
The silence of his apartment became his new courtroom, and the verdict was always the same: guilty. Guilty of cowardice, guilty of pride, and guilty of loving a woman he had spent years trying to turn into a machine. He lay there in the gray light, a fallen titan of the Bar Association, realizing that the only thing more terrifying than the corrupt system he had fought was the absolute, crushing vacuum of a life without your shadow in his cage.
But when Monday arrived, the machine reset with a violent, mechanical groan. He forced himself into his suit, the dark wool feeling like leaden armor against his skin, and prepared to face the world he no longer recognized. His car, as if sensing the internal breakdown of its master, refused to start, the engine turning over with a hollow, dying rattle that forced him into the one place he detested with every fiber of his being: the Tokyo Metro.
Hiromi stood by the doors, his reflection ghost-like and skeletal against the dark glass as the train plunged into the tunnels. He looked like a frame from a somber, noir animation, the lines of his face deeper, his eyes shadowed by a week of sleepless mourning. He hated the train, not for the crush of bodies, but for the exposure. Since the Okkotsu case had become a media sensation, he was no longer a man; he was a public spectacle, a titan under a microscope.
The air in the train was recycled and stale, smelling of damp umbrellas and exhaustion. He could hear the whispers of two young women behind him, their voices hushed but sharp as broken glass, cutting through the rhythmic screech of the tracks.
"Is that him? The one from the news?"
"Yeah, Higuruma Hiromi. The one who defended Yuta. I still don't believe he's innocent."
The words struck him with a clinical precision. He didn't turn around. He simply watched his own ghost in the window, realizing that the public could see what he had tried so hard to litigate away: he was a hollowed-out monument to a victory that had cost him everything. He wasn't just a lawyer anymore; he was a cautionary tale, a man whose brilliance had finally burned him down to the wick.
Hiromi let out a long, weary sigh, his breath fogging the cold glass of the window in a hazy, gray blur. Perhaps coming back had been a mistake, a failed attempt to reboot a system that was already terminally corrupted.
A few stations before Chiyoda, the morning rush bled out onto the platforms, leaving the train hollow and echoing with the metallic groan of the tracks. As the train lurched forward, plunging into the dark throat of the next tunnel, Hiromi turned his head instinctively, a twitch of muscle and bone he couldn't control.
And then, the world stopped. The rhythmic screech of the wheels became a distant, muffled roar, submerged under the deafening thud of his own heart.
You were there.
You were sitting diagonally from him, a silent apparition in the flickering, sickly fluorescent light of the train. Your hands, those hands he had memorized in the heat of the Gran Celestia, were folded over your briefcase with a practiced, defensive stillness. You weren't wearing the black dress of his dreams or the gala. You were back in your professional skin, a sharp, charcoal suit that looked like armor, but the way you sat, shoulders tight, gaze fixed on a point somewhere past the floor, told him everything.
The air between you became electric, thick with the unsaid and the unforgiven. He could smell the faint, cruel echo of your perfume cutting through the scent of ozone and dust. For a man who lived by the power of his voice, Hiromi found himself utterly struck dumb, his throat tightening until it felt like a noose. You were so close he could reach out and touch the fabric of your sleeve, yet you felt light-years away, a star that had already collapsed into a black hole, pulling him into the center of it.
The realization shattered him with the force of a blunt object. He didn't know you took this line. He didn't know your morning routine, your stop, or how you navigated the labyrinth of the city when you weren't tucked safely under his wing. Much like the cheesecake from days ago, the sweet, simple thing you had tasted without a second thought, he realized with a surge of self-loathing that he claimed to love you while remaining a perfect stranger to the mundane, beautiful details of your life. He had loved the idea of you, the brilliance of you, the light of you, but he had failed to learn the woman.
Then, you looked up.
Your eyes met his, and in an instant, the car suffered a total, catastrophic failure of reality. The rhythmic hum of the tracks, the flickering, sickly fluorescent lights, and the blurred faces of the other passengers all vanished, consumed by a gravitational pull so violent it felt like a physical weight crushing his chest.
The air between you didn't just vibrate; it burned. You were opposite poles of a magnet, every cell in his body straining against the invisible, agonizing force that demanded you connect, even as the logic in his brain screamed for him to look away. For a heartbeat, the train wasn't a vessel moving through Tokyo; it was a vacuum, a high-velocity confession booth where the only two people left in existence were a man who had said too little and a woman who had said too much.
Hiromi's mouth parted, a word, your name, forming on his tongue like a desperate prayer, but he choked it back until it tasted like bile. The oppressive silence of the Japanese commute, the rigid, suffocating social expectation of public decorum, acted as a physical gag. He gripped the handle of his briefcase until his knuckles turned white, the leather groaning under the pressure, agonized by the gut-wrenching realization that he was still a slave to the very order that was killing him. He was too much a man of the law to scream your name in a crowded train, even as his soul was screaming for a mistrial.
Before he could find the strength to shatter the silence, the train hissed to a violent, mechanical stop.
You stood up abruptly, your movements jerky and panicked, a visceral reaction to the proximity of the man who had broken you. You didn't wait for Chiyoda; you fled through the open doors as if the wagon itself were on fire.
Hiromi lunged toward the exit, his body acting on a primal impulse he'd suppressed for days. But just as his foot hit the threshold, his hand caught the cold, unforgiving metal pole of the car, and he stopped dead. He forced his fingers to curl around the steel, using the freezing pole as an anchor to his own self-imposed sentence. He was the one holding himself back, the warden of his own prison.
He watched you through the reinforced glass as the doors slid shut with a final, clinical thud. He watched you move across the platform, a small, defiant figure in the sea of gray suits, and then, the world fractured. You turned back. One last time, you looked at the ghost of the man you had left behind in the dark of the tunnel. Through the moving window, he saw your expression, a distorted blur of grief and unanswered questions, before the train surged forward, dragging him back into the abyss and leaving you behind on a platform that felt like the end of the world.
On the platform, you stood trembling, your breath coming in shallow, uneven gasps that tasted of ozone and cold concrete. You had bolted four stations early, driven by a tension so thick and suffocating it felt like a physical weight on your lungs. The goodbye you had uttered in the library, the one you had carved out of your own chest, was supposed to be final. You had intended to erase him, to bury the memory of his touch under a mountain of paperwork and professional distance, yet here he was, haunting the Tokyo Metro, appearing like a persistent ghost every time your defenses were down.
You were angry, furious at the system that had brought you together, at the cruel timing of a universe that thrived on irony, but mostly at your own cowardice. You hated that seeing him still made your pulse stutter. You lifted a heeled foot and brought it down hard against the unforgiving concrete, the sharp crack of the impact echoing through the station like a gunshot.
"Fuck!"
The word was a jagged glass shard in the air, a violent rejection of the poise he had taught you. You didn't care about the stares of the commuters or the silence of the platform. You watched the red tail lights of his train bleed into the darkness of the tunnel, disappearing like a dying ember.
You stood there, alone in the wake of his departure, realizing the ultimate, bitter irony: for the first time in your lives, the law was being followed to the letter. No more secret touches, no more blurred lines, no more prohibited hungers. The boundaries were clear, the statutes were being upheld, and it was destroying you both with a cold, legalistic efficiency that Higuruma would have called perfect.
—
The suffocating humidity of the Japanese summer had finally begun to recede, leaving behind a brittle, anxious heat that seemed to vibrate in the courtrooms of Tokyo like a taut wire ready to snap. You had become a silhouette of soaring exhaustion, a phantom moving through the halls of the Public Defender's office with a predatory, cold focus. You moved with a lethal efficiency that made your colleagues shrink back, giving you a wide berth as if they could sense the static electricity of a breakdown crackling under your skin.
You were alone. Truly, devastatingly alone. The silence of your new life was a deafening weight, a void you tried to fill with the broken remains of other people's tragedies.
The Hasaba case, the Twin Girls of Ikeda, had become a national obsession, a festering wound in the public consciousness. But for you, it wasn't a headline; it was a haunting. Every time you closed your eyes, you saw Mimiko and Nanako, their small, trembling frames looking like brittle birds, and the hollow, deadened look in their eyes that spoke of a betrayal no legal statute could ever fully repair, no matter how many motions you filed.
To protect them, to keep them from being swallowed by the very system that had already failed them, you had formed an uneasy, high-stakes alliance with Prosecutor Tsukumo Yuki. She was a woman whose brilliance was as sharp and unforgiving as a scalpel, a blade you used to cut through the bureaucratic rot. Alongside Utahime in the family court, you fought for their guardianship, turning the grief for your mentor into a weapon of war. You weren't just practicing law anymore; you were conducting a desperate exorcism, trying to save those girls so you wouldn't have to face the fact that you couldn't save yourself.
But in the quiet, hollowed-out hours of the night, when the only light in your office came from the flickering light of the monitor, you weren't truly alone.
He was there. He lived in the margins of your legal pads and in the silence between your thoughts.
Every motion you drafted, every predatory cross-examination you rehearsed in the dark, was infused with his unmistakable, ruinous cadence, that cold, surgical precision that stripped a witness to the bone. You found yourself using the fountain pen he had gifted you, your fingers tracing the same honed, impeccable logic he had engraved into the gray matter of your brain. It was a sickening, visceral paradox: you loved him with a devotion that bordered on the religious, a sacred, prohibited hunger that still made your pulse stutter, yet the thought of actually seeing his face made your stomach turn with a toxic cocktail of gratitude and resentment.
You were using the very weapons he had forged in the heat of his office to fight a war he had taught you how to win. Every successful verdict, every life you managed to snatch from the gears of the system, felt like a heavy, invisible tether pulling you back toward him. You were a creature of his making, a masterpiece of his design, and every time you won, you were forced to acknowledge that the ghost of Higuruma Hiromi was the only one holding the leash.
The crushing weight of the 99% conviction rate in Japan began to settle on your shoulders like a suit of lead, a heavy, suffocating armor that restricted your every breath. You felt the ghost of the Okkotsu case, the blood, the desperation, the impossible odds, lurking in the dark corners of your mind. Back then, you had been the shield, a buffer between him and the abyss; Higuruma had been the sword, the lethal edge that cut through the corruption. Now, in the hollow silence of your own career, you had to be both. You had to be the blade that bled and the metal that held.
You caught your reflection in the darkened window of your office, the glass acting as a cold, unforgiving mirror against the Tokyo night. Your hair was a chaotic mess, stripped of its former softness; your eyes were hollowed out, shadowed by weeks of shallow, five-hour sleep cycles that left you vibrating with a nervous, fragile energy. Your posture was rigid, distant, and predatory.
The realization was a jagged blade twisted deep in your gut: you looked exactly like him.
You were falling into his rhythm, the manic obsession, the self-imposed isolation, the way he used to skip meals because the pursuit of a verdict was more sustaining than rice, more intoxicating than wine. You were becoming the very thing that had broken him, adopting his self-destructive devotion as a form of twisted penance. You were dismantling your own humanity brick by brick, and you were doing it in his honor and in spite of him. A visceral tribute to the man who had taught you that the only way to survive the system was to become as cold and unyielding as the statutes themselves.
During a particularly grueling deposition with the Hasaba parents, you found yourself dismantling their testimony with a cold, mechanical cruelty that left the air in the room stagnant and bruised. You didn't raise your voice; you didn't have to. You used the silence as a weapon, tightening it around their necks just as he had taught you to do. You watched the father's hollow composure crumble under your gaze, and for a split second, a surge of dark, intoxicating power flooded your veins, a rush so potent it made your vision sharpen to a lethal point.
It was the same terrifying power you had felt in the shadows of Suite 1221, the absolute, carnal rush of total control.
But the moment you stepped out of the room and the heavy oak door clicked shut, the adrenaline soured. Your heart began hammering a frantic, erratic beat against your ribs, like a trapped animal trying to claw its way out. Your skin felt too tight, humming with a phantom, prohibited heat, as if his large, calloused hands were still ghosting over your waist, steering your body and guiding your tongue.
You hated the visceral, aching need for him that lived in your marrow. You hated that even in this sterile, professional vacuum, he was still the architect of your success and the choreographer of your movements. You were winning, but as you leaned against the cold corridor wall, gasping for air, you realized that every brilliant move you made was just another stitch in the shroud he had wrapped around your soul. You weren't just practicing his law; you were wearing his ghost like a second skin, and the friction of it was burning you alive.
The media was waiting outside the courthouse, their flashes exploding like strobe lights in the dying twilight, turning the world into a series of fractured, blinding frames. You pushed through the swarm, your jaw set in an iron line, refusing to feed them a single word. You reached the Metro entrance, the sharp, aggressive clack of your heels against the concrete sounding like a countdown to a detonation only you could hear.
You boarded the train, a hollow vessel heading toward a lonely apartment, and leaned your forehead against the vibrating, cool glass of the door. You were living his life now, the suffocating fame, the relentless scrutiny, the crushing weight of a system that demanded either absolute perfection or total destruction.
You were his masterpiece, polished and lethal. And as the train surged forward, screaming into the pitch-black tunnels of Tokyo, you realized with a shattered sob of frustration that you were still waiting for the creator to return and claim the wreckage he had made. You had uttered the goodbye, you had walked away in the rain, but Higuruma Hiromi wasn't a man you could simply leave behind. He was the very air that burned in your lungs, the broken law you practiced with such cruelty, and the shadow that would never, ever let you go.
In the reflection of the glass, your eyes weren't your own anymore, they were his, cold and filled with a justice that felt exactly like a death sentence.
—
The civil verdict for the guardianship of Mimiko and Nanako had been a hard-won, bloody victory. Under the cold, flickering fluorescent lights of the courthouse, lights that seemed to strip everyone down to their most pathetic truths, the judge had finally issued the suspension of the Hasabas' parental authority. Until the criminal trial reached its final, ugly conclusion, the twins were to be placed under the protection of the Child Guidance Center. It was a rare, decisive blow against the fossilized traditions of the Japanese family structure, and you had delivered it alongside Utahime with the surgical, cold-blooded precision of a woman who had nothing left to lose.
As you stepped out of the courtroom, the adrenaline was still humming beneath your skin like a live wire, a sharp, electric current that made your fingertips tingle with a phantom power. It was the same rush that usually followed a moment of intense, prohibited intimacy, a thrumming in your veins that made the very air feel thin and combustible.
You were laughing, a small, breathless sound of pure, unadulterated relief that felt alien in your own throat. You looked at Utahime, the triumph bright and dangerous in your eyes. For one fleeting, impossible moment, the suffocating weight of the last year, the memory of the library, the scent of Higuruma's cologne, the ache in your marrow, simply vanished. You didn't just look like a lawyer who had won a case.
You looked triumphant. You looked free. You looked like a woman who had finally learned how to breathe without a master's permission.
And you didn't look at him. But Higuruma saw you.
The sight of you hit him like a physical trauma, a blunt-force impact that sent a shockwave through his sternum. He was there for a mundane, soul-crushing civil dispute, a property litigation case he had taken as a form of self-flagellation, a way to crawl into the shadows and escape the suffocating, toxic notoriety of the criminal courts. He had spent the last six months trying to bury you under a mountain of paperwork and sterile, passionless logic. He had turned off the television the moment your face flickered on the screen; he had avoided the newspapers that screamed about the Ikeda Twins Case as if they were contaminated.
He had successfully convinced himself that his heart had finally become a dormant organ, a withered, useless relic of a man who had died on a library floor.
But as he watched you through the shifting crowd, the lie disintegrated. The sight of your laughter, that small, breathless sound he hadn't heard in half a year, was a blade cutting through his ribs. You looked radiant in the sickly courthouse light, possessed by a terrifying, independent power that he had helped forge but could no longer control.
He stood there, paralyzed in the corridor, the air turning heavy in his lungs. He had tried to litigate you out of his existence, to file your memory away as a closed case, but in a single heartbeat, the statute of limitations on his desire had expired. You weren't a memory. You were a living, breathing accusation, and the dormant organ in his chest began to beat with a violent, agonizing hunger that made his skin crawl with the ghost-sensation of your touch.
Because seeing you in the flesh wasn't just a prophecy fulfilled, it was a violent, sensory assault that bypassed his brain and went straight for the jugular.
The sight of your smile, the way your shoulders moved with that effortless, triumphant rhythm when you laughed, the sheer, radiant life of you, it hit him like a blunt-force trauma to the solar plexus. His lungs seized, the recycled air of the corridor suddenly turning to hot ash in his throat. His legs, those steady pillars of jurisprudence that had carried him through a thousand trials, finally buckled under the weight of his own hypocrisy.
Higuruma Hiromi, the man who had commanded the terrified respect of the Tokyo Bar, physically shattered. He didn't fall to his knees with the grace of a martyr; he dropped into a pathetic, desperate crouch against the cold, unyielding marble wall of the hallway. He looked like a man who had been shot in the gut and left to bleed out on the floor.
His large, calloused hands, hands that still remembered the exact curve of your waist and the damp heat of your skin, trembled with a violent, rhythmic palsy as they gripped his knees. He bowed his head, his vision fracturing, fighting the primal, nauseating urge to vomit from the sheer, agonizing intensity of the longing that had just been unleashed.
The defense he had spent six months meticulously building, the iron-clad motions, the self-imposed isolation, the lie that he was better off as a ghost, was gone. In a single, excruciating second, the solemnity he had cultivated was exposed as a fraudulent verdict. He wasn't a master of the law; he was a starving man watching a feast, a prisoner realizing that the cell door had been open all along, and he had simply been too much of a coward to walk through it.
He watched you from the shadows of a massive stone pillar. You were only thirty feet away, surrounded by colleagues, the light catching the waves of your hair. You looked exactly like the woman from his dreams, the one who wouldn't look back. But here you were, real and breathing, and the scent of the courthouse, floor wax, old paper, and stale coffee, seemed to amplify the phantom smell of your skin that still lived in his nostrils.
The desire he had tried to starve was suddenly a roaring furnace in his gut. He wanted to crawl across the marble floor and press his face against your thighs; he wanted to beg for a sentence he could actually serve instead of this endless, drifting exile. Seeing you happy without him was a specialized kind of torture, a verdict that confirmed his greatest fear: that he was the poison, and your life only flourished when he wasn't there to shadow it.
He stayed in that undignified, pathetic crouch, hidden behind the shifting wall of passing strangers, until his breathing returned to a ragged, stuttering rhythm that tasted of bile and dust. He felt loathsome. A thirty-eight-year-old man, a titan of the legal world who had dismantled structures in a courtroom, reduced to a trembling, visceral mess simply because a woman had smiled ten meters away. The power dynamic had shifted so violently it had left him with a permanent sense of vertigo.
By the time he forced the strength back into his leaden limbs and found the courage to stand, you were gone. The corridor felt twice as long and ten times as cold, a sterile tunnel of marble and fluorescent purgatory. He adjusted his suit, the fabric now feeling like a shroud, with a hand that still shook with a rhythmic, traitorous palsy. His mind, that surgical machine he relied on, was already frantically trying to find a way to litigate his way out of the agony, searching for a technicality that would make the perception of you less lethal.
But there was no loophole for this. There was no appeal process for the way his skin still burned for your touch. He had finally stepped out of his self-imposed cell and seen the sun again, but it hadn't offered him warmth. All it had done was illuminate the wreckage of his own design and remind him, with a cruel, sadistic clarity, that he was still living, and dying, in the dark.
—
The criminal trial against the Hasabas had mutated into a grueling, scorched-earth war of attrition. Working alongside Tsukumo Yuki was like standing in the direct path of a sun that didn't care if it blinded you or turned your skin to ash. Yuki didn't mentor; she provoked with a jagged, reckless intensity. She was a whirlwind of relentless, high-velocity demands, pushing you into a state of physiological stress so profound it felt like a second skin, taut, itchy, and ready to tear.
You were no longer just practicing law; you were drowning in the 99%, the dark water of the Japanese system rising until it filled your lungs.
Every night, the Public Defender's office became your field of honor, a sanctuary of fluorescent hums and recycled air. You survived on the bitter, metallic tang of lukewarm coffee that tasted like battery acid and ninety-minute naps stolen on the hard, cracked leather sofa. Your head would rest on a pile of legal transcripts, the ink practically leaching into your skin as you slept.
An imposter ghost followed you like a starving stray dog, biting at your heels and tearing at your resolve every time you doubted a piece of evidence. And in the hollow silence of those 3:00 AM vigils, you could still hear Higuruma's voice, that low, devastating baritone that used to vibrate against your collarbone, echoing from the charred wreckage of the Okkotsu trial:
"You don't belong here, (y/n). You're too soft. You're too naive."
The memory of his words felt like a phantom hand tightening around your throat, a cruel, prohibited caress that reminded you that even as you fought to save those girls, you were still a creature defined by the man who had discarded you. You were working yourself to the bone just to prove a dead voice wrong, fueled by a cocktail of spite and a lingering, sick devotion that you couldn't quite bleed out of your system.
You were desperate to prove him wrong, to rip his low, condescending opinion of you out of the air and burn it. You weren't just Higuruma's former apprentice, a shadow performing a role; you were a weapon forged in the white-hot center of his fire, and you had finally learned how to strike on your own. You stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, your eyes bloodshot and stinging, scrutinizing medical reports until the words blurred into static. You were hunting for the smoking gun that would link the Hasabas' clinical negligence to the twins' shattered psychological profiles, a needle in a chaotic haystack of medical jargon and the polished, sickening lies of desperate parents.
You didn't hate him. That was the most agonizing, persistent part of the fracture. You loved him with a quiet, burning constancy that made your chest ache like a bruised rib in the biting December air. But you needed to exist in the vacuum outside of his influence. You needed to know that if you stood in a courtroom and looked him in the eye, really looked at him, across the aisle or from the witness stand, you wouldn't crumble back into the woman who had cried, shattered and stripped, in the Imperial Hotel. You wanted to be his peer. You wanted to be his rival. You wanted to be the one to checkmate the system.
And in the darkest, most dangerously honest corner of your heart, you wanted him to see your name screaming from the morning papers and feel a surge of agonizing, suffocating pride. You wanted him to realize, with a devastating clarity, that the light he had been so afraid of losing hadn't just flickered out in his absence. It had turned into a wildfire, a feral and beautiful destruction that was coming for everything he had ever built.
During a late-night strategy session that smelled of burnt coffee and desperation, Yuki slammed a heavy manila folder onto the scarred wooden table, the sound echoing like a gunshot. Her eyes were bright, vibrating with a dangerous, caffeine-fueled intensity that bordered on the manic.
"The Hasabas' defense is going to litigate this as cultural discipline, Counselor. They're going to play the traditional family card and wrap their abuse in a flag of national values. If you go in there with that soft, empathetic touch Higuruma used to groom into you, they'll chew you up and spit out the bones. You need to be visceral. You need to be cruel."
Your heart hammered a frantic, uneven rhythm against your ribs. You looked down at the medical photos of Mimiko and Nanako splayed across the table, the yellowing bruises, the hollow, sunken cheeks, and the blank stare of children who had seen the end of the world. A wave of cold, acidic nausea rolled over you. You weren't naive; you were just the only person in the room who still remembered, with a terrifying, sensory clarity, what it felt like to be vulnerable under the hands of someone who claimed to know better.
"I'm not using his techniques, Prosecutor," you said, your voice raspy, cracking from hours of silence and the chemical burn of too much caffeine. You looked up, meeting her gaze with a cold, predatory stillness that made even Yuki pause. "I'm using mine."
In that moment, you realized your power wouldn't come from his surgical detachment. It would come from your capacity to feel everything, and then weaponize that empathy into a scalpel that could cut through even the thickest lie.
But as you turned back to your monitor, your fingers instinctively traced the familiar, weighted balance of the fountain pen he had given you. It felt like an aching limb, a severed piece of him that refused to be amputated, still twitching with a life of its own. You were working yourself into an early grave to escape the suffocating reach of his shadow, only to realize with a jolt of self-loathing that the harder you fought, the more you moved like him, thought like him, and sacrificed like him.
You were becoming a titan of the law, a woman who could silence a room with a single, grim look. You were becoming exactly what he had envisioned in his most arrogant dreams. And as you closed your eyes for another brief, haunted nap, the leather of the sofa cold against your neck, you wondered if winning this case would finally grant you the mercy of freedom, or if it would only serve as the final proof that you were, and always would be, a creature of Higuruma's design.
The desire for him wasn't a sharp, stabbing pain anymore; it had mutated into a low, constant hum, like the predatory vibration of the electricity in the office walls. You didn't want to run from him anymore. You wanted to stand your ground until the floor cracked beneath you. You wanted to show him that you had survived the bleak, starving winter he had left you in, and that you hadn't just found a way to stay warm, you had learned how to burn with a feral heat all on your own.
—
The final day of the Hasaba trial felt like the inside of a pressurized chamber, the air thick with the scent of old wood polish, heavy wool suits, and the metallic, copper tang of fear.
It was August, thirteen months of relentless, grueling warfare since you had first taken the case, and fourteen months of a deafening, absolute silence from Higuruma Hiromi. For over a year, you had existed in a state of high-functioning, inquisitorial pilot, moving through the world with a ghostly detachment. You had spent those months forcing yourself to bleed for the twins, a deliberate self-mutilation of your own psyche designed to prevent you from bleeding out over the memory of that moonlight-soaked library, the memory of confessing your love and walking away before the rejection could even touch his lips.
You had cannibalized your own heartbreak, taking the raw, jagged pain of the Hasaba twins and grafting it onto your own until the distinction blurred. You needed their suffering to be your motivation; you needed to breathe the case, eat the case, and dream in statutes just to survive the vacuum of his absence.
Yuki sat beside you like a caged predator, her presence a silent roar, but for the first time, you stood in the center of the courtroom without a shield. There was no Yaga to guide you, no senior partners from the firm to catch you if you stumbled. You were leading this assault alone.
You stood at the lectern, your spine a rigid line of steel, feeling the weight of the courtroom's silence pressing against your eardrums like the pressure of a deep-sea dive. You didn't look at the gallery. You didn't look for a ghost in a gray suit. You looked only at the Hasaba parents, two figures of curated, traditional dignity that you were about to dismantle piece by piece, fueled by fourteen months of a hunger that only a verdict could satisfy.
You didn't use the soft, pleading tone of a victim's advocate. You didn't beg for the court's mercy. You used the voice this case had forged in the furnace of your isolation, a low, unwavering resonance that vibrated through the floorboards. You infused it with a visceral, keen empathy, a weaponized version of the very softness Higuruma had once mocked. It was a depth of feeling he had never dared to touch, a territory too dangerous for his sterile logic.
As you presented the final evidence, the secret, agonizing recordings of the girls' terror, their tiny voices distorted by the static of a hidden mic, you felt a dark, electric thrill surge through your marrow. It was the same intoxicating rush of total dominance you had tasted once in the sweat of Hiromi's skin, the absolute high of having control, but this time, the hunger was being channeled into a lethal strike for the innocent.
"This isn't discipline," you said, your voice cutting through the clinical, refrigerated stillness of the courtroom like a scalpel through unmedicated flesh. "This is a slow-motion execution of a child's soul, authorized by the silence of those meant to protect them."
You watched the Hasabas' defense crumble in real-time. You watched their curated, traditional facade fracture and peel away under the crushing weight of the evidence you had hunted down during those midnight vigils. When the verdict was finally read, Guilty on all counts, the sharp, wooden crack of the judge's gavel wasn't just a legal conclusion. It was the sound of a guillotine falling on your own past, severing the tether that had kept you a ghost in Higuruma's machine.
You stood there, breathing in the scent of victory and ozone, realizing that you hadn't just saved those girls. You had finally executed the girl you used to be.
As the twins were led away to safety, their small hands finally released from the grip of their tormentors, you felt a violent, purging rush of heat ignite behind your ribs. It was an exorcism of the highest order. By snatching those girls from the gears of the system's indifference, you had finally bled out the last of the suffocating naivety that used to keep you small, keep you contained, keep you his.
You stood in the aftermath, the courtroom gradually emptying until it was nothing but an echoing cavern of wood and shadows. A strange, epiphanic clarity settled over you, a post-battle stillness that made the very air feel sharper, cleaner. You weren't his student anymore. You weren't a satellite caught in the gravity of his dying sun, praying for a stray beam of light.
You were a peer.
You had taken the cold, dead statutes he worshipped with such hollow devotion and you had breathed a feral, screaming fire into them until they bent to your will. You were finally clean. Not because the memory of him had faded, it was still there, a faint, feverish hum in your blood, but because you had finally surpassed the man who thought he was the only one who knew how to win. You had mastered the blade he gave you, and then you had turned it into something he wouldn't even recognize, a weapon of salvation.
—
It was a Tuesday evening when the silence of his apartment transitioned from a refuge to something unbearable, a physical pressure against his eardrums. Hiromi stepped through the threshold, the air inside tasting of dust, stale solitude, and the lingering scent of a life left on pause. He was hollowed out, his mind a cluttered, gray archive of property disputes and bloodless civil codes, but he forced himself through the mechanical motions of being a functional human being. He flicked on the television for background noise, a desperate, pathetic attempt to drown out the ringing in his ears, and retreated into the shadows of his bedroom.
He was hanging his suit jacket, his movements weary and heavy with the weight of another day spent in the dark, when your name cut through the static of the news broadcast like a honed blade.
"..and in the Hasaba twins' case, defense attorney (y/n) has delivered a closing argument that..."
The plastic hanger slipped from his numb fingers, clattering against the floor with a sharp, plastic crack that echoed through the empty room like a gunshot. A violent, visceral shiver raced down the length of his spine, settling in the small of his back like a brand. It had been months since he had allowed the syllables of your name to vibrate in the air around him. He had spent months meticulously avoiding the dreams, suppressing the primal urge to reach for his phone, and burying the memory of your light under thick, suffocating layers of a self-inflicted winter.
But as the news anchor's voice continued to describe your victory, the winter thawed in a single, agonizing heartbeat. His skin suddenly felt too tight, humming with a phantom, prohibited heat, the ghost-sensation of his hands on your throat, of your breath hitched against his lips. The silence was gone, replaced by the deafening roar of his own failure to forget you. He stood over his fallen jacket, his chest heaving as if he'd just run a marathon, realizing that while he had been rotting in his own shadow, you had become a sun that was now burning him from across the city.
He didn't want to leave the bedroom. He wanted to stay submerged in the dark, where the silence was a cold but familiar safety. But the magnetic pull of your presence was too violent to ignore, a physical hook buried in his chest that dragged him toward the light.
Hiromi stepped into the living room, his arms crossed tightly over his chest as if to hold his own ribcage together. He stood facing the television like a man facing a firing squad, waiting for the killing blow. And there you were.
Your image filled the screen, larger than life and twice as lethal. You looked different, sharper, the soft edges of the apprentice filed down into the lethal blades of a master. Your hair flowed loose over your shoulders, a chaotic contrast to the navy-blue suit peeking out from beneath the heavy, black gravity of your legal robe. You looked like a goddess of the court, radiant in a way that made his throat ache with a sudden, dry thirst.
In that second, the very last of his defenses, the motions to dismiss, the stays of execution, the iron-clad logic, crumbled into ash. He realized, with the devastating weight of a final verdict, that he had loved you from the very first moment your eyes had collided with his in his office. No amount of self-imposed exile, no moral decree from Nanami, and no logical argument could ever litigate that truth out of existence.
The void of his life without you wasn't a noble sacrifice or a path to redemption; it was a slow, agonizing death by degrees. He watched you speak, watched the fire in your eyes that he had helped kindle, and realized that while he had been playing at being a martyr, he had actually been a starving man standing outside his own home. He didn't just want you, he needed you with a primal, prohibited hunger that made his previous life feel like a hollow, plastic imitation of breathing.
Before the internal judge could intervene, before the echoes of Nanami's warnings could bar the door, he grabbed his phone. His thumb moved with an erratic, traitorous mind of its own, tapping the contact he had stared at for four hundred days but never dared to touch.
Ring… ring… ring…
Every tone was a sentence being read aloud in the vacuum of his heart. On the third ring, the line clicked open with a sound that felt like a seal breaking.
"Hello?"
The sound of your voice, sharp, professional, yet carrying that familiar, melodic weight, sent a jolt of pure, unadulterated electricity through him. Hiromi grabbed the remote and killed the television, plunging the room into a sudden, heavy silence so thick it felt like physical pressure.
"Hello…"
He heard your breath hitch, a quick intake of air that vibrated through the speaker and settled deep in his marrow. It was a sound that told him everything his legal mind had tried to deny: you were still there, and he was still yours. Before you could hang up, before the panic could seize the line, he spoke. His voice was low, raspy, and stripped of all its courtroom armor.
"I heard about the twins' case. Congratulations, (y/n)… your work was… incredible. It was masterful."
"Thank you, Hiromi…"
The way you said his name, the soft, prohibited slide of the syllables, made his skin hum with a phantom, prohibited heat. The silence that followed wasn't the cold, dead silence of the last fourteen months; it was a heavy, combustible tension, thick with the ghost-scent of old books and the memory of the last meeting. You weren't his apprentice anymore, and the weight of that realization hung between you, carnal and undeniable. He wasn't talking to a junior colleague; he was talking to the woman who had burned down his world and built a new one from the ashes.
Hearing his name fall from your lips also felt like a physical blow to his chest, a blunt-force trauma that somehow also lifted a thousand-pound weight from his lungs. For the first time since he last saw you, he could actually draw air. His right hand moved instinctively to the top button of his dress shirt, his fingers twisting the silk tie and the fabric with the nervous energy of a schoolboy, a stark contrast to the man who had once commanded entire courtrooms into silence.
"I'm sorry for bothering you, (y/n). I just... I saw the broadcast and..."
"It's okay,"' you interrupted softly, your voice steadying, gaining that lethal, calm resonance he had seen on the screen. "It's not a bother, Hiromi."
"Right. Well. I've taken enough of your time. I should probably let you—"
"How are you?"
The question hit him like a stray bullet, shattering the sterile, professional script he was desperately trying to follow. He had spent so long pretending he didn't exist, that he was merely a vessel for civil codes and property disputes, that he had forgotten how to answer a human inquiry. A soft, dry laugh escaped him, a broken, rusted sound of genuine, surprised amusement that vibrated in the quiet of his empty living room.
"How am I?" He repeated, the words tasting like bitter iron and old copper on his tongue. "Fine… I suppose. Work is, well... you know how it is. Complicated."
As he spoke, his free hand, the one not white-knuckling the phone, reached out blindly, searching for the back of the leather sofa. He leaned into it heavily, his fingers digging into the material as if he were trying to find a center of gravity that had long since been stripped away. He was struggling to stay upright in the wreckage of his own tomb.
The silence that followed was thick, heavy with the phantom scent of your perfume and the salt of your tears from the library. The thick tension was no longer a subtext; it was a physical weight on the line, a prohibited current that made the skin of his neck prickle. He realized that he wasn't just talking to his former apprentice. He was talking to the only person who had ever seen the rot beneath his suit and loved him anyway.
At the other end of the line, he heard it, your laugh.
It wasn't the desperate, fragile sound of the devotee who had begged for his touch in the Gran Celestia. It was a rich, grounded sound of a shared language, a secret history of late nights, high-stakes litigation, and the kind of pain that eventually hardens into something beautiful.
You felt a strange, intoxicating lightness in your chest, a stark contrast to the leaden gravity currently crushing him. The verdict had performed a surgical extraction on your soul; the chains of his shadow had been struck off, and for the first time, you felt like a sun. You still loved him, that quiet, burning constancy was still etched into your marrow, scarred over by the wounds of his departure, but it no longer felt like a death sentence. It felt like a territory you finally owned.
"Oh, I know," you replied.
You leaned back into the deep, welcoming cushions of your sofa, the fabric soft against your skin, a stark contrast to the hard, cracked leather of the office couch where you had spent your exile. Your apartment was quiet, dimly lit by the amber glow of a single lamp, smelling of home and the expensive wine you had poured to celebrate the silence. For the first time in over a year, you felt comfortable in your own skin, even the parts he had bruised with his silence. You felt light, yet grounded, the victory of the Hasaba trial still thrumming in your veins like a slow-release drug.
"I know exactly how complicated it is," you replied softly.
The sound of your voice in the stillness of your living room felt like a match struck in a frozen chamber, illuminating the invisible bridge that still stretched between your lives. There was no discomfort in the intrusion, only a profound, visceral sense of the familiar, a secret language that had never truly been forgotten. The call didn't feel like a haunting; it felt like a homecoming.
You pulled your legs up, tucking them under you, feeling the residual ache in your muscles from the courtroom battle. It was a good ache. An earned one. The memories were no longer a sharp dagger anymore; they vibrated in a low, steady hum that flowed through the phone and into your palm, a prohibited current that felt as natural as breathing.
As he listened to the low, resonant echo of your laughter, Hiromi looked at his own reflection in the black, dead mirror of the television screen. The winter of his own design, that sterile, self-inflicted permafrost, was finally, mercifully, beginning to crack with a sound like shifting tectonic plates. He had spent his entire career obsessed with the letter of the law, trying to win the wrong verdicts and litigating his own soul into a corner, only to realize that the only law that truly mattered was the one he had just broken by picking up the phone.
The weight of his suit felt different now, less like a shroud and more like a skin he was ready to shed. Surprisingly, the air in the apartment didn't taste like ash or recycled static, it felt like oxygen. It felt like a beginning.
"And how are you?" He whispered, his voice catching on the jagged edges of a pride he no longer needed. He closed his eyes, leaning into the silence of his room, which was no longer a tomb but a waiting room.
The prohibited current between you was no longer a threat, it transformed into a decree. The silence on the line was thick with the unspoken recognition that the past was gone, and in its place stood a woman who had finally learned how to burn all on her own, and he was more than willing to let himself be consumed by the fire.
—
The air in Tokyo had sharpened, mutating into a biting, crystalline cold that heralded the coming winter with an austere cruelty. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of the firm, the streets were being carpeted by the brittle, ocher corpses of ginkgo leaves, skittering across the frozen pavement like restless, discarded spirits. The city felt stripped, skeletal, and shivering.
When Hiromi arrived at his office on a leaden Wednesday morning, the atmosphere inside smelled of stagnant ozone and expensive, bitter ink. He found a thick, blue-colored envelope waiting on the sterile expanse of his mahogany desk. The paper felt heavy, almost obscene in its quality. Inside was the formal invitation and the exhaustive, self-important itinerary for the National Convention on the Protection of Human Rights, scheduled for late November in Kyoto.
Normally, Hiromi detested such spectacles. He viewed conventions as performative vacuums, echo chambers where lawyers gathered in tailored suits to congratulate themselves on virtues they rarely practiced in the blood-stained trenches of the courtroom. To him, it was legal theater, a distraction from the surgical precision of the law. Without so much as a second glance, he tossed the pamphlets into the far corner of his desk, burying them under a suffocating mountain of active case files and property disputes.
He didn't need the pomp of Kyoto; he didn't need the forced socialization or the shallow accolades of his peers. He told himself he needed the silence of his work, the cold, reliable comfort of statutes and precedents. But even as he buried the invitation, the skin of his palms felt restless, humming with that low, prohibited vibration that hadn't left him since the phone call. He was trying to hide in the paper again, trying to litigate his way back into the dark, but the memory of your name was a fire he could no longer bury under a pile of files.
Around noon, his secretary moved through the office like a shadow, dropping a heavy stack of depositions onto his desk with a dull thud. She lingered for a heartbeat too long, her gaze flickering toward the blue-colored envelope he had tried to discard.
"Will you be attending the convention in Kyoto, Mr. Higuruma? The organizers have called twice; they're eager for a confirmation."
"No," Hiromi replied, his voice flat and clinical, a dead resonance that didn't even look up from the blue light of his monitor. "It's not necessary. Tell them my docket is full. Tell them I have prior commitments."
The day dragged on, a monotonous, soul-eroding cycle of legal research and the chemical burn of black coffee. It was only at the end of the evening, when the office was bathed in the sickly amber of the streetlights below, that his eyes caught the corner of the discarded pamphlet. Something about the ink, a specific sequence of characters bolded in the center of the first day's schedule, seemed to vibrate against his retinas with a predatory intensity.
He reached out, his long, surgical fingers trembling with a rhythmic, traitorous vibration as he pulled the paper from the wreckage of his case files. He read the program for the opening symposium.
The Role of Counsel in the Defense of Minor Victims of Abuse: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach.
And there, printed in sharp, unforgiving black ink alongside Prosecutor Tsukumo Yuki, was your name.
The sight of it felt like a sudden, violent decompression. The "prior commitments" he had clung to as a shield evaporated into the stale office air. He wasn't just looking at a program; he was looking at an invitation to the only trial that mattered, the one where he would finally have to face the wildfire he had helped ignite. His heart hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs, a visceral reminder that while he could litigate against the world, he had no defense against the woman who was now taking his place on the national stage.
The world didn't just stop; it collapsed in on itself, the walls of his office suddenly feeling like the interior of a shrinking lung.
You were a keynote speaker. You were a recognized authority, a woman who had taken the empathy he once dismissed as a liability and forged it into a lethal, gleaming shield. You had grown into a titan, a real Shark, your stature expanding across the judicial system, while he had been busy hiding in the gray, dusty shadows of civil litigation, rotting in his own silence.
The image of you, standing on a stage in the ancient, dignified heart of Kyoto, speaking with the baritone authority he had helped you find, hit him with the force of a primal, physical craving. It was a hunger that clawed at the lining of his stomach, more visceral than anything he had ever felt.
The desire to see you, to breathe the same air as you, and to witness the masterpiece he had helped create, roared back to life with a terrifying, predatory howl. It shredded his resolve like wet paper in a storm. He realized, with a sudden, dizzying clarity, that he didn't want to go to Kyoto to learn about human rights. He was going to Kyoto to be judged by the only god he still believed in.
He didn't care about the ethics, the protocols, or the sterile warnings that had kept him paralyzed. The external voices, the judge in his head, the words of Nanami, the dictates of a society that demanded his stoicism, were suddenly nothing more than white noise. He reached for the phone, his voice no longer a flat, clinical monotone, but carrying the ferocious, jagged edge of a man who had finally run out of time to be a martyr.
The ink on the page seemed to burn, the black characters of your name searing themselves into his vision.
"Change my schedule," he said to the empty room, his words a low, prohibited growl that vibrated against the receiver as his secretary picked up. "Clear everything from the twentieth. I'm going to Kyoto."
His eyes remained fixed on the black ink of your name as if it were a life-raft in a rising tide, a single point of solid ground in a world that had become entirely liquid. He wasn't going for the symposium. He wasn't going for the human rights charter. He was going to put himself back into the path of the wildfire he had spent over a year trying to extinguish.
He leaned back into his chair, the leather creaking under his weight, feeling a sudden, violent pulse of adrenaline. For the first time in an eternity, the Great Higuruma wasn't thinking about the law. He was thinking about the way your pulse felt under his thumb, and the way the ancient air of Kyoto would taste when it was finally mixed with your breath.
—
Kyoto in late autumn was a masterpiece of amber and crimson, the ancient city draped in a nostalgic, golden haze that felt like a burial shroud for the year. Every breath of the outdoor air was heavy, tasting of woodsmoke and the metallic weight of things left unsaid. Inside The Thousand Kyoto Hotel, however, the atmosphere shifted into a sharp, detached professionalism that felt like a slap to the senses. The air-conditioned lobby smelled of expensive white tea, ozone, and the starched, suffocating ambition of Japan's legal elite.
Hiromi stood among the firm's partners, flanked by Nanami and Shoko like a prisoner between high-ranking guards. He was dressed in a charcoal suit that cost more than a year of a common man's rent, the fabric a flawless armor that should have made him feel untouchable. Instead, he felt like a restless, caged animal. His long fingers toyed incessantly with the sharp, plastic edge of his conference badge, a rhythmic, nervous tick that betrayed the stillness of his face.
His eyes, usually weary, cold, and analytical, were scanning the sea of tailored wool and elegant silk with a predatory, desperate focus. He was hunting for a specific frequency in the noise. He was looking for you.
The opening ceremony was minutes away, the low hum of a hundred voices vibrating in the grand ballroom like a gathering storm. As the crowd began to filter through the gilded doors, the calm, logical mask of the Great Higuruma, the man who had built a career on the silence of his own heart, began to fracture. The cracks were invisible to Shoko and Nanami, but to him, they felt like open wounds, weeping with the prohibited heat of a lifelong hunger. He didn't just want to see you, he needed to witness the fire he had abandoned, even if it meant being reduced to ash in the front row.
He was nervous, a concept that should have been odd to a man of his stature. He was a lawyer with a flawless, bloodless record, a man who had stared down judges and murderers without flinching, and yet he was trembling at the mere thought of a woman's gaze. The iron-clad composure that was his trademark had become a thin, brittle shell.
The ceremony was a suffocating blur of monotonous, self-congratulatory speeches. Hiromi sat in the front row, trapped between Nanami's stoic silence and Shoko's sharp, observant presence, pretending to study the itinerary while the President of the Bar Association droned on in a voice like dry parchment. He didn't hear a single syllable. His mind was a chaotic, punishing loop of the laughter he'd heard over the phone, the sound of your liberation, and the agonizing, carnal question of what would have happened if he had simply shattered the professional distance in the Imperial Hotel. If he had grabbed your face, forced your eyes to meet his, and finally whispered I love you into the hollow of your throat.
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, the white banquet room vanishing. In its place was the memory of your breath hitched against his lips, the prohibited friction of your bodies that he had cut short with the cold blade of his logic. He could have tasted you then. He could have let the judge inside him die a year ago in that library, trading his reputation for the way you would have arched under him, gasping his name.
Instead, he had chosen the logic. He had chosen the silence. And now, as he stood in what felt like a leaden cage, he realized that every correct decision he'd made was just another brick in the wall of his own execution. The regret wasn't just a thought; it was a physical weight in his gut, a jagged, unmedicated hunger that made the air in his lungs feel like acid.
When the session finally broke for the brunch, the room shifted into a choreographed, high-stakes dance of networking and the clinical clinking of crystal glasses. The air grew thick with the scent of expensive perfume and the stale heat of bodies in motion.
Hiromi stood tall, his silhouette a dark, sharp line against the ivory opulence of the ballroom. He utilized his height not as a symbol of status, but as a vantage point, cutting through the crowd with a predatory, singular intent. He moved through the sea of colleagues with a focused energy, his pulse a frantic drumbeat in his ears. He wasn't looking for a peer. He was looking for the wildfire. He was looking for the only person who could tell him if he was still alive, or if he had truly become the ghost he feared.
He saw you near the coffee station.
You were standing with your back to him, your silhouette framed by the massive floor-to-ceiling windows of the hall, the pale Kyoto light catching the edges of your frame like a halo. Before Nanami could intercept him or offer another word of cautious restraint, Hiromi muttered a curt, unintelligible apology and moved. He strode, his heart hammering a frantic staccato against his ribs that felt loud enough to shatter the crystal chandeliers overhead.
He reached the table just as your hand was hovering over a porcelain cup. He picked up a carafe, his long fingers steady despite the consuming adrenaline coursing through his veins, the precision of the surgeon returning to him even as his soul unraveled.
"(y/n)." He called your name like a command, a prayer, and a confession all at once.
You jolted, your shoulders tensing with a sharp, visible tremor before you slowly turned to face him.
Seeing you through the digital static of a screen or in the fractured, unreliable light of his dreams was nothing compared to the visceral reality of your proximity. You were wearing a high-collared blouse with a delicate, teardrop-shaped keyhole neckline, a small, tantalizing vulnerability in an otherwise impenetrable armor.
As your eyes collided with his, he watched the flush crawl up from the soft, hidden skin of your chest, staining your neck and cheeks in a violent, beautiful crimson. It was a physical surrender you couldn't litigate away. The realization that he still had this effect on you, that despite your victory, despite your new status, he could still set your blood on fire with a single sound, ignited a dark, possessive hunger in his gut. It was a predatory thrill, a primitive recognition that while you may have surpassed him in the courtroom, your body still answered only to him.
"Hello…" you whispered, your voice barely audible over the high-society din of the room, yet it cut through the noise and settled directly into the marrow of his bones.
"Hello."
"I didn't expect to see you here," you said, your fingers tightening around your cup until your knuckles turned a stark, porcelain white. "This isn't exactly your type of event."
Hiromi let out a short, genuine laugh, a sound so startlingly warm and stripped of his usual cynicism that it seemed to ripple the air between you. "No, it isn't. But I found myself suddenly interested in… the role of counsel in the defense of minor victims."
He spoke the title of your symposium like a secret, his voice dropping into that low, prohibited register that made the hair on your arms stand up. The blush on your face deepened, the crimson staining the hollow of your throat near that teardrop neckline. You shifted your cup from one hand to the other before finally gripping it with both, using the heat of the coffee to anchor yourself to the floor, as if you were afraid the sheer magnetic pull of him would lift you off your feet.
A smile tugged at the corners of your mouth, a treacherous, beautiful thing you tried to hide by biting your lower lip, but the effort was useless. The synergy was still there, humming between you like a live wire stripped of its insulation. It was a raw, carnal frequency that made the high-ceilinged ballroom feel like a cramped, airless closet. You weren't just two lawyers exchanging pleasantries; you were two celestial bodies that had spent a year in a cold, lonely orbit, finally feeling the first, devastating heat of re-entry.
Before the fragile silence between you could be filled, the microphone crackled to life at the far end of the hall, a dissonant burst of static that signaled the start of the official welcome. You turned toward the stage, offering him your back once more in a desperate attempt to reclaim your professional composure, but Hiromi didn't retreat. He didn't give you the sanctuary of distance.
He moved with a quiet, predatory grace until he was standing at your left side, closing the gap until the heavy, charcoal wool of his suit sleeve brushed against the soft fabric of your shoulder. The proximity was a physical assault; he was so close you could smell the bitter espresso and the cold, ozone scent of the Kyoto morning clinging to him, mixing in a perfect alchemy with his woody, comforting cologne.
He held his coffee in his left hand, a static prop, while his right hung loose at his side, hidden from the prying eyes of the room by the drape of his jacket. As you let your own hand drop, your skin made contact. It was a soft, accidental graze of the knuckles that felt like a high-voltage shock, a violent spark that seemed to illuminate the very anatomy of your nerves.
Neither of you pulled away.
In the middle of the bright, crowded hall, under the clinical gaze of a hundred colleagues and the drone of the director's speech, Hiromi's index finger found yours. It was a slow, agonizingly tender caress, a deliberate, prohibited exploration. He traced the line of your knuckle with a reverence that felt like a silent, desperate plea for permission. His skin was hot, a feverish contrast to the autumnal chill of the ballroom, and the friction of his touch was a carnal promise. He was anchoring himself to you, grounding his soul in the only truth he had left, right there in the open, daring the world to see the rot and the light all at once.
You stayed still. You didn't move an inch, your body frozen in a state of hyper-awareness that made every other sense dull into insignificance. Both of you stared ahead with practiced, hollow intensity, pretending to digest the director's professional platitudes, while the entire universe narrowed down to the single millimeter of skin where you were connected.
Hiromi's finger drifted to the back of your hand, his touch light as a ghost but charged with a raw, sexual tension that made the air between you shimmer with a visible, distorted heat. He wanted to lace his fingers with yours, to feel the interlocking of your bones; he wanted to pull you out of the light and into the shadows of the heavy velvet curtains, to remind you with a territorial, carnal silence exactly who you belonged to.
But before he could fully claim your hand, before his palm could meet yours in a total surrender, Utahime appeared like a ghost through the crowd, her expression sharp and urgent.
"There you are," she said, her voice a sudden, metallic intrusion that broke the spell.
Both of you jumped apart, the severing of contact feeling like a physical tear in your skin. You moved with the frantic, guilty reflex of a criminal caught in the act, the sudden distance between your bodies feeling like an arctic draft.
"The symposium starts in thirty minutes, (y/n)," Utahime continued, her eyes flickering briefly between your flushed face and Hiromi's dark, unreadable mask. "We need to go over the final slides and the transition cues for the medical expert. We have to move, now."
You took a ragged, shallow breath, your eyes wide and dark as you looked at Hiromi one last time. For a fraction of a second, you both stood in the wreckage of your own silence. Then, you offered a small, formal bow of your head, a stiff, hollow remnant of the professional mask you were both desperately trying to stitch back together. It was a lie of a gesture, a cold performance for the room that felt like a rusted dagger across his ribs.
"Excuse me," you murmured, your voice brittle.
And then you were gone.
He stood perfectly still as you followed Utahime toward the exit, your silhouette swallowed by the sea of suits and the closing of the double doors. The space you had occupied felt like a vacuum, a sudden drop in pressure that made his ears ring. Hiromi's hand dropped to his side, his fingers curling into a tight, frustrated fist as he tried to trap the residual warmth of your skin before the air could steal it.
He could still feel the phantom vibration of your knuckle against his, a rhythmic pulse that made the rest of the world look like a blurred, grayscale imitation of reality. The scent of your perfume lingered for a heartbeat, something floral, citric, but edged with a sharp, metallic note of adrenaline, before it too was neutralized by the smell of expensive coffee and ambition.
He didn't turn back to Nanami or Shoko. He couldn't. He just stood there, a man in a charcoal suit looking at an empty space, realizing that thirty minutes from now, he was going to have to sit in a darkened room and watch you command a crowd, knowing that the only thing more dangerous than your legal mind was the way his body was already grieving the loss of your touch.
—
The air in the symposium hall was thick, a pressurized cocktail of luxurious cedar wood, the sharp sting of expensive cologne, and the hushed, academic tension of two hundred legal minds waiting to be provoked. Hiromi slipped into the back of the room just as the heavy doors were being sealed, moving with the quiet, calculated grace of a shadow reclaimed by the dark. He didn't take a seat. Instead, he leaned his broad shoulders against the cold, wood-paneled wall near the exit, sliding his hands into his trouser pockets to hide the restless, rhythmic tremor that still haunted his fingers.
He was a spectator in a theater he used to own, a ghost haunting his own legacy, and he was perfectly content to remain in the wings.
For over ninety minutes, he didn't move. He became a fixture of the architecture, his gaze a fixed, predatory beam directed at the stage. He watched you up there, seated beside the formidable Tsukumo Yuki and Iori Utahime, and the sight of it felt like a slow, deliberate bruising of his ego. You looked every bit their equal, a third point in a lethal trinity.
From this distance, you were a sharp, elegant silhouette under the indifferent glare of the spotlights. He watched the way the light caught the movement of your throat as you spoke, and the way your hands moved with a newfound, surgical precision as you navigated the slides. Every word that fell from your lips was a testament to the distance you had traveled without him. You were no longer the woman who looked to him for a verdict; you were the one delivering it.
The heat in his gut he had felt in the lobby didn't dissipate, it mutated, darkening into a heavy, concentrated ache in his lower belly,a prohibited, territorial pride that made his skin feel too tight for his bones. He was no longer watching a colleague; he was watching the wildfire he had spent months trying to douse now burning with a blinding, self-sustaining heat. He found himself no longer fearing the flame, but wanting to be the one scorched, consumed, and finally purified by it.
Every time you leaned into the microphone, the amplified vibration of your voice humming through the floorboards and into the soles of his shoes, Hiromi felt a surge of adrenaline so potent it was intoxicating. Each time you dismantled a complex statute with that sharp, surgical precision he had spent years honing, it felt like you were dissecting him, too, stripping away his remaining defenses.
It was the raw, visceral admiration of a creator watching his greatest masterpiece breathe on its own, and the realization hit him with the force of a physical blow: he didn't just want you. He was devoted to you.
He found himself smiling, not the small, guarded smirk he usually reserved for a winning verdict, but an explicit, unmistakable expression of worship. He loved you. He loved the cold, brilliant way your mind worked; he loved the effortless way you commanded the room with the authority of a goddess, and the way you had taken the painful darkness of the Hasaba case and forged it into a beacon of justice.
As he stood there in the shadows of the exit, hands deep in his pockets to control the way they wanted to reach for you, he understood that his exile was over. He had spent his life searching for a law that was absolute, and he had finally found it in the curve of your smile and the fire of your intellect. He was no longer the man who had taught you how to climb; he was the man who would burn down the mountain just to hear you say his name again.
As the session moved into the Q&A period, a heavy, expectant silence fell over the room. Several young associates raised their hands, tossing out sterile, textbook questions about procedure and precedent. Then, slowly, with the deliberate gravity of a predator emerging from the tall grass, Hiromi raised his hand.
The moderator pointed toward the back of the hall, and the collective head of the audience turned. A murmur, sharp and buzzing like a disturbed hive, rippled through the crowd as they recognized the Great Higuruma standing in the shadows. You froze on that stage, your fingers tightening around your pen until the plastic groaned, your eyes locking onto his with a violent, magnetic snap.
Hiromi didn't look at the moderator. He didn't acknowledge the two hundred other lawyers in the room. He looked only at you.
"Counselor," he began, his baritone voice vibrating through the hall with a depth that commanded an absolute, suffocating silence. It was the voice of a man who had spent countless nights talking to ghosts. "You spoke at length about the burden of empathy when representing minors. My question is this: In a system that demands a ninety-nine percent conviction rate, how does an attorney reconcile the mechanical necessity of professional distance with the… inevitable, prohibited intimacy required to truly understand a victim's silence?"
He paused, the word intimacy hanging in the air like a heavy, unexploded charge. His eyes narrowed, burning into yours with an explicit, unapologetic intensity.
"Is there a point," he continued, his voice dropping an octave, "where the law ceases to be a shield and becomes a cage for the one holding it? And if so… how does one find the courage to burn the cage down?"
The room went deathly still, the air thickening into something heavy and pressurized. To the two hundred legal minds watching, it was a profound, philosophical inquiry into the ethics of the trade, a master and his finest pupil debating the soul of the law. But to you, every word was a bloody, unvarnished confession.
He wasn't talking about statutes. He was talking about the Gran Celestia. He was talking about the sterile, airless cage he had built for himself in that office, surrounded by the ghosts of cases that hadn't loved him back. He was asking you, in front of the entire Japanese legal community, if you had truly found the key to the bridge that he had destroyed.
The air in the hall crackled with the electric, suffocating ghost of Suite 1221. It was a secret code, a private cross-examination disguised as a public discourse, and the scent of sandalwood and old regrets seemed to rise from the floorboards.
You didn't look away. You didn't give him the mercy of a lowered gaze. You met his stare with a fierce, unwavering clarity that made his heart stutter an agitated, uneven rhythm against his ribs.
"The cage only exists," you replied, your voice clear and resonant, carrying an analytical authority that made the microphones hum, "if the attorney is too terrified to admit that the intimacy isn't a weakness of the law, but its foundation. We don't reconcile the distance, Mr. Higuruma. We bridge it. We walk across the fire and let it take what it wants."
You leaned into the mic, your eyes burning into his with a predatory, beautiful light.
"And if the shield breaks in the process... then you let it break. Because a lawyer who is too afraid to bleed for the truth is just a man hiding behind a desk. Some cages are meant to be burned, Counselor. I think you've known that for a long time."
Hiromi felt a sharp, electric ache in his chest, a sudden, violent expansion of a heart that had been cramped for far too long. He offered a slow, singular nod of his head, a silent, public acknowledgment of your victory. It wasn't just a concession of the argument, it was a surrender of his soul. You had surpassed him. You had found the answer he had been seeking in the freezing dark for years, and you had used it to set the world on fire.
He stayed at the back of the room, his pulse thrumming a heavy, erratic rhythm in his throat, watching as the session finally adjourned. The room dissolved into a blur of movement and sound, but for him, the noise was nothing but recycled static. He was done with the questions. He was done with the distance. He was finished with the sterile, safe life he had built out of statutes and silence.
As you began to gather your things, your hands still shaking with a slight, visible tremor from the collision of your gazes, Hiromi stayed rooted to the spot. He became a dark, immovable pillar in the middle of the shifting crowd. His eyes were no longer those of a mentor or a peer, they were the eyes of a man who had finally stopped litigating his own desires.
He didn't move toward you, not yet. But as the lights in the hall began to dim, his gaze remained locked on yours, dark and predatory, carrying a silent, visceral promise that the professional discourse was over. The real cross-examination, the one that would take place behind closed doors, where the law couldn't save either of you, was only just beginning.
—
The adrenaline of the symposium had finally begun to ebb, leaving behind a hollow, aching fatigue that settled deep in your marrow like lead. After two hours of exhausting, performative networking, nodding at judges whose eyes held no light, exchanging cards with senior partners who smelled of stale tobacco, and dodging Tsukumo Yuki's predatory, sharp-edged inquiries about your future, you finally reached the sanctuary of your hotel room.
The heavy door clicked shut, the sound a definitive, mechanical execution that sealed out the muffled hum of the corridor. You kicked off your heels with a weary, broken sigh, the cool, plush carpet a mercy against your aching soles. You stood there for a moment in the dim light, feeling the silence of the room press against your skin, desperate to wash away the scent of the convention hall, the smell of starched ambition and the lingering, electric ghost of Hiromi's touch.
You were about to head for the shower, your hands already reaching for the button of your blouse, when you saw it.
Sitting on the dark, lacquered console table across from the bed was a massive bouquet. It was a sprawling, visceral explosion of color against the sterile perfection of the room. It didn't look like the polite, curated arrangements sent by firms; it looked wild, almost overgrown.
As you stepped closer, the scent hit you, not the delicate fragrance of a florist's shop, but something deeper, more intimate. It was the scent of damp earth, crushed lilies, and something dark and spicy that made your pulse skip a beat.
The bouquet was wrapped in layers of crisp, heavy white paper that crackled like parchment under your touch, secured with a delicate silk ribbon in a pale, buttery yellow. It was an architectural marvel of an arrangement, a structural masterpiece that mirrored the precision of a closing argument: a crown of white gerbera daisies, pale yellow lilies, soft pink tulips, and spray chrysanthemums that looked like fallen stars scattered across a dark sky.
But in the center, standing tall and defiant among the delicate, fragile blooms, was a single, radiant sunflower.
The sunflower. The bloom that spent its life chasing the light, the flower that shared his name, Hiromi. He had planted a piece of himself in the center of your sanctuary.
Your breath hitched, the air in the room suddenly feeling too thin, too charged. You approached the table, the scent of the lilies and the raw, green smell of the sunflower stalk filling your lungs. Tucked deep between the petals, like a secret hidden in a deposition, was a small, cream-colored card.
There was no signature. No florid, desperate declarations of love. Just three words written in the sharp, elegant calligraphy you had spent years trying to emulate, a script that was as cold and beautiful as the man himself:
Great work, Counselor.
The ink seemed to vibrate against the paper. It was a verdict. It was an acknowledgment of your power, but also a claim. By calling you Counselor in the privacy of your bedroom, he was stripping away the professional distance he had just debated in the hall. He was telling you that he had been watching, that he had seen your fire, and that he was finally ready to let it burn him.
The weight of that card hit you harder than any closing argument he had ever delivered. He hadn't called you a girl. He hadn't addressed you as an apprentice or a ghost of his own regrets. He had used your title with a surgical, heavy respect, recognizing you not as a fragmented shadow of his past, but as a peer in the absolute present. It was the highest, most devastating form of surrender Higuruma Hiromi was capable of.
You leaned down, burying your face in the cool, damp petals, the crisp paper of the bouquet rustling against your skin like a secret whispered in the dark. The scent, earthy, floral, and sharply peppery, filled your lungs, a visceral inhalation of the life he had finally invited you back into.
For the first time in two years, the sound of his name in your mind didn't feel like a brand of shame or a cold, heavy shackle biting into your wrists. It didn't feel like the sterile, clinical distance of the Tokyo Bar or the suffocating dust of a law library.
It felt correct. It felt like the final, missing piece of a statute clicking into place.
You stayed there for a long moment, your forehead resting against the sturdy, sun-warmed stalk of that single sunflower. The adrenaline was gone, replaced by a thick, heavy heat that pooled in your stomach. The Man of Law had conceded the case. He had handed you the keys to the cage. And as the silence of the room wrapped around you, you realized that the bridge wasn't just rebuilt, it was open, and the only thing left to do was decide how much of the night you were going to let him steal.
It felt like the warmth of the sun hitting your skin after an endless, sunless winter. You realized that the version of you who had fled the Imperial Hotel in tears was finally dead, replaced by the woman who could hold his respect and your heart in the same hand. You weren't a weapon he had forged to be discarded; you were a light he had finally learned how to cherish without trying to cage.
You touched the soft, golden petals of the sunflower, the texture a stark, organic contrast to the cool velvet of the tulips. Under your fingertips, the bloom felt alive, radiating a phantom warmth that seemed to travel up your arm and settle directly into your blood. A low, electric hum began to stir in your lower belly, a heavy, tectonic shift of a desire that had been dormant for too long, buried under the frost of your pride.
And for the first time in months, you didn't suppress it. You didn't reach for the cold iron of your logic to douse the spark. You didn't run.
You picked up the card, tracing the sharp, authoritative path of the ink with your thumb, feeling the slight indentation the pen had made in the heavy paper. It was a tactile connection to his hand, to the way he had gripped the pen while thinking of you.
Beyond the glass of your suite, the city of Kyoto was glowing in a sprawling tapestry of amber and gold, a landscape of ancient secrets, hidden shrines, and the dangerous promise of new beginnings. The air in the room felt thick, charged with the same prohibited frequency that had vibrated between you in the banquet hall.
You looked from the card to the unmade bed, then back to the window. Hiromi had made his move; he had laid his soul bare in a bouquet of light and a three-word confession. The distance was gone, replaced by a painful, carnal anticipation that made your skin itch for the touch you had just felt in the hall. The law had no jurisdiction here, in the quiet dark of a Kyoto night. There was only the fire, and the man who had finally admitted he was willing to burn.
—
By nightfall, The Thousand Kyoto Hotel had shed its sterile, minimalist daytime shell, transforming into a cathedral of hushed, predatory opulence. The grand ballroom was a sea of shimmering crystal, heavy velvet, and the low, melodic hum of Japan's most powerful legal minds, a collective murmur that sounded like the purr of a well-fed machine.
You stood among the elite, draped in navy blue silk that clung to your hips and flowed with a liquid, mercury-like grace as you moved. The sleeveless cut exposed the expanse of your shoulders, a stark vulnerability only partially veiled by the weightless drift of a matching chiffon shawl. On your left lapel, the gold-and-silver scales of your attorney's pin glinted like a sharp blade under the chandeliers, a cold, metallic badge of your hard-won independence.
You were deep in the choreographed dance of the evening, flanked by Utahime and the stoic presence of Yaga, exchanging cards with a pair of judges from the Kyoto District Court with a practiced, effortless poise. You were playing the part of the victor, the rising star who had finally eclipsed her master.
But then, the air in the room didn't just move; it curdled.
You felt the shift in the atmosphere before you heard a single footstep, a sudden, localized drop in pressure that made the fine hairs on your arms stand up beneath the chiffon. The scent of the room, previously dominated by expensive flowers and vintage champagne, was suddenly pierced by something familiar and prohibited: the scent of sandalwood, dark coffee, and the heavy, masculine weight of Higuruma.
You didn't need to turn your head to know exactly where he was anchored. You simply followed the magnetic, heavy pull of his presence across the room toward a table near the bar. Hiromi was leaning against the high table, flanked by the stoic Nanami and several senior partners whose names were synonymous with the Tokyo elite. He looked devastatingly handsome, a dark, sharp-edged god in a navy blue suit that mirrored the liquid silk of your own dress, as if you had both dressed for a funeral and a coronation at once.
He was in the middle of taking a slow sip of champagne when his eyes locked onto yours over the crystal rim of his flute.
The effect was instantaneous, a violent glitch in his perfected machinery. He faltered, the Great Higuruma, the man of a thousand calculated breaths, visibly choked. The liquid went down the wrong way, and his broad shoulders jerked in a brief, uncharacteristic loss of composure that sent a ripple of confusion through the partners surrounding him.
You bit your lower lip, the friction of your teeth against the skin the only thing keeping you from a triumphant laugh. You maintained your professional decorum with the judges, but the victory tasted sweeter, more carnal, than the aged wine in your hand. You had done the impossible: you had physically startled him.
Across the expanse of the ballroom, through the shifting sea of wool and silk and the high-pitched noise of the elite, Hiromi recovered. He didn't look away. Instead, he straightened his spine, wiped a stray drop of moisture from his lip with a slow, deliberate thumb, and offered you a private, jagged smile. It wasn't a professional greeting; it was a hungry acknowledgement, a silent promise that made your breath catch in your throat and your pulse hammer against the neckline of your dress. He wasn't just watching you anymore, he was counting the seconds until he could get you alone.
Later, as the speeches finally tapered off into the low, syrupy crawl of ambient jazz, you made your way to the bar, desperate for something cold to cut through the rising heat in your blood. You felt him approaching before he ever spoke, the radiant, prohibited heat of his body acting like a compass, pulling the needle of your soul toward him as he closed the final distance.
"A glass of champagne, please," you said to the bartender, your voice steady despite the erratic rhythm of your heart.
"Make it two," the deep, familiar baritone rumbled directly behind you, the vibration of it settling in the small of your back.
You didn't jump. You didn't give him the satisfaction of a startled reflex. You simply turned with a slow, deliberate grace, the navy silk of your dress whispering against your legs like a secret. "Good evening, Counselor Higuruma."
"Good evening, Counselor," he replied.
He looked down at you from his height, his presence a dark, suffocating canopy that shielded you from the rest of the room. His dark eyes searched yours with an intensity that made the surrounding gala, the crystal, the judges, the frantic networking, fade into a soft, meaningless blur of silver light.
You let your gaze drift from the predatory heat of his eyes to the crisp, uncompromising line of his lapel, noting the perfect, devastating match of your colors. You were a unified front, two lawyers dressed in the same midnight hue, standing on the edge of a cliff.
"Good choice of color," you teased, a soft, dangerous smile playing on your lips.
"Thank you," he murmured, his voice dropping into that low, prohibited register meant only for the two of you, a frequency that felt like a direct touch against your skin. He didn't move closer, but the air between you was already incinerated, replaced by the heavy scent of his cologne and the raw, electric hum of the Gran Celestia beginning to spark back to life. "It seems we're… synchronized."
"So it seems."
"Half the guests are wearing navy suits," he added, a rare glint of mischief cutting through his usual cynicism, "but who cares about the rest of the world, right?"
You let out a genuine laugh, the sound bright and reckless against the low thrum of the music. Just then, the bartender handed you the glasses along with a small napkin, his movements a distant blur compared to the hyper-focus of Higuruma's gaze. You took a sip, the champagne bubbles sharp and ice-cold against your tongue, a necessary shock to your system.
But as the liquid settled, the image of his earlier unraveling flashed in your mind. You looked at him over the rim of your glass, your eyes sparkling with the memory of the Higuruma Hiromi losing his grip.
"Are you alright? Earlier, you caught your breath…"
Hiromi was in the middle of a second, careful swallow of champagne, and the sheer, playful audacity of your question made him choke for a second time. A muffled, low-pitched laugh escaped him, a sound that was raw and unpracticed, vibrating with a warmth that felt like a direct assault on your composure. You quickly handed him your napkin, your own chest tight with a suppressed, breathless amusement.
"I'm sorry… I didn't realize… sorry," you whispered, though your eyes were bright and predatory with laughter, relishing the sight of him being rendered speechless by a single sentence.
"It's not the best experience, Counselor," he rasped, his voice sounding like gravel and dark sins.
He took the napkin from you, his fingers dabbing at his lower lip with a slow, deliberate pressure. As he did, his hand brushed against yours, not a ghost of a touch this time, but a fleeting, high-voltage contact that sent a jolt of jagged adrenaline straight to your core. It was an electric second that seemed to stretch, the material of the napkin acting as a thin, useless barrier between your skin and his heat.
"The bubbles certainly don't help," he added, his gaze dropping to your mouth for a heartbeat too long to be professional. He looked at the white paper in his hand, stained slightly by the dampness of the champagne and the phantom heat of your touch, and then he looked back at you.
The mischief was gone, replaced by a heavy, explicit gravity. He didn't return the napkin. Instead, he folded it slowly, tucking the small, square piece of paper into the breast pocket of his navy suit, right over his heart. It was a silent, territorial theft. "But then again, nothing about you has ever been particularly easy on my system."
The confession hung in the air between you, thick and suffocating, heavier than the cold of a Kyoto autumn. You watched the way his chest rose and fell, the navy wool of his suit straining slightly against the broad span of his shoulders with every shallow, uneven breath. He was no longer the untouchable lawyer of the Tokyo Bar; he was a man physically undone by the proximity of the woman he had tried, and failed, to excise from his soul.
"Then perhaps," you murmured, your voice dropping into a low, velvet rasp that mirrored his own, "you should stop fighting the facts, Higuruma. You're the one who taught me that a bad defense only wastes time."
His eyes darkened, the pupils blowing wide until the irises were nothing but thin, keen rings of auburn fire. He stepped into your space, a slow, predatory closing of the gap that forced you to cling to the coldness of your crystal flute and root yourself to the ground. The contrast was a physical shock: the chilled glass against your fingers and the radiating, prohibited heat of his body pressing into your side.
He didn't touch you with his hands. Instead, he leaned in until his lips were a mere breath away from the sensitive shell of your ear. He didn't whisper; he spoke with a low, rough friction that made your skin crawl in the best possible way. You could feel the frantic, rhythmic thrum of his pulse in the air between you.
"The facts are these," he growled, the vibration of his voice bypassing your ears and settling deep in the marrow of your hips. "We are in a room full of people who expect us to be pillars of morality, who think I'm a pillar of ethics. And all I've been able to think about for the last minutes is the way you looked naked in the dark. The way you sounded when I finally stopped talking and put my hands on you."
He pulled back just enough to look you in the eyes, his gaze explicit and raw, stripped of every professional defense. His hand finally moved, not to your waist, but to the silver-and-gold attorney's pin on your lapel. He traced the sharp edge of the metal with his thumb, his touch heavy and possessive.
It was a silent claim, a public branding that only you could feel.
The heat of it was becoming too much, too loud, too explicit for a room filled with people who could ruin your reputation with a single whisper. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw a group of senior associates from the Tokyo Bar Association drifting toward the bar, their voices rising over the jazz.
Panic, sharp and cold, flickered in your gut. You needed space. You needed to breathe before the scent of him, tobacco, champagne, and sheer, masculine intent, made you forget where you were.
You jerked your chin up, putting the rim of your glass to your lips and taking a sip of the champagne in a single, desperate swallow. The bubbles were a violent, icy sting against the back of your throat, a necessary distraction from the way your knees felt like they were about to buckle.
"Counselor," you managed to say, your voice sounding thin and brittle even to your own ears. You pulled back, forcing your spine away from the bar and creating a few inches of sterile, agonizing space between your bodies. "The associates... they're coming this way."
You tried to smooth the navy silk of your dress, your fingers fumbling slightly, betraying the very nervousness you were trying to hide. You looked everywhere but at his eyes, at the crystal chandeliers, at the bartender's hands, at the silver scales on your lapel that were still warm from his touch.
Hiromi didn't move. He didn't flinch or look toward the approaching group. He simply stood there, his hand slowly dropping from your pin, his fingers curling into a fist at his side. He watched your frantic attempts to regain your composure with a dark, sadistic amusement that was far more terrifying than his anger.
As the crowd of lawyers pressed closer, the air becoming a thick soup of perfume and professional chatter, Hiromi instinctively placed his left hand on the small of your back. It wasn't a tentative gesture; it was a firm, heavy anchor. Even through the veil of chiffon and the fluid barrier of the navy silk, the warmth of his palm was a revelation, a sudden, localized heat that made the rest of the room feel like a freezer.
He guided you toward a vacant table near the entrance, his body carving a path through the elite with a quiet, dominant authority. You followed, your legs moving on autopilot, feeling a terrifying, familiar comfort in his wake. His hand fit perfectly against the curve of your spine, a lonely puzzle piece finally finding its home after two years of being lost in the dark.
The realization hit you with the force of a physical blow to the solar plexus, knocking the air out of your lungs. You didn't want to run. You didn't want to escape the suffocating weight of his touch or the gravitational pull of his presence. You were tired of the exile.
All the feelings you thought you had buried, the ones you had carefully packed away in the sterile boxes of your career, the ones that had blossomed long before the sunflower arrived, were now screaming for your attention, raw and unvarnished. You looked at the sharp, clean profile of his jaw, the man who had been your mentor, your rival, and your ruin, and you realized you still loved him with a desperation that bypassed your logic. It was a visceral, prohibited truth: you weren't just his peer. You were his and no amount of legal ethics or distance was ever going to change the verdict.
But then, the ghosts of the past invaded the warmth, their touch as cold and clinical as a morgue. The memory of the Okkotsu trial surfaced, the smell of old paper and the precise, brutal way he had cut you out of the case, severing your shared ambition like a stray, useless thread. The fear of being shattered again, of opening your ribs only to have him perform a cold-blooded autopsy on your heart, rose in your throat like bile.
You took a large, desperate gulp of the champagne, nearly emptying the glass in one go. You needed the alcohol to act as a chemical barrier, a liquid armor against the sudden, shivering realization of how much power you were handing back to him.
Without a word, Hiromi sensed the shift. He didn't ask for permission; he simply took the empty flute from your shaking fingers and vanished back toward the bar, his silhouette cutting a dark, decisive path through the crowd. He returned minutes later with two fresh glasses, the bubbles rising in frantic, golden lines that looked like a countdown.
The silence between you was no longer professional; it was a heavy, suffocating weight, saturated with the unventilated memories of the Suit 1221, the scent of the sheets, the sound of the city, and the devastating silence that had followed. You played with the slender stem of your glass, your thumb tracing the cold crystal as you stared into the golden liquid, watching the carbonation die out.
Hiromi stood close enough that you could feel the rhythmic, predatory heat radiating from his chest, yet he remained perfectly still, a man waiting for a witness to break under cross-examination. He wasn't going to comfort you with lies. He was waiting for you to decide if the risk of the fire was worth the certainty of the frost.
"Thank you for the flowers," you said softly, your voice barely a thread of sound over the low hum of the music. You were still staring into your glass, afraid that if you looked up, the ghosts of the past would finally consume you. "They're beautiful."
"You're welcome," he replied, his baritone a low, resonant rumble that felt like a physical vibration in your chest. "You deserve them."
The air left your lungs in a ragged, silent rush. You finally looked up, meeting his gaze, and the impact was a physical collision. He was watching you over the crystal rim of his glass as he drank, his dark eyes unreadable yet saturated with an intimacy that felt almost scandalous, a prohibited, sinful truth being told in the middle of a room full of saints. You felt the heat rise to your cheeks, a deep, visceral flush that started at your collarbone and crawled up your throat, a biological betrayal you couldn't control.
The atmosphere between you turned thick, pressurized, almost suffocating. The attraction was no longer a subtle pull; it was a demand, a violent, primary instinct that ignored the two hundred lawyers surrounding you. You wanted to reach out, to fist your hand in the knot of his navy tie and pull him down, to feel the solid, terrifying weight of his chest crushing your silk-clad body.
But you held back. You gripped the stem of your glass until the crystal groaned under the pressure. Not with hundreds of eyes watching. Not when you had spent months building a life out of the wreckage he left behind. You weren't just protecting your reputation; you were guarding the prize at stake, the only thing he hadn't managed to cross-examine out of you.
Your heart.
But the scent of him, that dark, sophisticated, spiced cologne mixed with the cold, sweet sting of champagne and the lingering, phantom heat of his palm against your spine, was dismantling you stone by stone in the ancient, unforgiving heart of Kyoto.
The pressure in the ballroom had shifted from professional to predatory, a physical weight that made the very air feel like a suffocating mix of expensive perfume and unventilated history. You set your glass down on the table with a hand that trembled visibly, the crystal clattering against the wood. You managed to murmur a hollow, brittle excuse to Higuruma, not that he believed it, and fled toward the corridor, your heels striking the floor with a frantic, uneven rhythm.
You found the sanctuary of the restroom, the heavy door clicking shut with a definitive, heavy thud that sealed out the hum of the gala. The silence was immediate and jarring.
You leaned heavily over the cold marble sink, staring at your reflection in the unforgiving, surgical light of the mirror. You looked like a woman who had just survived a collision. Your cheeks were flushed with a deep, feverish heat, and the lipstick you had applied with such methodical precision earlier had been bitten away in your desperation, leaving your lips raw, swollen, and stinging from the tension.
Your chiffon shawl had slipped, the elegant drape lost, revealing the trembling line of your shoulder. You adjusted it with clumsy, fumbling fingers, your breath coming in broken, shallow hitches. You turned on the tap, the roar of the water echoing against the tiles, and let the icy stream numb your hands before pressing them against your burning face.
The cold was a shock, but it didn't douse the heat; it only made you more aware of the furnace burning beneath your skin. You were a mess of exposed nerves and prohibited desires, a lawyer who had lost her objective distance and a woman who was realizing that the only way to survive the trial was to let the Judge finally win.
"Breathe," you commanded your reflection, the word a fractured whisper against the cold marble. "Just breathe."
But the air in the room felt recycled, devoid of the oxygen you needed to reconstruct your defenses. You weren't ready. You had spent the last months convincing the Tokyo Bar, and yourself, that you were a finished masterpiece, but in the span of an hour, Hiromi had reduced you to a draft. He remained your absolute, catastrophic weak point, a scar that throbbed with a dull, persistent ache, proving that the healing you had bragged about was nothing more than a thin layer of scar tissue over a live wire.
You feared that beneath the carnal, electric urge to touch him lay a void of feelings he was incapable of filling. You feared that the man who saw the world through the lens of statutes and evidence had no room for a love that didn't come with a brutal cross-examination. You were afraid that if you surrendered, he would simply find the flaws in your heart and use them to win the case.
You took one last ragged, hitching breath, the icy water on your face now a phantom chill against your feverish skin. You straightened your shoulders, pulling the navy silk tight across your chest like armor, and stepped back into the hallway.
But you didn't make it three steps. The hallway didn't lead back to the safety of the crowd, it led directly into him.
Higuruma was there, his heavy silhouette braced against the far wall like a structural support. He didn't look like a lawyer waiting for a colleague; he looked like a man standing on the edge of a lethal precipice, staring down into the dark. Before you could even draw a breath to ask what he was doing, his hand shot out, a lightning-fast, predatory strike. His fingers interlaced with yours, the contact a violent, high-voltage jolt of heat that fused your palms together in a grip as desperate as it was uncompromising.
"Come with me," he rasped, his voice no longer a baritone rumble but a low, urgent command that vibrated with a raw, unventilated hunger.
He didn't wait for a rebuttal. He didn't wait for the Counselor to douse him with logic. He pulled you down the corridor, the sheer force of his momentum dragging you along. You were forced into a near run, the navy silk of your dress snapping against your legs as he hauled you away from the light.
He swung open a heavy, industrial door and pulled you down a set of back service stairs hidden from the elite. The air here was colder, smelling of concrete and iron. The sound of your heels clicked frantically against the stone steps, a staccato, panicked rhythm that echoed up the narrow well.
"Higuruma… stop, where are we—"
You stumbled, your chest heaving, the adrenaline turning your blood to liquid fire. He didn't stop until you reached the landing between floors, a shadowed, prohibited space where the jazz was nothing but a ghost of a vibration in the walls.
He ignored your protest with a heavy, focused silence, hauling you through one final set of doors and into a secluded landing hidden in the hotel's architectural gut. It was a glass-walled sanctuary, a transparent lung centered around a single, ancient tree that looked like a twisted fossil, surrounded by the sharp, vertical stalks of moonlit bamboo. The silver light of the Kyoto night filtered through the panels in cold, fragmented streaks, casting long, crude shadows across the floor that looked like the bars of a cage.
Higuruma finally stopped. He didn't let go of your hand; he used it to whip you around to face him. His eyes darted toward the empty hallway, a quick, predatory check to ensure you were truly alone before they locked onto yours with a crushing weight.
You were both breathless, the sound of your chests heaving in the silent air, a synchronized, desperate rhythm of lungs fighting for oxygen that wasn't there. The stillness of the bamboo garden was a stark, almost mocking contrast to the electric violence of your racing hearts.
The silver light caught the sharp angle of his jaw and the hollow of his throat, making him look less like a lawyer and more like something carved out of the very stone and iron of the city. He looked at you, his gaze traveling from your flushed cheeks down to the raw, bitten curve of your lips, and then back up to your eyes.
The professional distance was gone. The legal facades had been left on the ballroom floor, discarded like a used card. Here, in the shadow of the ancient tree, there were only the humans, starving, unmasked, and vibrating with a carnal intensity that made the glass walls around you feel like they were about to shatter under the pressure.
He still hadn't let go of your hand. He couldn't. Instead, he squeezed it, his thumb digging into the soft flesh of your palm with a pressure that was almost painful, a brutal, grounding force in the center of the storm he had created. It was the grip of a man who was terrified that if he loosened his hold, the world would resume its orbit and take you with it.
"I love you," he said.
The words didn't come out as a soft, romantic whisper. They were a verdict, delivered with the heavy, unshakeable finality of a judge's gavel. They were the three words he had buried under suffocating layers of statutes, pride, and calculated self-loathing for years, and now that they were out, they felt like they were bleeding into the air. He said them with a raw, guttural honesty that stripped away every defense you had left, leaving your nerves exposed and screaming.
As he watched the way your breath hitched, his eyes weren't just seeing you; they were cataloging the sensory wreckage you had made of his self-control. He could feel the desperate, rhythmic heat of your pulse against his thumb. He could see the way your lips were bitten raw, slightly open, a physical evidence of the tension he had put there. And lower, beneath the navy silk, he was hyper-aware of the magnetic, prohibited pull of your body, a carnal gravity that made his own skin feel too tight.
He was thinking about the Okkotsu case, and how every success he'd had since then tasted like ash because you weren't there to challenge him. He was thinking about Room 1221, remembering the specific, crude friction of your skin against his, and how he had tried to convince himself that it was just a temporary lapse in judgment rather than a permanent rewriting of his DNA.
He felt exposed. Stripped of his suit, his title, and his clever arguments, he felt as if he were standing naked in the center of the Tokyo Bar, waiting for a sentence he couldn't appeal.
But most of all, he was focused on the territorial truth: he had seen you in that ballroom, shining and independent, and the thought of another man, any other man, witnessing the fire he had helped ignite was a physical pain in his gut. His love was a heavy, jagged thing, more like a prayer than a poem. He wasn't just telling you he loved you; he was admitting that he was obsessed with the way you looked when you were winning, the way you tasted when you were losing, and the fact that he was no longer capable of breathing the same air as you without wanting to consume you entirely.
In the silver, pressurized silence of Kyoto, the man who never lost an argument had finally stopped litigating his own heart. The winter of his design, the sterile, cold exile he had forced upon you both, shattered in the moonlight, leaving him standing vulnerable and exposed in the light of the only truth that had ever mattered.
He looked at you, his chest heaving as if he had just run a marathon, his hand still crushing yours. There was no Senior Partner, no Judge, no Man of Law left, no strategy. Just Hiromi, broken, carnal, and desperately, unapologetically yours.
He didn't wait for you to answer. He couldn't. The silence was too thin, too fragile, and he was already leaning into the heat of your panic. He stepped closer, his shadow swallowing yours, his free hand coming up to cup your jaw. His thumb dragged across your lower lip, tracing the raw, swollen evidence of your wreckage.
"Don't look at me like that," he rasped, his voice dropping into a dark, gravelly register that made your knees ache. "Like I've just delivered a death sentence. I've spent four hundred days trying to litigate you out of my head. I've sat through depositions and hearings, looking at every woman who walked into the courtroom and hating them for not being the ghost of you."
He leaned down, his forehead pressing against yours, his breath a hot, champagne-laced ghost against your skin.
"I thought I could survive on the memories of you. I thought the work would be enough to douse the fire. But seeing you tonight... seeing you in this dress, looking like you've thrived without me..." He let out a low, ragged sound, half-laugh and half-sob. "It was a lie. All of it."
His grip on your hand tightened, pulling your knuckles against the solid, thrumming heat of his chest, right where his heart was trying to kick its way out of his ribs.
"I don't want a professional compromise," he whispered, his eyes dark with a carnal, agonizing hunger. "I don't want a polite reconciliation. I want to go back to you. I want to strip that dress off your skin and remind your body that it belongs to me just as much as mine belongs to you. I want to hear that sound you make when you lose your composure."
He tilted your head back, his gaze explicit, stripping you naked right there in the silver light of the bamboo.
He saw the hesitation flickering in your eyes, the way the ghosts of the past were trying to claw their way back into the silver light. His jaw tightened, his knuckles white where they still gripped yours. He didn't let the silence fester. He leaned in closer, his chest finally making contact with yours, a heavy, crushing pressure of soft wool against navy silk that made your breath catch in a broken sob.
"I said I love you," he repeated, his voice dropping an octave, becoming a dark, gravelly friction that seemed to scrape against your very soul.
This time, the words weren't a statement; they were an assault. He spoke them directly into the space between your lips, his heat a prohibited, living thing.
"I love you with a desperation that makes the law feel like a toy. I love you with the kind of hunger that has kept me awake for months, staring at the ceiling of my apartment and wishing I had been man enough to choose you the first time."
His hand moved from your jaw to the back of your neck, his fingers tangling in the hair at the base of your skull, pulling just enough to force you to look at the raw, carnal wreck he had become. The ghostly version of him was dead. There was only this, the scent of him, the frantic rhythm of his heart against your ribs, and the devastating honesty of his gaze.
"I love you," he growled for the fourth time, the words vibrating through your entire skeleton. "I love the way you outthink me. I love the way you bleed for your clients. I love the way you feel under me when the lights are off and there is no one left to impress. I love you so much, (y/n), so much that is a flaw in my design that I have no intention of fixing. Ever."
He didn't move to kiss you yet. He stayed right there, in that airless, agonizing inch of space, forcing you to feel every bit of the fire he was offering.
The repetition of his love hung in the air like a heavy, unbreathable fog. Hiromi didn't move, but you could feel the microscopic tremors in his hand, the high-voltage tension of a man who had staked his entire existence on a single, desperate gamble.
His eyes, usually as cold and analytical as a courtroom transcript, began to shimmer with a sudden, wrecked wetness. It wasn't a weak or romantic tear; it was the raw, stinging moisture of a man who had spent too long staring into the sun of his own regrets. He looked at you, and for the very first time, he looked truly, terrifyingly small.
"Say something," he whispered, the words breaking in his throat like dry earth.
It wasn't a command. It was a plea, a fractured sound that bypassed your ears and settled deep in the marrow of your bones. He was begging for a sentence, any sentence, to end the agonizing suspense of his own exile.
"Please," he rasped, his voice a low, prohibited vibration against your lips. "Say something."
The silence stretched, thick and carnal, filled only with the sound of your frantic, synchronized breathing. When you didn't, or couldn't, speak, his gaze darkened, the vulnerability hardening into a final, explicit ultimatum. He leaned in until his nose brushed yours, the scent of his cologne and the heat of his skin becoming the only world you knew.
"Then tell me to stop. Tell me you've moved on, and I'll walk back into that gala and never speak your name again. But if you don't... if you take one more breath without saying no... I'm taking you upstairs, and I'm not letting you go until I've burned every ghost of the last two years out of us both."
Your forehead was pressed against his, the heat radiating from his skin so intense it felt like a physical brand on your soul. You could feel the frantic, rhythmic twitch of his pulse where his hand still crushed yours, and the tip of your nose brushed against his in a slow, agonizing friction.
You wanted to speak. You wanted to deliver a closing argument that would shatter him the way he had shattered you in that hotel library, but your throat was a desert, and your vocal cords were nothing but frayed wires. You were a lawyer who had lost her language, reduced to a collection of sensory triggers and visceral reactions.
Seeing him like this, vulnerable, his dark eyes shimmering with that helpless, uncharacteristic wetness, was a revelation that hit harder than any carnal urge. This was the man who had spent his life carving order out of chaos, the architect of a thousand cold-blooded victories, and he was currently disintegrating in front of you. He wasn't just asking for your love; he was asking for a stay of execution. He was offering you his throat and handing you the knife, waiting for you to decide if you wanted to heal the scar or open it back up.
A dark, visceral thrill raced through you, a crude satisfaction that tasted like iron and smoke. You thought you were carrying the weight of his rejection like a sentence of life without parole. Now, watching him fracture, you realized that he had been serving the same time. His suit, usually his armor, now looked like a shroud. The hand that held yours wasn't just firm; it was desperate, the thumb pressing into your palm as if he were trying to merge his skin with your own to ensure he wouldn't vanish into the silver shadows of the garden.
The silence between you became its own living thing, a pressurized, airless vacuum where the only sounds were the frantic, synchronized thrumming of your pulses and the distant, ghost-like wail of the music from the gala. You looked at the wetness in his eyes, at the raw, bitten honesty of his mouth, and then down at the silver-and-gold attorney's pin on his lapel.
The scales of justice were no longer a metaphor. They were right here, balanced precariously between your bodies. On one side, months of cold exile and the ghost of the Okkotsu case. On the other, the prohibited, high-voltage heat of Room 1221 and the man currently begging you for mercy.
The wildfire in your blood surged, a lustful, agonizing heat that settled deep in your womb, demanding a surrender that had nothing to do with forgiveness and everything to do with possession. You felt the weight of his entire world hanging on your next breath. You could destroy him with a single no, or you could burn the rest of the world down just to stay in this silver, moonlit cage with him.
You let your gaze drift back to his, your eyes tracing the fracture in his composure one last time. Slowly, deliberately, you moved your free hand. You didn't reach for his face. Instead, your fingers curled around the silk of his tie, your knuckles brushing the hot, rhythmic skin of his throat.
The silver light of Kyoto didn't just illuminate him; it dissected him. In the pressurized silence of the bamboo, you watched the legendary composure of Higuruma, the man who could stare down a death sentence without blinking, dissolve into a raw, staggering vulnerability. He was no longer a legend. He was just a man standing in the ruins of his own design, handing you the torch and waiting to see if you would finish the incineration.
A dark, visceral current surged through you, a mixture of ancient resentment and a carnal, agonizing hunger that bypassed your logic entirely. You realized then that you didn't want his apologies or his statutes. You wanted the same thing he did: the total, prohibited collapse of the distance between you.
You leaned in, your lips a mere heartbeat away from the salt of his unshed tears, and whispered the only words that mattered.
hi!! it's been a while. first of all, i wanted to apologize for how long this part took. after the end of part 4, i found myself not knowing how to continue in a way that felt organic, and by forcing myself to write, i ended up with writer's block lol i'm proud to have finished it, but i'm not 100% happy with how the story developed in this part (◡_◡)
that's why i wanted to ask if you'd like to leave me some constructive and respectful feedback on how you felt the story unfolded. my dms are open, my asks too (i've enabled anonymity), or you can just comment here and let me know what you thought. it would help me a lot with the next part and my writing in general!
speaking of the next part, part 6 will be the last in this series. i already have some things planned, but your opinions would be incredibly helpful to see if what i've planned feels accurate… thank you so much for your support and patience!
i love you all, thank you so, so much for joining me in this madness lol !! 💗
and thanks to @kldgo for your support and for helping me realize that time isn't a problem and that i don't need to beat myself up about it 🫶🫂 this part is dedicated to you, kigo
Guilty as Sin? pt. 1
My bedsheets are ablaze, I've screamed his name, building up like waves crashing over my grave. Without ever touching his skin, how can I be guilty as sin?
SYNOPSIS. Five years of professional order, and on a rainy Tuesday everything collapsed. When the brilliant, cold-blooded lawyer confesses her hunger for a leash, her mentor, Higuruma Hiromi, ceases to be her boss and becomes her master. The verdict is in: silence is a gift, and surrender is the only truth.
WC. 14.7K | smut. workplace romance. forbidden relationship. psychological angst. power dynamics.
CW. boss!higuruma, lawyer!femreader, age gap, bdsm & kink, bóndage, dóm/súb dynamics, explicit language, fingéring, gágging, óral (f receiving), orgásm control, orgásm denial, overstimúlation, márking, spánking, unprotected séx, vóyeurism, workplace sexúal misconduct.
A/N. series' masterlist ! here | next part ! here
"Kneel."
The command hit you like a physical weight, heavier than the hundreds of leather-bound law volumes lining the mahogany shelves of the office. The air in the room stalled, thick with the scent of Hiromi's sandalwood cologne and the lingering ozone of the city rain lashing against the 42nd floor windows. No amount of professional composure, no years of practicing your professional persona in the cold, fluorescent light of the courtroom, could override the primal instinct taking over.
Your nylon-covered knees sank into the plush, charcoal carpet with a soft, muted rustle. You settled your weight onto your heels, your palms dampening against your thighs as you looked up at him. Your heart was drumming a frantic staccato against your ribs, a sharp contrast to the terrifying stillness of the man standing over you. His half-lidded gaze darkened, hectic with desperation and desire. The ache between your legs deepens, the anticipation growing stronger.
"Good girl," he murmured. The roughness of his thumb grazed your cheek, a touch so fleeting that it felt like a hallucination. "Now. Open for me."
You obeyed instantly. Your lips parted with a soft, wet sound, exposing the heat of your mouth. Your tongue rested behind your teeth, taut and trembling with the silent plea for his next order. As the chill breeze of the air conditioner hit the exposed skin of your neck where your hair was swept up, you felt the gravity of him.
Looking into those dark, weary eyes, you recognized you weren't looking at a boss anymore, nor were you looking at the man who had molded you from a wide-eyed intern into a predator. But as his hand fisted into your slick-backed bun, tilting your head back at an agonizing angle, you couldn't help but wonder how the quiet, mundane respect of the last five years had finally fractured into this beautiful, jagged precipice.
It hadn't happened in a single moment. It had been a slow erosion of your own boundaries.
For five years, you had moved through the halls of Higuruma & Nanami, Assoc. as a rookie of his order. To the rest of the firm, Higuruma Hiromi was an engine of weary efficiency. You watched him in meetings, leaning back with a silver pen balanced between his long, elegant fingers, his expression a mask of bored, professional detachment. He was always polite, but it was the politeness of a man who had seen too much of the world's filth to believe in anything but the law.
And yet, you were the only one who saw the flicker of life in his eyes when you won a difficult deposition. He saw you as something separate from the grime of his career; you were pure, vibrant and possessed a sense of justice that he had long ago traded for survival. He had spent those years sharpening you, turning your empathy into a weapon, while secretly guarding you as his only sanctuary from the hollow that haunted his private life, from the isolation that he himself had obsessively sought. He deemed you untouchable, not because of the nine-years difference that separates you or the professional boundaries, but because he was terrified that touching you would mean eventually losing the only light he had left.
The shift, however, refused to stay buried. It began to leak through the cracks on a Tuesday in April, one of those late, spring nights where the rain turned the Tokyo skyline into a blurred, watercolor portrait. Gloomy, melancholic and lonely.
The office was a tomb. Everyone else had fled hours ago, leaving the two of you alone in the main conference room, hunched over a mountain of evidence for the Itadori civil suit. The room smelled of old, bitter, cold coffee and cigarette smoke that refused to stop lingering in the air. The only sound was the rhythmic, frantic clicking of your keyboard and the steady drumming of the storm outside.
"You're staring at that paragraph like you're trying to set it on fire," Hiromi's voice cut through the silence, low and gravelly from hours of disuse.
You looked up, rubbing the bridge of your nose. The shark was tired of searching for prey. "It's circular logic, Higuruma. They're hiding the liability in the sub-clauses. It's infuriating because it's so... hollow."
He leaned back in his leather chair, the light of the desk lamp casting deep shadows under his eyes. He looked at you and, for the first time, he didn't look away when your eyes met. He looked at the way a stray lock of hair had escaped from your bun, the way your shoulders were tight with a tension that surely had nothing to do with the law. Hunched over your laptop, with the hands on your head, you looked back at him.
"Five years," he remarked quietly, his gaze tracing the line of your jaw, his thumb and index finger stroking his own face, shadowing the path of his eyes on your skin. "I never imagined we'd still be the last two people in the building every night. Don't you have somewhere else to be? Someone waiting for you?"
You let out a dry, self-deprecating laugh that felt heavy in your throat. You looked down as you dropped your hands into your lap, then out at the blurred lights of the city. The moment your mask fell, suddenly, unexpectedly, like cracks in white, fine porcelain, happened before you could catch it.
"Is this it? I mean… Is this all my whole life means?" you asked, your voice an uneven whisper. "I'm twenty-seven, and I spend more time with the Japanese Civil Code than I do with human beings. My friends are all gone. They're posting photos of nursery decorations and anniversary dinners, and I'm here, eating lukewarm takeout over a deposition. I'm a lawyer like I've always wanted. I'm successful. For God's sake, everybody here call me "The Shark". But sometimes... I feel so lost in the freedom and meaning of it all."
You looked at him, hands resting on your lap, nervously playing with your fingers, your eyes searching his for a sign of judgment, for the cold, professional wall you were used to. But the wall wasn't there.
"I think I want someone to tell me what to do," you confessed, the words spilling out like a prayer, haunted by his observant presence. "Yes… I want… I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. What to eat. What to believe in. I'm tired of being the one with all the answers. I just want someone to tell me how to live, because so far, I think I've been getting it wrong. And I'm scared. Why am I so scared that I'm wasting my life?"
You forced yourself to swallow your spit. The words that came out of your mouth evaporated into thin air, painful and embarrassing. You wondered why you had to open up emotionally in the office? And why did you have to do it in front of Higuruma of all the people?
But the air in the room changed. You saw something visceral awaken behind his weary eyes. The fatigue vanished, replaced by a dark, focused intensity that made the hair on your arms stand up. Hiromi didn't see a broken employee, but a ruthless lawyer asking for a leash, asking for something more. He saw the woman he had considered untouchable offering him the very thing his soul excelled at: absolute, heavenly control.
In that moment, his fear of losing you was eclipsed by the sudden, violent need to possess you. He didn't offer a platitude. He didn't comfort you. He simply watched the way your chest heaved with every breath, his mind already beginning to map out the boundaries of the cage you were asking him to build and to break.
"You want to be told what to do?" he asked, his voice dropping an octave, becoming something you didn't recognize.
"Yes," you breathed.
He simply stood up, gathered his files, and walked toward the door. But as he reached the light switch, he paused, his silhouette casting a long, dark shadow over the table.
"Then finish the brief by midnight," he commanded, the "please" noticeably absent for the first time in five years. "And tomorrow, don't be late for the hearing."
The click of the light switch was the sound of a world ending. You sat there in the sudden darkness, your heart racing, realizing that for the first time in your life, someone had actually listened to what you were saying.
—
The weeks that followed the rainy Tuesday when the confession happened were a masterclass in psychological friction. Hiromi had retreated behind a wall of titanium-grade professionalism, but the air between you had changed. It was no longer the comfortable silence of two colleagues; it was the pressurized, thinning oxygen of two people holding their breath. His orders became shorter and sharper. He stopped saying please. He stopped looking at your eyes, focusing instead on the bridge of your nose or the files in your hands, as if looking directly at the raw soul inside you begging for a leash would cause him to lose his own precarious grip on reality.
You were starving for a sign, a touch, a continuation of that midnight confession. But Hiromi was a rational man of the law, and he knew that once he crossed that line, there would be no way to litigate his way back to innocence, back to the professional facade to which both of you were accustomed.
The breaking point arrived anyway on another Tuesday, a humid evening in May.
The office was mostly dark, the only light coming from the glowing green display of the heavy industrial Xerox machine in the narrow annex next to the break room. You stood there, the rhythmic thump-whir, thump-whir of the copier acting as the only heartbeat in the room. The machine finally went silent, the last of the hundred-page motions sliding into the tray with a soft, warm rustle.
As you reached out to gather the papers, a sharp, intrusive sound sliced through the silence.
It came from the break room, just a few feet away. Your breath hitched. You moved to the doorway that was connected to the common room, shielded by the shadow of the filing cabinets, and saw them through the ajar.
Nanami, the firm's other partner, the man who was the very definition of stoic, "overtime is a burden" professionalism, had his secretary pinned against the refrigerator. The scene was cruder than anything you had imagined in this sanitized building. His suit jacket was discarded on the floor, and his hands were buried in her hair, pulling her head back with a desperate, animalistic hunger. The sound of their mouths meeting was frantic, a starving, messy collision.
You heard the metallic clack of his belt buckle hitting the edge of the kitchen counter as he hoisted her up.
"God, yes... Kento, please..." the secretary sobbed, her legs wrapping around his waist.
The sound of skin meeting skin, the guttural curses that Nanami was growling into her ear, it sent a jolt of pure, unadulterated adrenaline through your system. You felt the sweat start to gather at the nape of your neck.
The heat started to rise from your chest to your cheeks, while your nipples hardening painfully against your lingerie. Your heart was drumming against your ribs, and instinctively, you crossed your legs, pressing your thighs together to find some release for the sudden, throbbing ache between your legs.
Your breath hitched, coming in short, shallow gasps. You were watching them, your pulse hammering in your throat, feeling a sickeningly sweet wave of arousal wash over you. It was wrong. It was a violation. And it was the most exciting thing you had felt in months.
"It's a fascinating study in human impulse, isn't it?"
The voice was a low, dangerous vibration against the back of your neck.
You nearly dropped the files, your body jumping in shock, but a heavy, warm hand clamped firmly onto your waist before you could spin around. Hiromi didn't let you turn. He stepped into your space, his large frame caging you against the doorframe. You could feel the radiating heat of his body, the broad expanse of his chest pressing into your shoulder blades, the most devastatingly and unmistakable silhouette of the hardening length of his erection pressing into your backside through the layers of your professional attire.
"Don't move," he murmured, his breath brushing over the sensitive skin behind your ear. "If you move, they'll hear us. And I think you'd rather watch than be caught, wouldn't you, Counselor?"
"I... I shouldn't be watching," you breathed, your breath hitching as you felt the heat of his full erected groin press against your hip.
"But you are. And you're drenched," he observed, his voice dropping to a growl, lips grazing the shell of your ear. "I can smell it."
He gripped your hip, his fingers digging into the flesh with a possessiveness that made you whimper. He leaned down, his nose brushing your temple, forcing you to maintain your gaze on the couple in the break room. Hiromi breathed you in deeply. The soft, faded scent of your warm, musky skin absorbing your vanilla perfume. The scent of your arousal mixing with the toner, almost disgusting, almost perfect.
"Tell me," he whispered, his voice dark and gravelly, exhaling slowly. "What do you see when you look at them? Do you see a violation of firm policy? Or do you see a woman who has finally stopped thinking for herself? A woman who has finally found someone to tell her how to breathe?"
You couldn't answer. You could only lean back into him, your head lolling to the side as you craned your neck to try and see him, but all you could see was the sharp line of his jaw and the predatory glint in his dark eyes. You were trembling, your right hand clutching the edge of the filing cabinet for support, and the other one grasping Hiromi's forearm that was holding your waist.
In the break room, the secretary let out a high, thin moan of pleasure as Nanami's movements became more frantic, more violent. The sound of the water dispenser in the corner made a slow, serene glug-glug, interrupting the tension that was thick enough to drown in.
"Tell me then, Counselor," Hiromi repeated, his fingers digging deeper in the plump flesh of your hip. "What do you think he's doing to her? Do you think he's being gentle? Or do you think he's taking exactly what he wants because he knows she'll give it to him?"
"I don't... I don't know," you breathed, your knees feeling like they were made of water.
"You do know," he countered, his voice dropping to a growl. "You can feel it. The way your heart is trying to jump out of your chest. The way you're wondering if my touch feel as rough as his."
He let the silence hang there, thick and agonizing. He just watched you suffer in the tension, watching you over his head as you became a quivering mess.
Hiromi's hand moved from your waist, his palm sliding up your ribcage, stopping just beneath the swell of your breast. He could feel your heart racing, trapped beneath his touch. He was fighting himself, you could feel it in the way his grip tightened, the way his breath hitched when you pressed your hips back into his. He wanted to break his own rules. He wanted to turn you around and finish what you had started weeks ago on the main conference room.
But he didn't. He stayed there, like a ghost behind you, forcing you to endure the sight of Nanami's release and the agonizing proximity of his own body. You both stayed like that, two shadows in the adjacent room, listening to the gasps and the rustle of clothes as the other couple finally composed themselves and left the building.
The silence that followed was louder than the sex you had voyeuristically witnessed. Hiromi finally let go of your waist, but he didn't move away. He stayed close enough that you could still feel his warmth.
Your head fell back, heavy and loose, until it found the solid, tense anchor of his shoulder. From that angle, the facade of your boss was gone. You saw how Hiromi's eyes were blown wide, shimmering with a dark, liquid heat you'd never seen before. His mouth hung open, a silent gasp caught between his teeth, while a deep, pulsing crimson stained his cheekbones. And clashed with the weary, dark hollows of his eyes, proving that he was just as ruined as you.
"Go home," he said, the command sharp and sudden. "Finish your work. And tomorrow, when you walk into my office, you better have a good damn reason for the way you're looking at me right now."
He turned and disappeared into the darkness of the hallway before you could even find your voice, leaving you standing in the heat of the copy machine, your body aching with a hunger that nothing would never be able to satisfy.
—
The Wednesday morning arrived with a cruel, cold sharpness. The sun hit the glass exterior of the building, turning the firm into a cathedral of light and steel, but inside, the air felt thin. Every time you passed the break room, your skin prickled with the phantom sensation of Hiromi's breath on your neck. You hadn't slept, the echoes of Nanami's secretary's moans from the night before were still vibrating in your marrow. The memory of what happened had kept you awake, a restless, pulsing heat that no amount of tossing and turning could put an end to it.
You spent the morning buried in the Itadori injunction, your fingers trembling slightly as you typed. At 11:27 AM, you gathered the heavy leather folders. You needed his final signature.
As you approached his corner office, the sight of the dark, frosted glass door made your stomach drop. The raw vulnerability of the night before made you feel as though every associate in the hallway could see right through your professional facade.
You knocked. A single, sharp sound.
"Enter."
You stepped inside, the heavy door clicking shut behind you, sealing out the noise of the office. Hiromi didn't look up immediately, seated in front of his desk. He had discarded his suit jacket, his white dress shirt stretched tight across his broad shoulders, sleeves rolled up to reveal the thin dark hair on his forearms. The room smelled intensely of him, of bitter espresso and that grounding, woody sandalwood.
"The injunction files, Sir," you said, your voice catching.
He didn't turn. "Bring them here."
You walked toward him, but as you reached the center of the room, he moved with a sudden, predatory grace, getting up from his chair by a stride. He didn't take the files; he took you. Before you could react, he had spun you around, pulling your back flush against his chest.
"Hiromi... someone might see," you gasped, your heart leaping into your throat, calling him by his first name for the first time. Vulnerable, intoxicating.
Directly in front of you was the glass wall you had just passed. Through the dark tint, you could see the entire floor. You saw the head secretary heading back to her desk; you saw two junior lawyers laughing as they walked by, their shoulders nearly brushing the very wall you were pinned against. The sheer proximity was a physical blow to your senses.
"They can't," he murmured, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that traveled from his chest straight into your spine. He dropped the folders onto a side table, the heavy thud sounding like the hammering of a gavel. "It's one-way glass, Counselor. Darkened and treated. From out there, they see a mirror, a reflection of their own busy, boring lives. But from in here..."
He slid his left hand up your throat, his thumb tilting your chin up while his right arm wrapped firmly around your waist, pulling you so tight against him that you could feel the hard, demanding line of his erection pressing into the small of your back. You were wearing thin and tailored plaid trousers today, and you felt every inch of him.
His hand traveled down your sternum, tracing the line of your blouse's buttons with agonizing slowness, passing through your navel before settling heavily over your covered mound. He didn't slide his hand underneath; he simply cupped his hand against it, pressing his palm in your clitoris through the fabric of your pants, applying a steady, mean pressure that made your knees buckle.
"From in here," he whispered against your ear, "we can see everything. We can watch them work while I decide exactly what to do with you."
You whimpered, your hands reaching back to grip his forearms, feeling the hard, coiled muscle beneath your nails. The sight of your fellow lawyers just inches away, oblivious to your boss's hand crushing against your crotch, sent a wave of illicit, terrifying heat through you. You were their colleague, a predator still in training, yet here you were, trapped in a cage of glass, cigarette smoke, and sandalwood scent.
Suddenly, he spun you around. The transition was violent, a blur of movement that ended with your back pressed against the glass and him towering over you. He didn't even give you a chance to breathe. He crashed his mouth against yours, a desperate, starving claim that tasted of coffee and a sudden need. It wasn't any kiss, it was the kiss of a man who had spent weeks dying of thirst.
He pulled back just an inch, his eyes dark, the pupils blown wide with a terrifying hunger. "I haven't been able to think about a single statute since last night," he confessed against your lips, forehead collapsing into yours, his voice raw. "All I see is you in that room. All I see is you wanting to be told what to do."
Hiromi kissed you again, more desperate than before, bruising your lips and claiming your moans. He bit your lower lip, tugging it until you let out a sharp, needy whimper. His mouth sliding down your jawline. He reached for the back of your head, his fingers tangling into your hair, pulling your bun tight enough to expose the sensitive, helpless column of your neck.
"This is mine," he whispered.
He sank his teeth into the junction where your neck met your shoulder, sucking the skin with a forceful, punishing pressure, hollowing his cheeks, pressing his tongue harder. Your back arched beneath his grasp, breasts brushing his chest, hands anchoring in his shoulders. Your mind turned into a chaotic haze of pleasure, escaping from the fear of the door opening. When he finally pulled away, he lingered for a second, breathing how his scent mixed with the one of your skin.
"Go," he breathed, his own breathing ragged, his forehead resting against yours. "Before I decide the injunction can wait another hour."
You stumbled out of the office, your shaky legs feeling heavy. You made it back to your box, sinking into your chair and staring blankly at your monitor. The office hummed around you, unchanged, but as you looked at the black reflection of the screen, you saw a dark, unmistakable mark peeking out from your collar.
Your blood ran cold. You scrambled to the restroom, locking yourself and leaning into the mirror. It was worse than you thought; a deep, purple-red brand that screamed of possession. Panicked, you fumbled with your hair, pulling out the pins and letting the strands fall over your shoulders to hide the bruise.
For the rest of the day, you were a ghost of yourself. Every time someone spoke to you, you instinctively reached up, your fingers orbiting over the mark, shifting your hair or pulling your collar higher. The thought of being caught sent shivers through your spine. You were carrying the secret of your nonprofessional persona in the very skin of your throat.
—
The next morning was a slow descent into a fever dream. You had chosen a cream scarf of silk, thin and elegant, but as you wrapped it twice around your neck to hide the maroon brand, it felt like a leaden weight. Every time you moved your head, the friction of the silk against the bruised skin was a sharp, electric reminder of Hiromi's teeth.
The meeting was scheduled for 10:00 AM in the main conference room, known as the "Civil Litigation War Room". All the junior and senior associates of the civil department were there, including Hiromi's lead secretary, a woman whose efficiency was only matched by her uncanny ability to notice the smallest deviation in office decorum.
You sat at the long, obsidian-glass table, your laptop open, but your focus was entirely on the silk scarf. Underneath, the skin of your neck felt tight and hot.
"Counselor (y/n)? Are you with us?"
The secretary's voice snapped you back to the present. She was looking at you, her head tilted, her eyes narrowing behind her thin-framed glasses. Beside her, Hiromi sat at the head of the table, his expression a mask of bored, professional detachment as always. He was leaning back, a silver pen balanced between his long fingers.
"Yes, sorry," you stammered, adjusting your posture. "The Itadori deposition. I was just... reviewing the timeline."
"You look flushed," the secretary noted, her voice carrying across the silent room. "And that pashmina... it's a bit warm for the office, isn't it? Did you catch a cold?"
You felt Hiromi's gaze shift toward you. It wasn't the gaze of a concerned boss. It was the heavy, dark stare of a man watching his handiwork.
"I... I had a bit of an accident this morning," you said adjusting your posture again, heart hammering against your ribs. "I was rushing, and I burned my neck with the curling iron. It's quite unsightly, I'm afraid."
The secretary arched an eyebrow. She looked at your hair. You had pulled into a tight, professional bun, not a single stray strand or curl in sight. "A curling iron? For a bun? That seems... counter-intuitive."
A few of the other associates chuckled. Your face burned. You looked down at your notes, feeling the weight of Hiromi's silence. He didn't come to your rescue. He let you flounder, let you feel the thrill of the lie, the delicious shame of carrying his mark in a room full of people who saw him as a paragon of virtue.
"We have work to do," Hiromi finally interrupted, his voice like a cold blade cutting through the chatter. "If the Counselor is finished discussing her beauty routine, perhaps we can focus on the fact that our client is facing a twelve million yen liability."
He looked at you then, and for a split second, the professional mask slipped. His eyes dropped to the cream silk of your scarf, his nostrils flaring slightly. He wanted you to know that he knew. He wanted you to feel the brand pulsing against your skin.
You spent the rest of the meeting lost in your own head. The scarf felt tighter with every passing minute, a physical manifestation of the secret you were carrying. You felt watched, haunted by the imagined judgment of your peers, yet you knew they saw nothing but a diligent lawyer. This internal isolation, the gap between your professional image and the raw, aching woman beneath the scarf, was driving you to the brink of a breakdown.
An hour after the meeting ended, the notification chimed on your desktop.
Internal Mail: Urgent From: Higuruma, Hiromi To: [Name] Subject: Final Review - Case #882 My office. Bring the physical files. Now.
The word Now felt like a physical tug on a leash. You didn't hesitate. Your self-control had been eroded by weeks of tension and a morning of hiding, you stood up so fast that your chair hit the back wall. You grabbed the files, your pulse a frantic drumming in your ears, and walked toward his door, high heels pounded on the ceramic floor.
When you entered, the click of the deadbolt behind you was the only greeting.
"Take it off," Hiromi commanded. He was leaning against the edge of his desk, his arms crossed.
You unwound the silk, feeling the cool air of the office hit the heated skin of your neck. His hand gestured for you to approach, making you step into his space. His thumb traced the edges of the bruise he had made. He didn't use a gentle touch; his nail grazed the center of the mark, making you hiss through your teeth, pushing his thumb deeper until he felt your accelerated pulse.
"A curling iron burn?" he mocked, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. "Such a creative little liar," his fingers holding you by your jaw tilting your head back, half-lidded eyes piercing into his almost unnoticeable brown eyes. The pupils dilated, taking almost the entire space of his iris.
"But in here, we don't lie. In here, you belong to the truth of what you want," Hiromi murmured, leaning over you, face centimeters from yours. Stray, rebellious strands of his hair fell forward, grazing your forehead with a warm, tingling friction. His hair was a mess, the dark locks roughed up and agitated from the dozens of times he'd raked his fingers through them.
He didn't wait for an answer. He grabbed your waist and hoisted you onto the mahogany desk, scattering the files that you were clinging to like autumn leaves. The wood was cold against the back of your thighs, a shocking contrast to the heat radiating from your own skin. You were already ripe, your body slick with the anticipation that had been building since that night in the copy room.
He hiked your skirt up to your hips. The sight of your black lace panties against your shaky, smooth skin made his nostrils flare. He leaned down, his face inches from yours, his scent, sandalwood and cigarettes mixing with a musk, metallic hint, filling your lungs.
"Look at the glass," he whispered, his hand sliding under the damp laced fabric of your thong.
You obeyed, your eyes fixed on the frosted door. You could see the blurry, ghost-like shapes of people moving in the hallway, completely unaware that their superior was currently sliding two fingers through your folds.
He played you with a cruel, agonizing precision. Two fingers caressing your pulsating hole, poorly, tightening around nothing. His thumb hooked over your clitoris, applying a heavy, grinding pressure while his fingers stretched you. Finally entering you, mimicking the depth that you were starving for, pistoning his fingers with a motion of his wrist. The sound of the friction of his pads hitting that sweet, spongy spot right under your cervix was enough for you to have gone completely insane. The wet, obnoxious shuck shuck of his fingers filling the room, louder than your own ragged breathing and broken moans. You were experiencing an overwhelming feeling of pleasure, your hips bucking instinctively against his hand, your head tilting backward, unable to keep looking at the ordinary situation behind the frosted glass.
"Hiromi... please," you moaned, your hands clutching the edges of the desk so hard the wood bit into your palms.
"Please what, Counselor?" he asked, his voice a calm contrast to the frantic bucking of your hips. "Do you want me to stop? Do you want to go back to your briefing?"
"No! Don't stop. I'm... I'm almost—"
"Say it," he growled, his teeth grazing your earlobe. "Tell me what you want."
Your gaze met his. Your eyes filled with tears were overwhelmed by the shivering sensation of his fingers hitting that spot over and over again while his cupped hand was getting wetter. His brows frowned, the usual tiredness of his eyes replaced completely by lust and hunger. His breathing became agitated, unhinged, almost making fun of your own sobs. You were a ruined mess, pouring out all your juices on the floor. His thumb pressed harder on the bundle of nerves of your pussy.
"I-I want you... Fuck! I wanna-a... Hiromi, please, I wanna cum!" You sobbed, realizing that you were on the absolute precipice, that white, hot second where your muscles coil and the world disappears. You could feel the first exasperated contraction of your orgasm beginning to gather in your gut, the stars started to burst behind your lids, nerves tingling under your skin.
Everything became too much, a beautiful, overwhelming dissonance of skin and heat. The humid weight of Higuruma's breath against your ear, the agonizing friction of your nipples against the lace of your bra, and constant bite of your stockings against your thighs. Even the ordinary hum of the office outside the door felt like a physical intrusion. You were rushing toward the edge now, your mind blurring as you reached out to grasp the shivering, coiled lightning between your thighs.
And then… the void.
He yanked his hand away, splashing your slick arousal. The sudden absence of heat and friction was a physical blow. You gasped, your body twitching in a desperate attempt to find that sensation again, thighs closing, creating a poor excuse of friction. Your eyes wide and unfocused as you looked at him.
Hiromi didn't move. He stood back, his expression turning unemotional, almost cruel. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a clean white handkerchief, wiping your juices from his fingers with a terrifyingly calm deliberation.
"Why? Why did you stop?" your voice was an erratic, desperate whisper. Your flushed cheeks and bitten lips were mixed into your confused, frowning expression.
"Because you haven't earned it yet," he said, his eyes dark with a cold authority. "You think you can just have it whenever the need gets too much? You think it's that easy to find release?"
"Hiromi, please... I need it," you pleaded, your voice breaking. You felt raw, humiliated, and utterly unfinished, the cool breeze of his office grazing the naked skin of your upper thighs.
"If you want to finish what we started," he said, his voice dropping into a register that brooked no argument, "meet me at the Grand Celestia Hotel. Room 1221. Eight o'clock tonight."
The anger finally broke through your haze. "No," you snapped, the word feeling like a spark in a dry forest. "You can't do that. I'm not a toy you can just... summon when you feel like playing God."
A flicker of frustration crossed his features. He hadn't expected that you would bite back so soon. He looked at you, sitting half-naked on his desk, and for a second, the silence was deafening. Then, he reached down. His hands hooked into the waistband of your black lace panties. With a swift, powerful motion, he stripped them down your legs.
"Hey, stop!"
He didn't stop. He pulled them off your ankles and tucked the warm, damp fabric into his back pocket.
"We'll see," he said. He walked back to his chair and sat down, opening a folder as if you weren't even there. "Now, put your clothes back together. You have a lunch meeting with the senior partners in ten minutes."
"I... I don't have my underwear, Hiromi. Give them back."
He didn't look up. His pen scratched against the paper with a methodical finality. "I know. I imagine the draft in the conference room will be quite... stimulating. I suggest you keep your legs crossed, Counselor. It would be a shame for the partners to see what a mess you've made of yourself."
You stood up, your legs trembling so violently you had to hold onto the desk for support, straightened your skirt and tying the scarf back around your neck. The lack of underwear was a cold, constant shock. Every step you took toward the door, you could feel the touch of your own skin brushing against your bare, sensitized labia.
You walked into that lunch meeting feeling like a wound. You sat between two senior partners, forced to discuss corporate liability while every shift in your seat, every draft of the air conditioner, reminded you of what he had taken. You sat with your legs tightly crossed, the friction of your own skin the only comfort you had, knowing that the man at the end of the table had your scented sin in his pocket and your sanity in his hands.
—
Friday was a test of endurance. You had returned to the office with a fresh pair of panties beneath your skirt, a barrier of fabric that felt like a betrayal. You wanted to feel the air again, you wanted the vulnerability he had forced upon you. Instead, you were wrapped in your professional armor, the cream silk scarf knotted again so tightly around your throat that it felt like a silken noose.
You didn't look at him once. You kept your eyes glued to the flickering blue light of your monitor, burying yourself in the details of the Itadori case, but your body was a traitor. Every time the elevator chimed, your heart lurched into your throat, expecting his silhouette to darken the doorway. Every time you crossed your legs, the friction of your own thighs against the cotton of your panties sent a jolt of phantom electricity to your core. Your body remembered the exact weight of his palm, it remembered the rhythmic, heavy grind of his thumb.
By mid-afternoon, you were drenched. The sensation was a constant, pulsing thrum, a dull ache in your pussy that made sitting still an act of sheer willpower. You could practically smell him in the air, remarkable sandalwood and cold espresso, even though he was thirty feet away behind a closed door, likely holding your damp lace in his pocket as he dictated memos. The perfect lawyer was drowning in her own skin.
The weekend, however, was where the real torture began.
The silence of your apartment was deafening. Outside, the Tokyo sky had turned into a bruised charcoal, and the rain began to lash against your bedroom windows in a moody, relentless assault. You paced the floor of your room, the hardwood cool against your bare feet, but the restlessness in your mind was a fire that wouldn't go out.
You caught your reflection in the full-length mirror. The hickey was fading, turning into a sickly, mottled yellow-green, turning into a dying brand. As the mark vanished, a wave of genuine panic surged through you. If the mark disappeared, would the connection vanish too? Was he already forgetting the way you had sobbed his name like a prayer?
As the Saturday night fell, you were a wreck. You collapsed onto your bed, the sheets already tangled and damp from hours of tossing and turning. You closed your eyes, but the darkness was even worse, it was a canvas for his face. You saw the dark, focused intensity in his eyes, his eyebrows furrowed, his lips moist when he asked you "Tell me what you want". You felt the ghost of his breath against your cheek.
Desperate, you slid your hand beneath the waistband of your sleep shorts. You needed the release. You needed to quiet the noise in your head. You needed to burn the desire.
You tried to mimic him. You used two fingers, finding the rhythm he had established on the mahogany desk, your other hand reaching up to grip one of your breasts as a substitute for his strength. You closed your eyes and tried to summon the scent of his office, the sound of the air conditioner, the terrifying thrill of the one-way glass.
But your own touch felt meaningless. It was thin, indifferent and devoid of the one thing you were starving the most for: authority. There was no weight behind your fingers. No command in the silence of your room. You pushed yourself harder, your breath coming irregular, frustrated gasps, your hips bucking against the mattress, but the pinnacle remained mockingly out of reach. You were chasing a ghost. You wanted the hand that had yanked away from your arousal. You wanted the man who had told you that you hadn't earned it yet.
You pulled your hand away, sobbing in the dark, your body trembling with the weight of an unreleased, agonizing tension. You realized then, that you were no longer in control of your own pleasure. It felt like a death sentence. He had stolen the keys to your body and locked them in his desk.
"Fuck…"
Sunday went slowly. You sat by the window, watching the remaining, more subtle rain, trying to reconcile the "Higuruma & Nanami, Assoc.'s Shark", the brilliant, independent lawyer who had fought for her place in this firm, in this city, with the woman who was currently counting the minutes until she could be ordered around again, until she could earn it.
It was a war between the mental and the carnal parts of you. You feared him. You feared losing the professional respect you had spent five years building. You feared that once you stepped into the room 1221, the version of you that won trials and commanded respect would be swallowed whole by the version of you that wanted to be dominated by Higuruma Hiromi.
But as the sun began to set, that fear turned into a grim, absolute certainty. The professional admiration hadn't vanished, it had morphed into a terrifying form of devotion. You didn't just want him to fuck you stupid, you wanted to be judged by him. You wanted to be the only thing that made that weary, broken man want to hold onto.
By the time you went to bed on that night, the restlessness had settled into a cold, hard resolve. You were going to lose your mind if you stayed in this apartment one more night. You were going to lose your soul if you didn't give him exactly what he wanted.
—
The Monday morning was a trial in every sense of the word. You moved through the corridors of the Tokyo District Court like a ghost haunting its own life. Your eyes were rimmed with the faint, tell-tale shadows of a weekend spent in a fever of unreleased tension, but your mind had never been sharper. It was on a cold edge. You studied the case, you were part of the case. Every bit of the sexual frustration, the pulsing ache that had been your only companion for forty-eight hours, was being channeled into a singular, aggressive focus.
As you sat at the counselor's table, the dark wood railing felt like the edge of the desk in Hiromi's office. You found yourself staring at the judge, but your internal monologue was a chaotic litigation of your own soul.
Exhibit A: The silk scarf.
Exhibit B: The missing underwear.
Verdict: Guilty of a hunger that transcends the law.
You were judging yourself for the very thing that was making you so effective. The raw, carnal desperation to finish the job, to be done with the "if" and move into the "when".
Hiromi sat beside you, his presence a silent, heavy gravitational pull. He didn't speak, but you could feel the radiating heat of his shoulder just inches from yours. His scent of sandalwood was already usual to your nose, but it was mixed with the smell of burnt tobacco, espresso, with the warm notes of oak wood, caramel, cinnamon and smoky touches of his favorite whiskey. It became a physical assault on your senses in the sterile, wood-paneled courtroom.
At one point, as you leaned over to whisper a note about a witness's testimony, his knee brushed against your thigh. It was a subtle, fleeting contact, professional to any observer, but to you, it was a lightning strike. You felt the muscles in your legs tighten instinctively, your breath hitching as you felt the phantom weight of his hand on your mound. You looked up, and for a split second, your eyes met.
He wasn't looking at your notes. He was looking at your neck. The hickey had faded to a phantom of a bruise, a pale, yellowish shadow that was barely visible beneath your loose hair. You saw his nostrils flare, a dark, entertained glint awakening in his weary eyes. He saw the fatigue in your face; he saw his perfect lawyer fraying at the edges, and it seemed to feed him. He wasn't just your mentor today, he was the prosecutor of your self-control.
You won the injunction by noon. You were relentless, tearing through the opposing counsel's arguments with a clinical savagery that left the room silent. It was one of the best performances of your career, fueled entirely by the need to get out of your lawyer gown and jump into the room 1221.
The walk to the car was an agonizing slow-motion sequence. The city noise of Tokyo swirled around you. The hiss of tires on damp asphalt, the distant hum of the train. But all you heard was the blood rushing in your ears.
You stopped by the black sedan, the adrenaline of the victory finally beginning to flow away, replaced by a raw, naked honesty. You turned to him, your hands trembling as you clutched your briefcase.
"The Grand Celestia," you said. Your voice cracked, a jagged sound that betrayed your professional composure, but your gaze remained firm. "Tonight. If you want to play, Sir... then let's play."
A slow, dark smile spread across his face. The first genuine expression of amusement you had seen in years. It wasn't the tired smile of a successful lawyer, it was the satisfied smirk of a man who had successfully broken a wild thing. He stepped closer, his shadow falling over you, his eyes scanning your tired face with a terrifyingly intimate scrutiny.
"Eight o'clock," he replied, his voice a low, gravelly promise that made your knees feel weak. "And don't bother with underwear this time, Counselor. I still have the pair I want you in. I'd hate for you to feel... overdressed."
He reached out, his fingers ghosting over the spot where the mark had been, his touch a cold promise of the new brands he intended to leave.
"Go home. Rest," he commanded, the authority back in full force. "You're going to need your strength for what I have planned."
—
The Grand Celestia was a fortress of quiet, expensive air. As you stepped out of the taxi, the humidity of the Tokyo evening clung to your skin, the sky was bruised with deep pinks as the sun dipped lower, the clouds stirring in a restless dance that finally swept the storm away.
The lobby of the hotel was a tomb of chilled marble. Suddenly, you became conscious of the feel of every inch of your outfit: the sleeveless draped blouse cinching under your breasts, the dark pencil skirt hugging your hips, the stockings ending mid-thigh with a lace grip that dug into your skin, the pointy black high heels numbing your feet, and the terrifying, airy void where your underwear should have been. Tonight, you were a woman who had meticulously prepared herself to be unmade.
You found the private alcove in the back of the hotel's restaurant. Hiromi was already there, his silhouette framed by dark wood and silver light. He looked tired, his eyes carried the weight of a thousand red papers, but as you approached, a sharp, focused clarity cut through his fatigue. He watched you shift your weight, your hands nervously twisting the strap of your bag.
"You're five minutes late," he noted. There was no bite in it, only a calm observation. He gestured to the chair opposite him. "Sit. Let's have dinner," he said, looking into your eyes. "And enjoy ourselves. You look like you're expecting an execution, not a meal."
The dinner was a lifeline to normalcy in a sea of rising tension. As the wine flowed, the rigid set of your shoulders began to melt. Hiromi unbuttoned his cuffs, rolling back his sleeves to reveal his sturdy, hair-dusted forearms. You talked about the absurdity of the opposing counsel's closing statement; you debated the texture of the wagyu. You laughed, a genuine, melodic sound that made Hiromi's gaze soften. For a moment, you were just two people who finally felt safe in each other's presence.
"I wonder sometimes," you said, toying with the stem of your glass, "if you ever get tired of always being right."
Hiromi let out a dry, almost inaudible laugh.
"Being right is a lonely burden. What tires me is the noise," he sipped some wine, bobbing his Adam's apple as he swallowed. "The messiness of people who don't know what they want," he continued, keeping his eyes fixed on yours. "That's why I like being with you."
"Why?" you asked, half laugh, half whisper, leaning forward.
"Because you are precise. You're like an equation that solves itself," he leaned in too, his voice dropping an octave. "Or at least, that's what I thought until a few weeks ago. Now... now you're the only chaos I'm interested in bringing to order."
You felt a jolt of electricity at his words, but you tried to hide it by taking a sip of the Bordeaux. "You're overanalyzing again," your gaze met his above the roundness of the cup. The sweet, glistening wine spilling across your lips. "I'm just trying to perceive the base notes of this wine."
"It's red fruits, tobacco, and... some leather," he said, his eyes never leaving yours, tracking the way your pulse fluttered at the base of your throat. "But what you really love is the control that comes with knowing exactly what you're consuming. Even now, you're trying to classify this dinner, trying to put a label on the moment so it feels safe."
You felt the heat rise immediately, a rosy stain creeping up your neck and disappearing under your loose hair. "I am not doing that, Higuruma."
"Yes, you are. You turn red right here." He reached across the table, his index finger barely grazing the edge of your jaw, his skin searingly hot against yours. "It's fascinating to watch the most aggressive lawyer in Tokyo crumble over a simple observation about wine. I wonder if it's not the wine that's making you lose your composure."
He pulled his hand back slowly, his eyes dark with a quiet, satisfied intensity, just as the waiter placed the final course between you.
It was a single, dark chocolate fondant, dusted with a fine layer of cocoa that looked like velvet. As you pressed your silver spoon into the cake, the center gave way, oozing out like molten lava across the white porcelain. The richness of the scent, bitter, sweet, and intoxicating, filled the small space between you, mirroring the thick, heavy atmosphere of the alcove.
You took a small, trembling spoonful, the sugar hitting your tongue like a drug, momentarily grounding you as the world outside the hotel seemed to vanish. You looked up at him, your lips stained dark by the chocolate, your heart hammering against your ribs.
"Aren't you going to have any?" you asked, your voice barely a whisper, a challenge and an invitation all at once.
Hiromi didn't reach for a spoon. He leaned across the table, his hand cupping the back of your head with a sudden, grounding heat. "Yes, I am," he murmured, his voice dropping into that guttural, dark register that made your core pulse.
He kissed the chocolate right off your lips. His tongue was bold, sweeping into your mouth to claim the sweetness and the wine, his other hand finding your jaw with a strength that made you gasp against his mouth. When he pulled back, you felt dizzy, the world spinning around the gravitational center of his scent. Starving for more, you watched as he took a real spoonful. The pulse between your legs increased as you leaned forward, initiating the kiss this time, desperate to taste him again.
"Upstairs," you breathed against his lips. "Please. Now."
The journey in the elevator was an exquisite torture. There were two other guests in there, an another couple in formal wear, and the silence was deafening. Hiromi stood behind you, his hand dropping to your hip, his fingers exploring its curve. His hand became anxious as he watched the numbers rise at an overwhelming pace. His heavy fingers began to trace small circles on the plump flesh of your hip, traveling south, encountering the curve of your ass cheek. As he didn't feel the underwear lines that should be resting there, he realized the truth. He has never wanted to touch your naked skin that much.
A low, sharp intake of breath hissed past his teeth.
"Good girl," he whispered into your hair, the words a jagged promise.
The moment the door to Suite 1221 clicked shut, the dinner was forgotten, a memory buried twenty floors down. Hiromi discarded his suit jacket, his eyes locked on yours.
"I want a total delivery," he said, his voice echoing in the softly lit room. "I want your silence, your noise, and your absolute surrender, " he removed the knot from his tie, revealing popped veins on his hands.
"I am going to tie your hands, because I want you to remember that every sensation you feel tonight is a gift I am allowing you to have, " he methodically discarded his belt with a swift movement.
"I'm going to eat you until you can't remember your own name, and then I'm going to fuck you until you understand exactly who you belong to," his eyes have never left you while he unbuttoned his shirt. Heavy pecs greeting you as he got rid of his shirt.
"Do you understand, Counselor?" His shirt and blazer sat abandoned on the armchair. In the low light, Hiromi's naked torso was a devastating presence, pale, gleaming, and dangerously close. There was a heavy, grounded masculinity to his build; you could see the ripple of muscle with every breath he took, the hard, anatomical definitions of his frame towering over you.
Your mouth flooded with a sudden, sharp rush of spit at the sight, a primitive response you couldn't suppress. You swallowed hard, the movement echoing in the desert of your throat as you offered a frantic, wordless nod. Your hands, pinned to your sides, began to tremble.
"Use your words, (y/n)."
The sound of your name, vulnerable, abrupt, and stripped of every professional title, felt like a physical blow. The way his tongue rolled through the syllables, lingering on the vowels with a dark, proprietary heat, was a final slap to your remaining sanity. With the last, jagged thread of your composure, you whispered, "Yes." The word didn't feel spoken; it felt torn from the very center of you.
"Good," a wicked smile spread across his face. He stood before you in the middle of the room, in only his trousers. The incipient dark-haired path decorating his lower abdomen, disappearing under the waist of his black suit pants, his erection straining against the fabric.
"Take off the blouse," he commanded with a quiet, rigid breathing.
You obeyed, your fingers clumsy, flustered. When the fabric fell, he saw you were bare beneath that, too. He stepped forward, anticipating the warmth of your skin, thumb and forefinger catching one of your nipples in a sharp, demanding pinch. "No bra, either? You really are desperate for me, aren't you?"
You gasped, your back arching instinctively as your nipple peaked under his touch. "Yes," you choked out, the word of a confession of total defeat.
He brought your wrists together in front of your abdomen. Using his black silk tie, he bound them, tight enough to restrict, yet gentle enough to respect the skin. You felt the dry, expensive thrill of the fabric, and as the realization that he had done this before, that he knew exactly how much slack to leave, sank in. Your knees buckled.
Hiromi caught you, his large hands stabilizing your waist, but he didn't pull you into a hug. He held you at arm's length, forcing you to stand under the soft, amber glow of the chandelier.
The heavy velvet curtains were drawn tight against the Tokyo skyline, sealing the two of you in a world where time had stopped. The only sound was the low, rhythmic hum of the air conditioner and the frantic, shallow cadence of your own breathing.
Hiromi's gaze traveled over you then, not with the casual look, but with the starving, possessive weight of a man inspecting a masterpiece he finally owned. His eyes, usually so weary from the law, were now burning with a dark, terrifying focus. He looked at your bound wrists, then traced the line of your collarbone down to your bare chest. You felt the heat of his stare like a physical touch, marking you where his hands hadn't even reached yet.
"You're trembling," he noted, his voice a low vibration that seemed to rattle the very bones of the room.
"I... I didn't think it would feel like this," you whispered, your voice cracking.
"The law is a cage of words, Counselor, you know that. But, this," he stepped closer, his shadow swallowing you whole as he loomed over you, "is the cage of desire. And you've never looked more at home."
He didn't give you a chance to retreat into your mind. He reached out, his hand cupping the back of your head, and kissed you fiercely. A deep, territorial claim that tasted of wine, chocolate and a sudden, carnal hunger. Still kissing you, he guided you toward the massive canopy bed, the duvet inviting under the dim lights.
He turned you around with a firm, silent strength, forcing you to grip the carved wooden post at the foot of the bed. The wood was cool and unyielding against your bound hands, a stark contrast to the radiating heat of his body pressing into your back.
"Don't let go," he ordered, softly.
With your wrists bound, your hands holding onto the canopy post and your forehead pressed against the wood, you were a work of art in raw lines and frantic breathing. The posture forced your back into a deep, vulnerable arch, exposing the entire smooth length of your spine to his predatory gaze.
You couldn't stay still. Your hips shifted in a restless, impatient stutter. A physical manifestation of the fever that had been building since Thursday. It was a mix of raw anticipation and the sheer, terrifying weight of his authority. The lack of space, the heavy, radiating heat of Hiromi's chest just millimeters from your back, was making you come apart at the seams.
He leaned in, and the first touch of his mouth was a shock. He didn't just kiss you; he claimed you. He sank his teeth into the sensitive slope of your shoulder, biting hard enough to make you gasp, leaving a deep, purple brand that would last for days. He moved to the junction of your neck, his tongue swirling over the skin before sucking with a forceful, mean intensity that made your vision blur.
"Hiromi... please," you whimpered, your fingers tightening their grip on the wooden post until your knuckles turned white.
You were dazed, your body a live wire of overstimulation. Beneath the hem of your skirt, you felt the betrayal of your own body. A hot, slick trail of arousal was beginning to glide down the inside of your thigh, a silky, honeyed wetness that made the space between your legs feel humid and electric. You felt every draft of the air as a sharp, cold contrast to the liquid fire he was stoking within you.
The sound of his breathing and kissing, ragged, dark, focused, was the only thing you could hear over the blood rushing in your ears. You tried to press back into him, desperate for the friction, but he held you in place with a hand on your hip that felt like a brand.
Suddenly, the air behind you shifted.
Crack!
The sound of the slap was a gunshot in the silent room. The sharp, stinging heat of his palm against your cover rear sent a jolt of pure adrenaline through your nervous system. You let out a shattered cry, your back arching even deeper, your toes curling inside your shoes. The pain was a bright, white flash that instantly clarified the chaos in your mind, like a verdict.
"Is that okay?" he asked, his voice a low, gravelly vibration. He didn't pull his hand away; he left it there, the heavy heat of his palm molding to the stinging skin, his thumb caressing your abused ass cheek.
You nodded, letting out a broken moan. Tears started to accumulate on your eyelashes, waiting for you to be completely unleashed.
"Use your words, Counselor."
"Yes," you breathed, a sob catching in your throat as the realization of your total exposure hit you. "Yes... more. I want to feel more."
Hiromi didn't grant your wish with words. Instead, his hands moved to your waist, his fingers finding the hidden zipper of your pencil skirt. The sound of the teeth sliding open was a sharp, reserved hiss in the silence of the suite. With a firm, downward tug, he forced the heavy fabric over your hips, letting it pool around your ankles like a discarded skin.
He stepped back for a heartbeat, his gaze sweeping over the wreckage he had made of you. You stood there, bound to the post, exposed, wearing nothing but your towering black stilettos and the sheer, lace-topped stockings that hugged your mid-thighs. Your bare skin shivered, a subtle shaking as the cool air of the suite brushed against you. The inner curve of your thighs glistened, slick with the sweet wetness of an anticipation you could no longer hide. Your breath was a broken, pacing thing, the only sound in the suffocating silence. And there, on your right butt cheek, the ghost of his palm remained with a dull, throbbing heat, sore and vivid, marking the exact spot where he had just reformed you.
Hiromi saw the exquisite collapse of the only thing he had ever truly respected: your composure. Watching you there, shivering, aroused, and marked by his own hand, felt like reading the final, undeniable verdict that his sanity was in a limbo. For years, he had operated in a world of gray morality and weary justice, but this was absolute. This was a truth he could finally touch.
As his gaze swept over the wreckage he had created, a dark, heavy heat settled in his gut, a possessiveness that felt both ancient and terrifyingly new. The sight of your inner thighs glistening with the evidence of your need for him specifically acted like a drug to his analytical mind, short-circuiting the logic he usually relied on.
And he could not restrain himself.
Smack!
Another slap in the exact same place, harder this time, the sound echoing off the decorated walls. The sting was a shocking reminder that your body no longer belonged to you. He moved down your spine, his mouth a searing brand, biting and tasting every inch of your skin until he knelt behind you.
The heat of his breath was the only warning before he pressed his face into the junction of your thighs, inhaling the deep, musky scent of your arousal. He smelled you, drinking you in, his teeth sinking into the soft flesh of your buttock. You cried out, a high, shattered sound that broke against the wooden post, your fingers clawing at it as the world narrowed down to the sharp sting of his teeth and the relentless, heavy thrum of your own heart.
Hiromi didn't just touch you, he claimed you with a raw, primal hunger that was as structured as his closing arguments. His large hands clamped onto your hips, his thumbs digging in with a punishing force, anchoring you against his face, almost forcing you to sit on it.
The heat of his breath was the only warning before his tongue buried itself inside you from behind.
"Ah!" A broken sob tore through your throat. It was too much. The texture was wet, rough, and demanding, lapping at your swollen entrance with a ruthless, measured pressure that made your knees bend. He was eating you as if he were starving, drinking you in with a terrifying, absolute focus that made you dissolve into a screaming puddle of nerves.
He moved down, his mouth forming a tight, vacuum-like seal directly over your clitoris. The suction was agonizingly perfect, a focused pulse of pleasure so intense it was almost painful. You tried to pull away, to ground yourself against the wooden post, but his hands on your hips, spreading your cheeks open, held you in place with brutal efficiency.
"Please... Hiromi, I can't... I can't breathe!" you choked out, your head tossing back, exposing your throat to the amber light. "F-Fuck!"
He didn't listen. Instead, he intensified the suction, his tongue flicking over the sensitive bead in a punishing, unforgiving rhythm. It was more than just a sexual act, it was a demonstration of ownership, an act of possession. He was deciding when you would break.
The waves started at the base of your spine. A hot, heavy tide of sensation that crashed over your mind. You came with a shattered cry that cracked against the ceiling, your whole body arching like a bow, your forehead hitting the cool wooden post as your world exploded into a bright, white flash of pure feeling.
You were a mess, a sobbing, shaking surrender, your fingers clawing at the wood until your knuckles turned white. And kneeling behind you, Hiromi just held you, feeling the seismic aftershocks of your climax, letting you know that you could only fall because he was there to catch you, while licking you clean.
He didn't give you a second to recover from the first wave. With a sudden, jarring strength, Hiromi grabbed your hips and flipped you around. Your bound wrists stayed high, the black silk tie straining against your skin as your back hit the cool, carved surface of the wooden post. You were pinned, exposed, your chest heaving, your lace-top stockings the only thing shielding your trembling thighs from the heavy, charged air of the suite.
Hiromi didn't wait. He stepped into the space between your knees, his shadow swallowing you whole. He reached down, his hand slick with the evidence of your first climax, and drove his right fingers inside you.
It wasn't a gentle entry. It was hard, intrusive, and punishingly deep.
"Hiromi—!" Your head thrashed against the wood, a ruined gasp escaping your lips.
He ignored your plea, his focus narrowed to the brutal precision of his hand. Each thrust was a heavy, blunt force that bottomed out against your womb, making your toes curl again. The only sounds in the dead silence of the room were your frantic, animalistic moans and the wet, rhythmic slap of his palm hitting the soaked, puffy lips of your pussy, creating friction with your swollen clit. It was a visceral, messy percussion that marked the tempo of your undoing.
You were a chaos, overstimulated and raw. The friction was unbearable, a building heat that made your vision swim with static. You tried to close your legs, to hide from the intensity, but he used his own knee to shove your knees wider, forcing you to witness your own surrender.
"Look at me," he commanded, his voice a dark, gravelly friction.
You obeyed, your eyes blown wide and glassy, meeting his terrifyingly calm gaze.
"Come."
The second wave hit. It was a violent, convulsive release that sent a hot, heavy flow of fluid soaking down your nylon-covered legs and coating Hiromi's entire forearm in a shimmering, pale heat. Your whole body buckled, your hands clawing at the post, your voice breaking into a high, shattered cry that died in his mouth as he crashed his lips into yours.
The silence that followed was deafening. You hung from the post, sobbing for breath, your skin flushed a deep, feverish pink. Hiromi didn't move away. He didn't reach for a towel to wipe away the mess you had made of him.
Instead, he slowly brought his hand up to his face. His eyes, dark and unreadable, never left yours as he began to lick his fingers clean, one by one. He tasted you with a slow, deliberate relish, reclaiming every drop of the chaos he had just wrung out of you.
"The verdict is in," he whispered, the sweet saltiness of your cum still on his tongue. "You belong exactly where I put you."
He guided you onto the center of the massive canopy bed, your movements heavy and uncoordinated. You collapsed back against the cool, feather duvet, your arms automatically rising above your head, like a wordless surrender.
The contrast in the room was a physical ache. The air conditioner was humming at a steady, calm chill, biting at the damp, sensitive skin of your inner thighs and the distended peaks of your nipples. Yet, your core was a furnace, radiating a humid, heavy heat that felt like a thick fog. You were damp with your own sweat and the remnants of the first two orgasms, a shimmering mess of flushed skin and black lace against the white covers of the bed.
You watched him through half-closed, feverish eyes. Hiromi stood at the edge of the bed, his silhouette under the dim amber light. With a terrifyingly calm deliberation, he stepped out of his trousers and boxers.
When he finally loomed over you, fully exposed, you felt a fresh jolt of adrenaline. His cock heavy on his hand, an angry cherry tip leaking more precum with every stroke. He caressed himself, the rhythmic, heavy sound of wet skin against skin filling the silence. His eyes, dark and unyielding, pinned you to the mattress.
"Tell me again," he commanded, his voice a gravelly, low-frequency rumble that vibrated in your body. "What is it you think you need right now?"
"F-fuck me," you gasped, your voice breaking, your professional persona completely drowned in the sea of your own desperation. "I need you to fuck me… Please, Hiromi."
A dark, ghost of a smile touched his lips, but he didn't give in. Instead, he knelt between your legs, his weight a crushing, welcome pressure. He leaned forward, using the broad, velvety head of his cock to begin a slow, torturous friction against your clitoris. He didn't enter you. He simply teased the swollen bead, the heat of him searing through the slickness that already coated you.
The stimulation was electric, a focused, white-hot point of pleasure that sent sparks to your fingertips. You began to arch, your hips stuttering upward, begging for the impact of a full thrust, your breath turning into a series of erratic, high-pitched whimpers. You were seconds away, eyes shutting tight, teeth gritted, hand fisting above the silk, ready to shatter for the third time.
Then, he pulled away.
The sudden cold was like a slap. You let out a shattered moan of protest, your bound hands clawing at the air, eyes opening again. Hiromi didn't look at you as he reached for his trousers on the floor. He pulled out another tie, but he also pulled out something else, the scrap of black lace from the previous Thursday. Your stolen underwear.
He moved back over you, his shadow swallowing you whole. Before you could speak, he stuffed the laced fabric into your mouth, the scent of your own dried arousal and his office cologne hitting your senses all at once. He tied a second silk tie around your head, securing the makeshift gag until you were effectively silenced.
He leaned down, his lips brushing against your ear as you let out a muffled, desperate sound behind the lace.
"I decide when I fuck you," he whispered, his voice cold and absolute. "I decide when I touch you, and I decide exactly when you're allowed to come. Do you understand, Counselor?"
Bound, gagged, and aching with a need that felt like it would split you open, you looked up into his dark eyes. You didn't hesitate. You nodded, a slow, feverish movement against the pillow, accepting the rule of possession as your only truth.
The submission was total, a silent plea for the end of the torment he had just built.
Hiromi didn't hesitate. He knelt between your spread thighs again, his large hands sliding under your lower back to tilt your pelvis upward, aligning you for his entrance. Then, with a single, devastatingly deep thrust, he buried himself inside you.
The impact was a shock to your system, a blunt force that seemed to reach your very throat. You let out a muffled cry into the lace of your own underwear as the internal muscles of your pussy clamped around him in a desperate, throbbing spasm. He didn't move at first. He simply stayed there, fully seated within you, letting the sheer size of him stretch and claim the space you had tried to keep professional for five years.
Hiromi didn't move, his eyes locked on yours as he felt the violent, involuntary clench of your muscles around him. It was a claustrophobic heat. He could feel the exact moment his presence shattered the last of your rationality, replaced by the raw, internal tremors of the woman beneath him.
From his height, he watched the way your throat arched. You looked like a revelation of sins and sweat, pinned to the mattress by his cock. He saw the way your pupils dilated, the hazy, unfocused shimmer in your eyes, and the tears were accumulating in your bottom eyelashes.
He felt the staggering size of his own power in the way you stretched to accommodate him. For five years, he had kept a polite, icy distance, but now, every frantic spasm of your body against his was a confirmation: you weren't just taking him in, you were being completely redefined by him.
The silence of the room was heavy. He stayed still for that long, agonizing heartbeat, savoring the feeling of being the only thing filling you. In that static, electric moment, as he felt your core clamp around him in a desperate plea for friction, Hiromi finally felt like a man who had won the only case that ever mattered.
"Fuck… You are so tight," he ground out, his hand spreading over your lower abdomen, his thumb hooking over your mound to find your swollen clit. He pressed down hard, the heavy, grinding friction tearing a series of broken sobs from deep inside you.
Slowly, he lowered his torso until he was crushing you into the mattress, a suffocating, heavy blanket of skin and radiating heat. He hiked your knees toward your breasts and hooked your ankles over his shoulders, your feet with your high heels still on, framing his head as he pinned your thighs against your ribs. His hands anchored your arms over your head, making it impossible for you to retreat or even shift an inch. His forehead pressed against yours, his dark eyes a mere fraction away, tracking every micro-expression, every flicker of agonizing pleasure and raw, unadulterated need that shattered across your face.
"Stay with me," he growled, his voice a low, vibrating friction against your skin. "Don't you dare close your eyes."
Then, he began to move.
The rhythm was agonizingly slow at first, long, deep strokes that felt as if he were physically rearranging your internal organs. Hiromi wasn't just moving, he was calibrating the pleasure, his jaw locked so tight the muscle leaped in his cheek. With every forward push, the coarse, dark hair of his pubis ground against your overstimulated clitoris, a friction so relentless it made your vision tilt into a white-hot haze.
"Look at me, (y/n)" he exhaled, the command hitching in his throat. His voice was reduced to a paced, raspy struggle.
As the pace shifted, his control finally snapped. The slow burn was incinerated by a sudden yearning. His thrusts became sharper, faster, a brutal percussion that made the bed creak in steady, paced protest. You thrashed beneath him, your bound wrists straining against the pillows, your muffled groans turning into a continuous, high-pitched hum behind the gag.
Hiromi's breathing turned into a dark, continuous growl, the sound of a man drowning in the very thing he'd tried to quantify for years. He watched you fussed against the pillows, the sight of your helplessness fueling a terrifying, proprietary heat in his gut.
You were a catalyst bundle of pleasure, your entire nervous system sparking with a sensory overload that was too much to bear. The heat, the scent of his sweat, the taste of the silk in your mouth, the sensation of his big veined, slightly curved cock constantly hitting the hot, syrupy spot beneath your cervix, and the relentless, driving force of him inside you coalesced into a single, blinding point of no return.
And he was a man possessed by the scent of your sex and the taste of the air you shared. As he felt his cock bottoming out against the sensitive curve of your pussy, a low, animalistic sound tore from his chest, a half-sob, half-roar of absolute conquest.
"You're ruined," he choked out, his forehead crashing against yours, his sweat dripping onto your flushed skin. "I've ruined you... and God help me, I'm never letting you go back."
Then, the waves hit.
It hit you a violence that made your whole body lock. You came so hard your back arched off the mattress despite his weight, your eyes rolling back as a shattered, internal scream died in your throat. Hiromi felt the seismic, internal convulsion of your release, the way your walls clamped around him in a frantic plea. Your orgasm soaked the cover underneath your bodies, gushing against his stomach, the tiny, glossy drops of your release trapping themselves at the base of his cock.
His hands found your hair, gripping the roots as he delivered more thrusts fucking through as you came. The tip of his cock poked your cervix devastatingly, like he was trying to fuse your souls together. A long, shattered groan escaped him, a sound of pure, unadulterated surrender, devoted to your cunt. He stayed there, buried deep, his chest heaving against yours as he eased down the overstimulation.
Just as the aftershocks of your release began to come down, Hiromi moved with a sudden, predatory efficiency. He didn't give you a moment to breathe, let alone recover. You were far from finished, you were just beginning to be malleable. He felt a dark, pulsing satisfaction as he gripped your waist, flipping you into the duvet, forcing you to face down into the pillows, your hips hiked high and your bound wrists still pinned beneath the weight of your own chest.
The cool air of the suite hit your flushed, damp skin, but it was immediately replaced by the searing heat of his body as he loomed over you. Seeing your hips hiked high, back beautifully arched in a silent, vulnerable plea, ignited a primal hunger that scorched away the last of his weary self-restraint. He entered you again in one fluid, uncompromising motion, his rhythm turning visceral.
This wasn't the measured, educational pace of a mentor anymore. This was a reclamation.
Every thrust was a heavy, raw impact that felt like it was reaching your very heart, rattling your ribs and stealing the oxygen from your lungs. You were drowning in sensation, the metallic taste of your own saliva in your mouth, the scent of the hotel's expensive linen, and the relentless, driving force of him behind you. And he watched the way your body was pushed forward with every impact, his hands clamping onto your hips, the flesh of your butt jiggling violently with every thrust.
The overstimulation was absolute. Your nervous system was ruined, sparking with every collision of skin. In a blind, animalistic instinct to survive the intensity, you tried to crawl forward, your fingers clawing at the bedsheets, trying to escape the rough pace of his hips.
But you weren't going anywhere. To Hiromi, the sensation of your fingers trembling as they grasped the sheets, trying to escape the overwhelming sensation of his cock, was the ultimate tribute.
"Don't run," he growled against the back of your neck, his breath a searing brand. "You stay right here... exactly where I need you."
His hands clamped onto your hips like iron shackles, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of your waist with a bruising strength. He dragged you back onto him, meeting every forward movement with a devastating counter-thrust that made your vision turn white.
Plap. Plap. The wet, pornographic percussion of the act filled the room, a messy, primal soundtrack to your undoing. The sound of his skin hitting yours was a constant, heavy pulse. Just as you felt the fourth wave of your own climax beginning to build from the sheer, relentless friction. He could feel your nervous system sparking, your body beginning to build toward a fourth wave of release, and it pushed him over the edge. The sight of your reddened skin, the way you buckled under his strength, made his own vision turn into a jagged, white-hot static.
With one final, electric open-hand smack! to your ass, Hiromi reached his breaking point. A low, guttural groan tore from his throat, a sound of absolute, unrefined release, vibrating against your back. He buried his face in your hair, inhaling the scent of your skin, your sweet perfume blending with the musky, slightly tangy scent of your sex, as he came. He spilled inside you with a force that made your entire body lock, his pulse thumping against your internal walls, painting them white, as he claimed the very center of your being.
Even as he began to soften within you, Hiromi reached around, his large, warm hand sliding down the front of your body. When his fingers found that hyper-sensitive bead of your clit, slick with the evidence of the mess you'd made together, he felt a fresh rush of dark pleasure.
The touch was a shock to your system. You were already raw, sparking with overstimulation, and the sudden, steady friction of his thumb was almost too much to bear. You let out a muffled, shattered moan against the silk gag, your hips stuttering upward in a desperate, instinctive search for relief.
"Not yet," he whispered into your ear, his voice a gravelly command that brooked no argument. "You don't get to stop until I tell you."
He increased the pressure, his thumb circling and flicking in a relentless, punishing tempo that ignored your silent pleas for mercy. It was an analytical, focused kind of cruelty order that he had promised, delivered through a haze of pleasure. Your vision began to tilt, the world narrowing down to the friction of his hand and the heavy weight of him pinning you to the mattress.
"Come, (y/n)," his sharp teeth sank into your shoulder.
The final wave hit with a violence that caused your body's hair to rise. You came so hard your back arched like a bow, a high, broken sound dying in your throat as your nervous system finally short-circuited. You collapsed back into the pillows, trembling and spent, every inch of your skin humming with the aftershocks.
In the humid silence of room 1221, the only thing left was the scent of tobacco, sex, and the heavy, undeniable truth of what you had become to him.
In the heavy, suffocating silence that followed, the only thing you could feel was the warmth of his cum mixed with your own flooding you and the weight of his chest crushing you into the mattress. The professionalism was gone. There was only the woman, the bed, and the man who had finally, irrevocably, broken her cage.
Afterward, the silence was broken by the fading, ragged cadence of your shared breathing. The air conditioner continued its omnipresent hum, but it couldn't touch the feverish heat still radiating from your skin.
Hiromi moved with a quiet, grounding tenderness that felt even more overwhelming than his previous aggression. His large, steady hands flipped you once again and reached for the silk ties at your wrists, undoing the knots with a practiced ease. When the fabric fell away, your arms dropped to the duvet, heavy and leaden, the skin of your wrists tingling with a dull, faint pressure.
He reached for the lace in your mouth, his fingers brushing your lips as he removed the damp silk gag. The sudden rush of cool air into your lungs made you lightheaded. He didn't pull away immediately, his reddened eyes locked into your teary ones. He leaned down and pressed a lingering, soft kiss to your forehead, his thumb tracing the sharp line of your cheekbone, moving the lingering scent of sex around.
"Are you okay?" he whispered, his voice no longer a command, but a low, gravelly anchor in the dark.
You looked up at him, your vision slightly blurred, your hair a chaotic halo against the white pillows. A weak, genuine smile broke through the exhaustion. "Yes," you breathed, your voice sounding foreign to your own ears. "Are you?"
A flash of genuine surprise softened the sharp lines of Hiromi's face, a rare, unguarded moment that felt more intimate than the sex itself. He looked at you, truly looked at you, and for a second, the predator was gone. A slow, private smile mirrored the exhausted peace in your face. "More than okay, Counselor."
The walk to the bathroom was a lesson in physical memory. Your legs were trembling, your inner thighs aching with a deep, pulsing soreness that served as a visceral reminder of every thrust, every slap, and every surrender. You felt the dried salt of your own tears and the lingering slickness of his release, like a map of the night written on your skin.
When you emerged, wrapped in a heavy white robe, the room was empty. The sudden absence of his gravity made the suite feel immense, almost haunting. Your eyes drifted to the nightstand, where a single sheet of hotel stationery lay beside a glass of water.
The room is yours until noon. Rest. I'll see you in the office.
The words were professional, yet the ink was heavy, as if he had pressed down hard on the pen. You sank back into the bed, stripping away the damp, tangled duvet to find a cool, dry patch of soft cotton.
As you lay there in the loud silence of the midnight, the weight of the night began to settle in your chest. It was a guilty realization, the bone-deep thrill of the transgression clashing with the terrifying reality of the morning to come.
How could you possibly sit across from him at the table of the main conference room tomorrow? How could you ever be the firm's Shark again, barking orders and citing precedents, when you knew exactly what it felt like to be his prey? The power dynamic had shifted in perpetuity, the courtroom was no longer the only place where he could hold the gavel.
The guilt was there, a cold, persistent shadow at the edge of the room, whispering about ethics, careers, and the professional suicide you had just committed. But the heat still humming in your skin was louder. You had been marked, bound and claimed by the only man whose intellect rivaled your own.
As you finally drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep, your fingers curled into the sheets, still smelling like him, tracing the spot where he had knelt. You knew that tomorrow's silence would be agonizing, a minefield of stolen glances and professional masks, and you knew, with a terrifying certainty, that you would do it all over again tomorrow.
hiii !! my higuruma's hear me out took shape and it is finally here ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧ i felt soooo overwhelmed by this fic, not just bc of the length, but bc i had my nose stuck in my english dictionary since saturday (｡>﹏<) anyway, i'm working on a part 2, adjusting some details, so stay tuned !! hope you enjoy it <3
