Estranged daughter of the 24th chair of the Zen’in Group, you always thought you were above the lows that the rest of your family likes to sink to in pursuit of the top rung of the ladder-- but when your uncle, Naobito, unexpectedly brings you back into the fold as COO, you see no choice but to contract an attorney. A shield against the schemes of your cousins. A sword with which you could choose to strike first.
Enter Higuruma Hiromi, prodigy of the Iwate Bar Association, and… your former college TA. Neither of you were meant to stay the same-- not after eight years passed since the last time you’d seen each other. But from the boardrooms in Tokyo, to the wedding of your cousin Mai in the Riviera, it’s all too easy to fall into old orbits and unspoken words. Nobody is ever missing.
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.・゜゜・ ・゜゜・．
｡･ﾟﾟ･ ･ﾟﾟ･｡
My part of Honey's 2k followers collab event with @nanamisbbygirl (congrats on 2k!!!)
ao3 link ☾ press play ☾ art credit to deccarabia
‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾
Rating: M
Word Count: 24.2k
Warnings: Zen'in clan typical misogyny, age gap/power gap between MC and Higuruma, brief mention of WWII-related war crimes, brief suggestive content, morally dubious MC, brief mentions of vehicular manslaughter, drug/alcohol abuse, etc., Succession-typical dark subjects.
Notes: No curse AU, corporate drama AU, scr3wing ur lawyer trope, age gap (Higuruma's 7 years older than MC), second chance romance, kind of ex-fiancee Choso and ex-fiancee Gojo (in that there were political engagements they never went through with), license on Big Three clan relations, VERY inspired by Succession, background KamoMai/NoriMai, background YutaMaki
Prelude: There sat down, once, a thing
His hair is mussed, suit wrinkled, and dark circles perpetually mark the lower rim of his eyes, creating a hollow, sleep-deprived simulacrum of a man-- though perhaps, the apprehension coursing through her body had less to do with what was a downright sloppy look for a corporate counsel, and more with the double-exposure of what the distance of eight years had cast into sharp relief.
But back then, she’d known what to do with the butterflies in her chest that only ever seemed to bloom when her Law and Ethics 101 TA grinned and praised her closing statements during mock trials.
She stands straight, in shiny patent-leather pumps, a custom-tailored sheath skirt, hair tucked back neatly like it were any kind of armor at all.
“So,” he drawls, voice deliberate, even, measured in that steady way it had always been. He leans back in his chair, almost irreverent in the face of her title. “What brings the COO of the Zen’in Group to my office?”
She feels a distinct sense of being like a child again, as if she were called to the principal’s office for a reprimand-- the kind of scrutiny that makes her feel like a bug pinned under glass.
“Hiromi-san,” she begins slowly, stepping forward slightly. She offers a small smile-- though the muscles in her cheeks ache in disuse even as she calculates the minute lift of the corners of her lips. But since she’s gotten the appointment, and she’s in his office, anyways, she forges forward. “I’d like to hire you.”
His gaze lifts to hers. Something flickers across his face-- surprise, maybe, that she’d still address him so familiarly despite the eight years apart. “Is that so?” he murmurs.
It’s the first time the two of them are seeing each other since she left Keio University without a word, just before graduation-- and even standing over him with the distance of the desk between them, she feels small, scrutinised, as if he were the one with all the cards in the situation.
Hiromi-san shifts slightly, crossing his legs. “I don’t do corporate clients.”
“I’m not a corporate client.”
“You’re the COO of the Zen’in Group.”
The title lands bitter in her ears, as if it were all he saw now-- the boardroom, the news articles, the titles, the fact that she’s paying to even stand in the same room as him-- not that she couldn’t afford it, but that it slammed a screen between them that seemed to ignore all their old boundaries and histories.
As if there wasn’t a time when she’d fall asleep across from him in the library during cram week, or they’d ignore the clock ticking thirty minutes, an hour, two, past the conclusion of office hours to lounge at his desk and talk-- not just about the class, about her extraneous questions about applying for law school, but about other things-- their families. Their favourite foods and TV shows. Anything aside from the dense law tomes that they wanted to read. Dancing around the heart of the subject matter-- because she was too young, and he was too ethical. Logarithmic lines that approached, but never actually touched, zero.
“I want you as personal counsel.”
He hums slightly, a noise of interest-- and she lets herself feel a slight spark of hope in her chest. “I’m sure the Zen’in Group has in-house counsel. Your salary could afford a small army of the top lawyers in Japan. So why me?”
She finally takes a seat. “Because I don’t want to hire some asshole that my family can buy my secrets from.”
His brows rise faintly, and he laces his fingers together, leaning his elbows upon the desk, and she pauses, then brings her chair closer to the desk, until the legs of the chair brush against the facade of the desk.
Any closer, and their knees would knock together. She’s more than aware of the gap in between the singularity of contact.
“Last October, Uncle Naobito had a stroke,” she begins carefully. “Just a few months after I was brought on as COO. We-- hid it from the shareholders and just told them that he was stepping back from his responsibilities due to age-related health issues. Since then, the company’s been basically run as an interim triumvirate-- Uncle Ogi, and my cousins, Jinichi, and Naoya.”
She tries to stem the flow of rage she suddenly feels, thinking of them-- smug, self-important, far less intelligent than they wanted to give themselves credit for. Men who made little of their own lives, resentful of who, and what she was.
And she had no illusions about her role, to be sure-- given their family’s propensity for spite.
Maki was as good as dead to their family, Mai was still in university, Ranta was too far outside the core family, and so she had been the closest weapon with which Naobito could bludgeon his C-Suite of vultures with. A woman, estranged from the family, scraping by overseas as some petty middle management for the past few years-- suddenly elevated to COO of one of the Big Three conglomerates of Japan, like it were some kind of weird, fucked-up fairy tale that turned out more Grimm than Disney.
“Since then, they’ve been tearing into me like I’m a bleeding seal in a fucking shark tank. Every one of my proposals are voted down by their blocs of cronies. My family speaks over me in public board meetings like I don’t exist. And last month, they tried to reach around my oversight to contract an under-the-table deal with Kamo Pharmaceuticals behind my back that would have had us hemorrhaging money.”
He blinks slightly-- takes the tirade in stride. “You’re saying you want me to… what? Advise you? Sue them?”
She lifts a shoulder with a wry smile. “I want you to shut them up.”
He smiles-- but it’s a thin, brittle thing, one that doesn’t meet his eyes. “You want dirt.”
“I want leverage,” she corrects-- as if by giving it a prettier name, they could bypass the ugliness of the subject matter. “I want you to help me with the oppo research.”
A stilted kind of quiet descended upon the duo-- and she shifts slightly in her seat. His gaze flickers over her face as if searching for something in her features he doesn’t seem to be able to suss out.
“You were never one for power plays,” he says, finally, drumming his fingers against the polished top of his desk. “You said you hated the rest of your family and their corporate bullshit.”
“I was young,” she replies. “And idealistic.”
“And now you’re not?” he says softly, with something almost like pity in his voice. “That’s a shame.”
Part I: If he had a hundred years
Her father lies dead-- and it is such a strange thing to wrap her head around, because in some ways, she always thought that he’d outlive even her-- all steel and spite.
Zen’in to the core.
“My condolences,” Uncle Naobito says, clapping her on her shoulder with a heavy, disarming hand as the clan gathers to send her father’s coffin off to the crematorium. His palm carries as much weight and tenderness as a punch.
She keeps her head bowed. Nods slightly-- a practised movement she’d performed jerkily on the plane ride over, just enough of an angle to imply deference and respect-- which she sorely lacked for the man in front of her-- but without coming across as scraping or servile.
The funeral was too full of suits.
People pretending to be people.
Strangers-- ones wearing her own face, blood that ran thinner than the sediment of spite that enmired them all. Ones that don’t-- shareholders. Investors. People for whom the ceremony was a performance only, there to pay “respects” to the now-reposed 24th Chair of the Zen’in Group. Hushed voices murmuring with the weight of futures and investments even as a man’s body made its journey to its final resting state. The stack of condolence envelopes sit heavy in the bag on her wrist.
She hadn’t even been invited to the wake-- the only acknowledgement of the fact being an email from Naobito that blamed “scheduling conflicts” that reeked of perfunctory backstabbing.
For all that she’d been estranged from her father. For all that she’d packed her bags, taken her mother’s last name, and never looked back all those years ago.
“You’ve been away from your family for too long,” Naobito continues later on. Family. The word echoed bitter in her head. As if she’d never always been lesser for being a daughter. As if they hadn’t just let her mother die alone, in pain, abandoned, too obsessed with image and traditionalism.
She lets out a noncommittal hum. Revealing none of her hands.
“Uncle Chojuro’s being encouraged to step back from his role as COO,” he adds.
Of course he was-- he’d been ancient since she herself was a kid, and the dinosaur in the Zen’in C-Suite had been a point of contention in the investors’ circles since perhaps longer than she’d been alive. But that coveted position had still been occupied by the old man--
“We’ll funnel you in through PR. Fast track you up. Whatcha think about it, new blood?”
She blinks slowly. Doesn’t turn her head-- just her gaze, over towards him, a furrow in her brow. “Are you asking me?”
“‘Course I am-- yer my favourite niece,” says Naobito, and she could truly grind her teeth at the overt familiarity of it, the faint scent of sourness that lingered around his breath-- tobacco and alcohol. “So?”
She thinks of her father-- more concept than comfort. She thinks of Naoya, two years younger and lightyears crueller. She thinks of the way that as a teenager, she’d seen Ogi whipping his daughters behind the servers’ partition at a family dinner. She thinks of Toji, the family ghost, whose prison stint had been hushed up on the news networks they’d desperately tried to buy up in the aftermath of his arrest.
She thinks of her mother, locked away in some distant Zen’in estate, suffering in hospice care whilst the family pretended they were honoring a dying woman’s wish to repose peacefully.
She looks at him-- her uncle. Her father’s younger brother. A scumbag like the rest of them. She knows he doesn’t ask because he thinks she’s capable, or that she’s deserving. Qualifications like that don’t get anyone anywhere, much less into the C-Suite of one of Japan’s Big Three conglomerates.
“I’ll think about it,” she tells him-- but he smiles, slow and oily, like the deal’s already been sealed.
.
He’d suggested a restaurant. A neutral, third location. She’d sent him an address in Akasaka, and offered to pay.
It’s one of those places where the food’s more for display than consumption, where the lights are kept purposefully dim to highlight the arcs of flame from the open kitchen, and the shrouded seating offered some semblance of privacy for clandestine meetings-- business dinners, illicit affairs, state visits.
The shadows under his eyes are even more pronounced with the dim halo above them. Champagne fizzles merrily in the pair of crystal flutes, and she hates to admit that she’d asked hers to be topped off more than once already-- and they were only still on appetisers, too.
“I looked over the files you sent,” he says, quiet. “Shareholder breakdowns, audits, the likes.” Concise, clipped, exacting, the way he always was. But she could hear the rebuke in his tone-- as if the only reason he’d signed the contract was to stop her from burning everything down around her ears.
She takes another sip of her champagne.
“For all intents and purposes, Hiromi-san, we can pretend we’re angling for a hostile takeover of my family’s company. Now tell me, how would you go about things?”
He doesn’t answer right away. Just steeples his fingers and looks at her-- looks, like he were trying to see past it all-- the steeled face, the permafrost tone, the sharp black silhouette.
A single pearl hangs from a silver chain above her sternum, stained iridescence and irregular form. A singular relic of sentimentality that his eyes linger on for a moment, before he exhales, leaning back in the woven leather chair.
“I’ll reemphasise that it’s easier to be the white knight than the black knight. You want as many people on your side as possible-- as quickly and painlessly as possible. Litigation will be long, messy, a nightmare. The market will get you before you get to the top seat, and any whiff of infighting is a poison pill for shareholders and investors.”
“I’m not afraid of a challenge,” she counters.
“Our goal’s hard enough as-is. I thought we were trying not to angle for impossible. Because you’re playing with fire right now.”
She stabs her fork into the scalloped lotus roots with a vehement crunch. “As long as they get burned worse than I do.”
He doesn’t speak for a moment. And then says her name-- once, soft. Like it still meant something to him.
She looks, despite herself.
“There’s a difference between winning the war, and becoming a cog in the machine you’re trying to dismantle.”
She laughs, once. Dry. “I’m not becoming anything, Hiromi-san. I was born to this. All the filth of the Zen’in name? It’s all mine. My birthright as much as it’s Naoya’s or Jinichi’s or Ogi’s.”
“No one’s born to anything,” he says, softly. “We choose.”
She clenches her jaw. “I’ve made my choice, Hiromi-san. Now tell me how to win.”
Keeping a tight hold to her fork, she braces herself as if the pressure of the metal underneath her fingers could somehow stem the tremor she’s afraid will rear its ugly head. Because here they are, the two of them, eight years too late and sitting in a restaurant where a meal for two cost more than the coursework for her major did, and he’s looking at her like she’s a stranger wearing the skin of someone he once knew.
For all that mattered, she was.
She was a Zen’in, now, after all.
.
After class, she lingers. She always does. Pretending to have questions about the lecture. Pretending to re-pack her lecture notes. She’s always the last to leave the hall. Never in a rush, even when she should be-- whether it’s to get to her next class or a family event. He’s at the desk, organising the handouts he’d collected from the beginning of class.
“You were a little lenient with today’s class,” she says, and he glances up with an arched brow, a lock of mussed dark hair falling across his forehead.
“Lenient, huh?” he muses.
“You kept the cross examinations pretty abstract. Didn’t really critique when Takeo-kun was making his statements, and I’m sure his arguments had more holes than a sieve.” She tilts her head, quizzical. “Are you goin’ soft on us, Hiromi-san? Or am I the only one who gets the honor of bein’ pushed?”
“I’m not here to traumatise undergrads,” he replies, shaking his head, as if her needling amuses him. “It’s a law and ethics course. Someone’s got to keep me on the moral path.”
“Are you sure?” she says, with a grin that spells trouble, and that earns a huff of air from him-- almost a laugh.
There it is again.
That space between them, devoid of anything else but their two orbits. Too heavy to be casual. Too restrained to be passion.
She’s twenty-one. Top of the class. She doesn’t speak to her uncles anymore. Barely keeps in contact with her cousins. Comes to the family events, poses carefully with her hand on the back of her father’s wheelchair in photo ops. Goes north twice every month to visit a cottage in Aomori that smells of antiseptic and incense by turns.
Hiromi’s twenty-eight. Finishing his Master’s. Top 1% in the national bar exam. He’ll be out of Keidai by next year, he tells her. Going back to Morioka to work as an apprentice legal counsel for a friend’s uncle’s business. Make the Iwate Bar Association. Then maybe his own practice in another few years down the line.
You think I should have gone harder?” He leans against the edge of the desk, forearms flexing where the sleeves of his button-down have been rolled up. She follows the motion-- just long enough that when her eyes flicker up to meet his, he’s already gazing back at her.
He doesn’t call her out on it, though. That’s the game they play-- too well, in fact. The act of skirting a line.
“I’m starting to think I’m the only one you go hard on,” she replies instead. Because it’s the same old dance, every time-- sustained gazes and teasing quips. Office hours that extend long past the allotted timeslots. The minutes after a class.
She wonders if she’s said too much. Wonders if he feels the cut of the irony of it, too. Of how this-- whatever this is-- would be wildly unethical. He’s her TA. She’s seven years younger than him.
But that’s how lawyering works. They dance around the orbit. Never cross the invisible line. Keep a respectful enough distance that the plausible deniability remains.
And yet, they don’t extricate themselves, either.
Part II: And more, and weeping, sleepless
Uncle Ogi doesn’t rage-- not like Naosuke once did, blowing through ten grand on drugs and drink and women during one of his most infamous benders, before they locked him away in a Swiss rehab. Not like Naohide, whose interns lived in fear of flying ashtrays, hot coffee, and the glass doors he used to slam hard enough to nearly shatter. Not like Naotaka, who trashed his entire Roppongi condo and threatened a murder-suicide when Naoya, of all people, had been named CTO and now has a lifetime membership in a sanitarium in Osaka as a result.
But rage has never been Ogi’s style.
His is the quiet kind. Precision-forged. Contained, the point of violence exploding out through the pressure-valve of his fists. She’d never felt it, herself-- but she’s heard things. Caught glimpses.
The storm’s long been brewing before she’s even walked into the room-- and at its epicenter is Ogi.
They’re all here, for once. Called into a family-only emergency board meeting-- no handlers, no proxies.
Naobito flickers into view on the oversized screen mounted to the wall—video-calling in from the sabbatical they'd forced him on after his stroke. Somewhere warm and vernal, probably still Okinawa. Aunt Masae and Naoharu are stationed on either side of him like permanent furniture, one dabbing at the corner of his mouth when he coughs, the other mechanically pouring tea like his trust fund depended on it (and did).
Naoharu was one of those men who loved to talk endlessly about the value of individuality and being a visionary, but would rather roll over and play dead than face any amount of pressure, a rather unfortunate (if predictable) side effect of being the middle son of Naobito. His younger brothers were gluttons who overindulged in the power that money offered. His elder brothers were impulsive hotheads with a violent streak. He was just porridge in a beige suit.
Jinichi’s there, a copy of TIME Asia in his hands and a furrow in his brow as if by flipping the pages, the answer he’s desperately searching for will materialize. There, across the cover, is a blown-up, grainy candid of a couple, eloping out of some Vegas courthouse in moody chiaroscuro.
It would look more in-place in a gossip rag, in some kind of place that still laundered scandals as fairytales, if not for the identity of the couple themselves.
The girl’s turned away from the camera, but she has a grin like a knife and strong jaw that catches the light exactly the same way that Uncle Ogi’s does. His face. His blood.
His shame.
DYNASTY DISRUPTED:
Inside the Elopement of GojoCo’s Heir Apparent and the Black Sheep of the Zen’in Group.
Naobito laughs on the screen, voice distorting through the airwaves. Spittle foams down one corner of his mouth-- dutifully mopped up by Aunt Masae. “Told you,” he croaks. “Should’ve knocked that girl around harder when she still fit in your lap, Ogi. Might’ve taught her what goddamn role she was meant to play in this family.”
She can hear Ogi’s teeth grinding as he exhales through his nose.
No one dares respond-- not till Jinichi sighs-- hesitant. “So… do we try to file an injunction? Send them a cease and desist to retract the article?”
“It’s not about legal anymore,” Ogi snaps at Jinichi-- “It’s about controlling the narrative.”
Because when Maki dropped out of college at nineteen and struck out for the States as an MMA fighter, the family cut her off and she became as good as dead to everyone. Even to her own twin sister-- Mai, the “good one”. The twin who still kept obedient to their family traditions.
(It was truly a small wonder she didn’t suffer the same fate as well, but then again, maybe that was the one blessing she’d received from her father’s influence as the once-CEO.)
But now, Maki’s in the front page of the news outlets. Trending with the family name on socials. Financial speculators. Sporting fans. All in a furor about a union no-one knew about-- and that the Zen’ins certainly didn’t sign their approval on.
Snippets from the article float through the ether of the world-wide web. Quoted or misquoted, it didn’t matter. Maki leaving the Zen’in name. The whispers behind the scene of cutthroat familial rivalries.
A damaged, rotting legacy.
GojoCo is just as old as Zen’in Group-- born in the twilight of the Edo period, both families clawing power out of the Meiji Restoration, shaping trade, tech, and transport in the postwar landscape of Japan. Rivals in everything.
And now, the one Zen’in they couldn’t tame has married directly into their oldest competitor.
The air shifts.
Naoya takes the opportunity to let out a scoff that sounds more like a bark, head tilting back with something like mania. He flips his phone around to an image of Maki, blood streaked down her chin, face twisted into a snarl mid-fight.
“You’re telling me that managed to bag the GojoCo heir? She couldn’t even act like a woman when we were kids. Couldn’t cook, couldn’t serve tea, couldn’t bow right, wouldn’t shut up when she was told. Does he have a head injury or somethin’?”
Ogi looks two seconds away from blowing up the entire office.
“Naoya,” she says flatly, a warning in her tone.
“What?” he smirks. “You know you’re wonderin’ too.”
She sighs, rubbing at her temples-- looks around the table.
Jinichi. Ogi. Naoya.
Naobito and Naoharu over the video call.
She thinks of everyone who’s not there, too.
Naohide, who had been forced to cede his seat on the board to her after the last intern whose mouth they’d stuffed with so much money they’d never talk. Naosuke’s in Switzerland on a permanent vacation, hopefully not relapsing. Naotaka’s been voted off the board after threatening to shoot Naoya and then taken a nice long vacation in a mental institute. Chojuro’s unofficially retired to curate his rock gardens to his heart’s content. Nobuachi’s still under the impression that his holiday care packages to the C-Suite keeps him in play. Ranta’s an intern rising too fast through company ranks on the virtue of his surname.
Ogi’s muttering something about paying for a social smear campaign-- some kind of dirt to discredit Maki. Digging for skeletons. To bring down his own daughter.
Jinichi’s humming in agreement-- ever the grunt, never the visionary.
Naoya’s thrumming his fingers against the wood-grain table, the sound grating through her skull.
She runs through the logistics in her head, throws her restraint out the window for the time being. It’s a crisis. She can use it. Play the part they want of her-- sharp spinster, a little unbecoming, but leagues more preferable to the way Maki or Toji had wound up. A weapon. An example to point at, in exemplifying familial loyalty.
“We need Mai,” she tells Ogi-- and as the man opens his mouth, ostensibly to object, she adds in, rapidly-- “Not on the board, not as part of the business-- we need her as damage control.”
A beat of silence.
It’s Naoya, of course, who opens his big mouth first.
“‘Course we do,” his mouth stretches into a grin. “She’s a good girl, isn’t she? Comes to every family dinner. Stays quiet unless spoken to. Always says please and thank you. She’s the type you can actually marry.”
The silence that falls over the room is sudden and brittle.
Even Naobito looks vaguely uncomfortable-- though that might just be the droop of his stroke-warped features filtered through the video feed. Ogi shoots a look at his nephew sharp enough to skin him alive, but Naoya just smiles, unbothered.
She clears her throat. “We don’t need her for marriage arrangements, Naoya. We need her for optics. If Mai’s gracious, supportive, family-first-- it softens the narrative the vultures on Twitter are starting to spin. Makes it look like a few bad apples went viral, not that we’re a psych journal case study in generational dysfunction.”
She’s almost amazed at the fact that no one’s tried speaking over her yet-- but she supposes this is what it’s like for the board to be at the end of its rope.
“And we’ll still invite Maki to the retreat,” she adds.
Jinichi folds his arms. “Retreat,” he repeats, flatly, half question, half rhetorical.
“Yes,” she says. “No press. Family only. No corporate branding. I’ll be our photographer. We bring in a therapist. Someone reputable, but foreign enough that we won’t be accused of bribing our way into a good report. They observe. Interview. Publish a fluff piece about how we’re the very image of familial unity.”
Naoya scoffs, nearly choking on his own breath. “You want a family therapy session?”
“A PR stunt,” Ogi mutters-- but he doesn’t sound opposed.
“Yes, uncle,” she concedes. “Maki’s marriage can’t be undone. Dragging her through the mud only makes us the villains. And it’s too easily traced back to us these days, and who knows what the Gojos will do if we go after her? But if we appear above the pettiness-- gracious in inviting her, even though we know she won’t come-- it repositions the narrative.”
Naobito lets out a hacking laugh from the monitor.
“Bah. Do what you want. Just don’t let it cost more than it’s worth.”
She pushes back her chair and stands.
“My office will handle the logistics. You’ll receive itineraries by the end of the week. In the meantime, I’ll coordinate with Mai.”
.
Chrysanthemums clutched in her fist, the stiff collar of her black brocade kimono scraping raw against the back of her neck, the pearl pendant sitting heavy against her sternum, she approaches the wooden coffin.
The ceremony’s small. Quiet.
Barely a dozen people. Her father, her. Naobito as the Chairman. A few of her mother’s relatives from overseas-- strangers she never meant to meet.
The summer Aomori sea breeze blows in, carrying idle leaves and petals, scattering along the stone paths of the funeral home. The sun winked overhead, as if mocking the shadow in her chest.
Her father remains seated-- not a single flower for the woman who’d walked three steps behind him her entire life, and borne him a daughter he never asked for.
They wouldn’t even bury her in the main Zen’in family shrine.
Just an extraneous plot in one of their satellite temples in the north, reserved for obscure cousins and wives and daughters that no-one cared about. For the discarded, the inconvenient, the forgotten.
Her mother had never disobeyed them. Not once. She’d been loyal to the end, even as they packed her off to the seaside to slowly succumb to uterine cancer in obscurity.
Barely twenty when she married her husband, nearly two decades her senior, plucked from a filing-cabinet of potential brides, handpicked by the board. Well-bred. Well-read. Pretty enough to photograph for the occasional press release.
And in the end, that was all her life ever amounted to.
A warm body beside a cold man. A womb that rotted before she could bear her husband his coveted son. A hermit only visited by her daughter-- twice a month, like clockwork. She had vanished into the north-- and no-one else had cared enough about her to ask where she was going, either.
She stares at the coffin, at the gleam of the wood. Chrysanthemum petals strewn across the enclosure like her own announcement of defiance that she hasn’t quite yet mustered.
Because in the end, her mother had always submitted herself to the will of the Zen’ins, but fate had other plans. Dead by forty-five. No sons to her name.
The stiff silk of her sleeves hangs heavy around her wrists like manacles. Every breath she draws in tastes of ash and incense and the smothering weight of their name.
She thinks of how they’ve always molded her-- etiquette tutors since she could walk, adolescent social events with Gojo Satoru and Kamo Choso that positioned her as a potential future bride for either of the heirs, press cameras flickering white at the corners of her vision at every birthday, at her coming of age ceremony, her high school graduation, her university acceptance party.
Even in college, she played the part that had been expected of her. Dressed right. Scored top of her class. Kept to the right social circles. Made speeches at functions with her family’s name grafted into every conversation.
And yet--
She remembers the thrill of her first time presenting in Hiromi-san’s class-- the way her voice rang with the bravado of the inexperienced as she laid out her argument, and the unfamiliar burn in her chest when he’d simply leaned back against his desk, arms crossed, and stumped her with a follow-up she hadn’t anticipated.
It hadn’t even been a class that was strictly in her major-- just something she’d circled for the appropriate credits on her humanities track.
But it was the first time anyone had ever truly questioned her-- she, who skated by on her impervious Zen’in name.
And she kept chasing the feeling ever since.
It was stupid. Childish, even.
But in between their after-lecture exchanges, and idle office hours, and study hall conversations-- there was something there.
Something real.
He never expected anything from her but reasoning and clarity. And when she spoke-- he’d been the first person to listen. To dig beyond what the Zen’in name dictated she say.
But grief strips everything down to the bone.
Her mother is in the ground now. And if she stays, she’ll follow.
With two weeks left till finals, she drops out of university, and books a one-way ticket to London under her mother’s maiden name.
.
In-between the brief seminars, where Ogi admits baldfacedly to having never recalled an instance in which he’d hugged his daughters, and Naoya needles his older brothers with their own uselessness, she catches her breath on the engawa encircling the inner courtyard of the family estate, camera in hand, scrolling through the photographs she’d taken of the sessions.
They’ll need double the payment for the therapist’s good opinion, she fears-- what with the retreat rapidly devolving into a dick-measuring competition between the men of the family. Mai, once the keystone of the plan, has shrunk in on herself in the background, speaking up only in one-word answers and tight-lipped smiles. A quiet, glum young man with the same eyes as Maki, and Jinichi, and Naobito-- Fushiguro, he calls himself, brandishing his invite.
Must be some cousin or another, they shrug, and let him in.
But through her camera lens, everything looks uncannily warm. Naohide’s hand on Naoya’s shoulder, threatening mutually assured destruction under some HR scandal, looks like a fraternal embrace. Mai’s awkward scrunch of her shoulders as Naobito forces her to wheel him around the estate looks like the demurring of a dutiful young lady.
She was always good at smoothing over the ugliness lurking beneath the surface of their family, after all. That’s what the PR to COO fasttrack was for.
Maki hadn’t shown. Neither had Toji-- though they’d very carefully issued the invitations.
That didn’t surprise anyone. Not after what happened between them and the family.
She keeps scrolling back into the memory card. London skylines, on the brief moments she had the whim to capture her new home. Older still, holidays with the family.
And then--
The image shines up at her-- not as indictment, not exactly. But as a reminder.
It had been their first week back in class after the winter holidays-- and she’d taken the liberty of his entire afternoon grading block to show off the new digital camera she’d gotten for Christmas, lounging in the armchair across from his desk-- the one that practically bore her name on it now, with every passing day she’d find an excuse to be seated there.
There’d been snapshots around the family’s resort in Hokkaido-- Maki and Mai sharing a rare moment of respite from the storm that was their family, Naoya with snow down his shirt courtesy of Ranta. Close-ups of lavish decor, a few stiffer photo-ops that her father wanted her to email over, so he could send them forth to the publicists.
“Hiromi-san,” she began. “Would you ever let me take pictures of you?”
He looks up then, pen dancing between his fingertips with a raised brow. “Hm?”
“For a project,” she amends quickly, as if it mattered at all. For all he knew, she could be right-- she did indulge in a photography course this semester, after all.
“Is it…?” he trails off. But somehow, she’d known what he meant.
Is it appropriate?
Is it too close?
Sharp nose in profile. Black turtleneck to ward off the chill that lingered in the air. Stray hair still falling over his forehead. Notebook in hand, a brief moment of unguardedness-- he’d been trying to get the cap off, the pen lodged between his lips.
Even now, the image makes her smile-- almost wistful.
He’d been the same age she is, now, and not for the first time, she feels a sense of gratitude-- that they never crossed that line. Not back then, when she’d still had so many trials and tears ahead.
She thinks of the messages sitting in her phone.
[hiromi-san]
Let me know when you’ve returned safely.
Take care of yourself.
Someone calls her name inside, and she quickly turns the camera back into shutter mode, getting back up to her feet.
Part III: A thousand years would fail to blur
“We need allies,” she’d said.
Hiromi-san looks up. The gesture, complete with the quizzical tilt to the side, seems so nostalgic that she almost feels twenty-one again, lounging in the library during study halls, lobbing idle, hypothetical queries at him that were as rhetorical as they were a way to just get his attention.
He waits for her to continue her train of thought-- patient as ever. The thought feels warm in her chest, but she forges on despite it.
“The board’s supermajority belongs to the old guard.”
She pauses, wrinkles her nose. “The executive directors all suck, which goes without saying.”
Holding up one finger, she begins her audit of the rest of the board. “Gakuganji’s so ancient that he literally grew up with Great-Uncle Chojuro,” she says-- the old man had been a retired financial analyst who’d been there during the heyday of Japan’s postwar industrialization. Too loyal to the old guard.
“Usami’s a conservative through and through,” she ticks off another finger for their liaison from the Ministry of Economy. A follower, like a more lugubrious Jinichi, if that were even possible.
“Furudate was Naobito’s attorney first,” she mentions their legal counsel. “He’ll side with Naobito’s wishes.”
“Zaito’s…” she trails off, thinking of the only other woman on the board-- Director of HR. Of the way Naoya watches her, with lupine hunger, and the steel challenge she throws right back at him. “A maybe, but I don’t trust her enough.”
He hums, flipping through the pages. “Kusakabe?”
“A maybe. But he rarely shows for the meetings, so he won’t have much pull.”
He exhales. Runs through the numbers again. “I thought maybe you were being too pessimistic, but you might be right.”
She cracks a rare grin at that. “Of course I am, Hiromi-san.”
.
Hey, remember when our families almost forced us to get married? seemed like an odd way to reintroduce oneself, but then again, from what she recalled of him, Kamo Choso was never much for formalities anyways-- what with the blatantly visible face tattoo he’d sported along with his long, shaggy hair and numerous piercings.
When he slides into the booth next to her at the nightclub, hoodie slung low over his eyes, she offers him a terse nod, and a lift of her martini glass.
For a moment, there’s just the pulse of music. He flags down a waitress, orders something strong and glow-in-the-dark, then leans in closer so she can hear him over the noise.
“There’s whispers. Kamo Pharmaceuticals,” he begins, with no further preamble, “is going to be bought out.”
She’d always appreciated that about Choso. His forthrightness. Good. She’d been dreading the notion of the tired old song and dance of courtesy around the subject matter before the actual main event.
“Private equity?” she asks, tracing her finger around the rim of her glass.
He nods once. “My mother’s firm. TENGEN.”
Her brows raise slightly at the mention of Choso’s estranged mother. “I didn’t know you were still on speaking terms.”
“We aren’t,” he replies. Short. Clipped. Resentful. “She just came into a ridiculous amount of capital from the Itadoris, and the first thing she’s doing is to come back to dismantle my father.”
She blinks. “Those Itadoris?” she asks. “As in, SKNA Ventures? Itadori Ryomen, Itadori?”
He downs the rest of his drink, then nods. “She married Itadori Ryomen’s brother and bought out his shares,” he reminds her. “I have a half-brother from that side of the family, too.”
“Damn,” she mutters. “Every time I think my family’s fucked, I should just remember you.”
He snorts, inelegantly. “It’ll be in a few months,” he murmurs. “The board’s stalling, but it’s inevitable at this point. After the WWII documents were leaked, the western investors all pulled out-- every single one. There wasn’t much goodwill left to salvage and the shareholders got spooked. Eso, Kechizu, and I are already preparing to take our golden parachutes.”
She hums. “So you’ve folded.”
“Nah.” He smirks faintly, but there’s something almost wistful in his countenance. “I just don’t have the taste for blood this world demands. Noritoshi, on the other hand…”
“Preparing for the siege?” she asks. She almost felt bad for him. Of course Noritoshi was still clinging. He always had been. The youngest of the Kamo sons, half-brother to Choso on their father’s side. An illegitimate child, bearing the name of his great-grandfather-- the one directly implicated in those same war crime documents-- as though that name were a badge of honor instead of a bloodstain. Desperate for recognition. To be embraced by the Kamo name, even as the institution was falling down around his ears.
Choso sighs. Shakes his head. “He’s an adult, but I can’t help but worry. He’s weighing his options. Still thinks he can cut a deal that keeps him at the new table. My mother won’t gut him right away. The family name’s currency enough for now. But he’s not a killer, either. And you have to be a killer in this world.”
Am I? she wonders.
“Well, he and Mai used to date in prep school, didn’t they?” she asks instead-- thumbing through the recollections of holiday parties from before she’d left for London. Remembers the way Mai used to sneak glances at Noritoshi from across the banquet hall, where he’d been shuffled off with the corporate guests, an odd, teenaged outlier.
Choso’s gaze flickers over to her. She could see it too-- same as he could. The gears turning. The waitress returns with a polite smile and replacement glasses.
A pause, as the music ebbs and flows in the background.
“You think he’ll go for it?” he asks.
She shrugs. “I think he’ll be smart enough to recognize the lifeboats where they’re being offered.”
“And your cousin?” he presses.
“They like each other. Always did,” she notes, too casual. “So let’s use that to our mutual advantage.”
“That’s cold,” he mutters with a mock shiver, swirling his drink around his glass. “Even for you.”
She hums again, propping her chin in her hand. “I’m desperate, Choso,” she admits. “I need more board seats.”
Spreading her free hand across the top of the table, she lays the proverbial cards down.
“Noritoshi marries Mai. I bring him on as a voting seat in the Zen’in board. He gets the salary, capital, legitimacy he always wanted from your old man. He gets Mai, and Mai gets him-- and the two of them can have their happily ever after with someone who at least sees them as a human being.”
She pauses then, not for effect but because the longing of it actually tightens something low in her chest. Thinks about Hiromi-san, and undergrad, and late-night strategy meetings.
“And in return?” Choso asks her, though she’s sure he already knows the answer.
She smiles. “In return, he votes for me.”
.
Ogi had raised a thin brow when she’d proposed the idea. Naobito had laughed, just now getting back into the office after he’d thrown such a fit in Okinawa that the staff had no choice but to funnel him back to Tokyo. Naoya had crossed his arms, leaned back in his seat, and then whined something about the poors gettin’ handouts from us.
In the end, the event had been less her cousin’s achievement and more a coordinated effort between Nitta, her own executive assistant; and Nishimiya, one of the more ambitious marketing coordinators. Between them, they’d constructed the sponsor list, the invitations, the vendor agreements.
Mai had mostly just signed off on suggestions as they came in, scratching her name on the invoices, nodding at the seating charts, and half-heartedly approving the auction items via voice memo that was prefaced by a complaint about a hangover from going clubbing with her college friends the previous night.
That was the thing about Mai.
She showed up. She did what she was told. But she drifted through life with a kind of lackadaisical laziness-- one foot always out the door, as if she longed to follow her twin sister, but didn’t yet have the guts to.
But at the end of the day, there was the Future Minds Educational Charity Bazaar, with Zen’in Mai playing the role of gracious hostess. Half PR stunt for the Zen’in brand, half-effort to coax Mai into the role of a socialite.
(She’d told Choso to forgo his duties as the Kamo representative for the time being and nudge his younger brother into attendance instead.)
The string orchestra in the background played on a neverending loop of inoffensive classicists. Hydrangeas bloomed in the center of the white banquet tables. Crystal glasses refracted the light of the chandelier overhead. The opulence was almost obscene, if they didn’t carefully prune the school board guest list to a mere half dozen people, mostly for the photo ops with the giant check the Zen’ins would sign over at the end of the night.
Across the room, Hiromi-san stands in clean-cut charcoal grey, murmuring something to Kusakabe, who’d finally deigned to show up to an event. His eyes glance over the dance floor, like it were a courtroom, clinical and assessing-- and then alight on her.
She stills, where she’s been making the rounds, schmoozing with some Fujiwara or another, then nods-- a perfectly professional acknowledgement from a COO to her legal counsel. Nothing more. Nothing less. And yet, the air shifts.
His gaze lingers.
She forces herself to smile at her conversation partner, lifting her champagne glass in agreement of some infrastructural query he’d posed or another, but the damage is done. Hiromi-san’s presence lingers in her mind-- and his gaze scrapes down the line of her spine.
She exhaled. That was fine. He could watch all he wanted. But tonight wasn’t about him.
Tonight was about Mai and Noritoshi, and the Hail Mary of a scheme she and Choso cooked up in a nightclub.
She spots Mai near the orchestra, understatedly elegant in a halter-necked indigo dress, taking a brief moment of respite from conversation.
Across the room, Noritoshi Kamo has just arrived.
He hadn’t changed much from the pale, reedy teen she’d last remembered at some New Year’s party or another. Taller and broader now, hair cropped shorter, but she watches as he pauses by the donor’s book, signs his name, and then scans the room, as if looking for something-- someone.
Perfect.
“Mai,” she’d called softly.
“Don’t start,” Mai said-- but without any bite. Just the exhaustion of a girl running on fumes, firmly on power-saving mode.
“I wanted to say well done,” she offers, jostling the girl half-teasingly, subtly angling them in a slow, meandering trajectory around the edge of the ballroom.
Mai raises a skeptical eyebrow at that.
“Really,” she insists. “The event’s been a smashing success. You’ll be the featured article on Aera tomorrow.”
Her cousin shudders. “Ugh. God forbid.”
“Is it really so bad?” She asks.
Mai’s face darkens. “Yes,” she sighs. “I swear, if someone else tries to start on some semiconductors bullshi--”
“Mai.”
Her name-- simple, breathless, just slightly disbelieving, despite the fact that Kamo Noritoshi had shown up to a gala with her name all over it.
“Noritoshi,” she replies, evenly-- carefully-- turning to face the boy who she’d used to surreptitiously link hands with when their parents weren’t looking at the insufferably stuffy corporate galas.
The boy in question clears his throat, a hand thumbing at his cufflinks. “It’s… been a while,” he murmurs.
“It has,” Mai agrees, tone impassive-- but the soft blush dancing its way up her features betrays the feelings underneath the surface.
A beat of silence, a breath. Something tentative hovers in the air.
“Can I get you a drink?” Noritoshi asks in the background.
Hiromi-san’s eyes meet hers again across the ballroom as she turns away from the intersection she’s set in motion.
.
In three months’ time, Naobito’s back to terrorizing the executives, leaning heavily on his new cane. He moves slower now, but his voice still rings just as sharp. She sits at his right hand, and dutifully pours the tea when his knuckles rap against the boardroom table, Naoya’s eyes burning with some strange resentment as he watches his father.
In three months’ time, the strategy sessions shift from Hiromi-san’s office to his living room. “It’s closer to your office anyway,” he’d said offhandedly, half-apology, half-invitation. She’d hesitated. Once. Briefly. But they’re not at Keidai anymore, and the coffee table in his bachelor pad becomes their new strategy map, strewn with invoices and ledgers.
In three months’ time, Kamo Noritoshi and Zen’in Mai announce their engagement through a spread in Vogue Japan, photographed in the carefully manicured courtyard of the Zen’in estate. The diamond on Mai’s finger is a placeholder from the family vaults, but she hopes, perhaps foolishly, that the glow in her cousin’s eyes isn’t just another part of the set dressing.
Part IV: The still profiled reproach
“Too many suits,” she murmurs, scanning over the guestlist in the privacy of Hiromi-san’s bachelor pad. The quiet clink of ceramic as she set her mug on the side table punctuated the thought. It had long gone cold, forgotten amidst the flurry of logistics.
Hiromi sprawled comfortably on the adjacent sofa, russet pullover rolled to his elbows. Gone were the formalities of button-downs and power suits and leather pumps. She lounges in a linen housedress with a cardigan thrown over top, armor off.
Côte d’Azur. In three months-- just enough time for Noritoshi to bail on his family’s company before he would be dragged down with it when the TENGEN merger goes public. Just enough time to make it look like a calculated business decision, and not the last lifeboat off the ship.
Custom Dior for the bride and bridesmaids-- of which she is one, having already forwarded her measurements to the dressmaker. A seaside villa that had once belonged to some royal or another.
An overly opulent affair, in her opinion, given the bride and groom-- youngest son of the Kamo family, an illegitimate child, and the younger twin of Zen’in Ogi, sister of the family black sheep. A four-day destination marriage with a guest list of hundreds of family members and industry representatives.
“There’s something we’re not seeing.”
Her uncle’s recovery had been nothing short of miraculous, but any health scare for the CEO of such a wide-reaching conglomerate was liable to make the stock nosedive. The interim appearance of triumvirate rule seemed to salvage things somewhat-- and despite the scandal of Maki’s elopement, the firm was somewhere trending along where they’d been last year, before Naobito had his stroke.
And she’d been there every step of the way. Updates on shareholder sentiment and stock outlooks. Strategizing sessions in boardrooms. Bringing him lunch in his office. A hundred small tests, most of which she passed without complaint. Still, he had yet to name a successor, let alone favor any of his executives over each other outright.
Could it be?
“He’s going to announce something there,” she said finally, setting down the sheaf of printouts, right next to her mug of cold tea.
“Something big. And for a crowd like this… probably the succession.”
Hiromi-san shifts too, propping himself up on his elbow,.
“He could be bluffing,” he offers.
She allows herself a small smile. “He could. But you know my uncle. He doesn’t stage a show without an audience. And it’s hard to getting an audience of this size live. Whatever this is, it’ll be big.”
Hiromi-san raises a brow. “You think he invited everyone there for that?”
“Why not? It’s a wedding,” she said, after a pause. “All about future generations and things like that-- it’ll be topical.”
And yet, despite it all, despite her titles and her competencies, as soon as Naobito returned, she’d just become the woman pouring him tea during meetings again.
“It’s not me,” she says finally.
Hiromi’s brow furrowed. “You think he’ll name Naoya?”
“No.” Her mouth twists. “Not Naoya. He’d be poison for investors.”
“Then who?”
That was the question. The one that dogs her steps now.
She runs over the list of cousins in her head. Eliminates them one by one. Naosuke’s in rehab. Naohide can’t control his temper in the boardroom. She files Naoharu away as an obedient maybe, same with Jinichi. Naotaka’s insane. Ranta. Nobuachi. Fushiguro. Cousins who were so distant that no one really even knew how they were related.
Ogi was therefore, by process of elimination, the most likely candidate-- but even that didn’t seem completely right to her.
“There’s someone we’re not seeing,” she mutters.
.
The whispers roar into something almost violent, like an inferno-- yet, standing in the eye of the storm, Okkotsu Maki (nee Zen’in) looks completely impervious in an emerald green tailored jumpsuit, her husband on her arm in matching colors, marching through the gathering of guests that mill about in the courtyard following the conclusion of the formal welcome dinner.
“What’s she doing here?” Ranta materialises at her elbow, sounding almost panicked. “Ogi-sama’s about to freak the fuck out.”
She tilts back her drink. Tries to think of how much time she’d spent these past few months acquiescing to Naobito’s whims as far as his niece’s wedding was concerned, and almost laughs-- because they very well couldn’t have invited the entire Gojo board and then added a footnote that the heir apparent couldn’t bring his wife.
They were banking on the idea that Maki would be too bitter at them still, to want to come.
But of course she did.
Her little sister was getting married, after all.
“Tell Uncle Ogi that if he can’t handle seeing his daughter at her sister’s wedding, he certainly won’t be able to handle the top seat.”
Snatching another flute of champagne off of the tray of a passing server, she turns on her heel to go bother Naobito, leaving poor Ranta to relay the message-- which he won’t, mostly because he valued his own skin too much.
“Well, isn’t this interesting?” she asks brightly, sidling up next to her uncle’s seat of honor overlooking the proceedings-- equally impervious.
“You planned this,” he growls, sulky-- a baleful gaze turned towards her that might have had more bite if not for the fact that he sounds more annoyed than genuinely accusatory.
“I anticipated it, Uncle,” she corrects-- subtle difference though it was. “It’s a family affair. And now Maki’s here for her twin’s wedding. She’ll behave herself.”
She was here as a representative of the Gojos after all-- wife of their heir. And even if Maki were rough around the edges and a downright feral combatant in the boxing ring, she knew her cousin, if the rumours of the love match were true, wouldn’t do anything to jeopardise her husband’s status. Not here. Her presence, in and of itself, was enough of a fuse.
“As long as we don’t rise to the bait,” she adds, noting Ogi making his beeline over to one of the security detail that stood sentry along the courtyard’s colonnades with a face like thunder.
A glimpse of dove grey marks Hiromi-san’s presence, calming her pulse somewhat-- technically another suit-- but hers. Her invitee, granted as part of the board, the same way Naoya invited a handful of his school buddies. Just knowing he was there was a welcome balm against Ogi’s burgeoning tantrum below with Ranta helpless at his elbow.
Naobito sighs, leaning back and drumming his fingers against the arm of his chair-- carved mahogany and velvet, some pre-revolutionary antique. A throne, for all intents and purposes. “Well, that makes all the family here. ‘Cept Toji, but even his boy showed.”
She blinks.
“Toji’s son?” She doesn’t mean to sound as surprised as she does. She doesn’t even know the man had a son.
This is bad.
Very bad, because there’s another piece on the board she hadn’t been made aware of. And now Naobito knows, that for all her maneuvering and plotting, she has a massive, Toji’s son-shaped blindspot in her vision.
Her uncle lets out a low rasp of a laugh, more a clearing of his throat than any actual mirth. “I thought you met the kid already at family therapy? Name’s Fushiguro.”
.
The morning was still-- uncharacteristically so. Or perhaps she was simply just early, standing in the liminal space at the edge of the world just before the dawn, the skies a clear pearlescent grey above her, the last tinges of night slowly bleeding out of the canvas above her.
She lets her feet sink down in the sand, chilled from the tide. The private beach was part of the venue’s estate, reserved for guests, but it had stretched out far enough from the main house that she could remain impervious, for the time being, to the gradual creakings and groanings and chatterings of the villa awakening from the drinks and conversations that had extended on late into the night of the welcome dinner.
“I never thought you were the type to get sentimental before weddings,” his voice cuts through her reverie, and she turns. Smiles, because here, she doesn't have to worry about prying eyes and ears-- not yet, at least. Not while the entire estate is still half-asleep, groggy with jetlag and the laziness of being on vacation.
Here, she can just take in the sight of Hiromi-san, linen shirt flapping in the breeze, unbuttoned to his collarbones, khakis rolled up to his calves as he lets the surf lap at his ankles. The shawl she drapes over herself flutters behind her like a banner, tassels tangling in the silver chain around her neck.
She let out a soft breath, returning her gaze to the horizon. “I don’t think Zen’in women necessarily have the best luck with love,” she said. “So I hope things will be all right for Mai and Noritoshi.”
There’s a small gap for silence-- just the sound of the tide, and their footsteps as they waded through the shallows.
“They used to date in prep school,” she offers. “She brought him over a few times for family dinners. Holiday parties. It was like puppy love. That sort of thing. She really liked him-- and I think he liked her, too.” She shrugged, overly casual. “He left for Harvard, Mai stayed in Japan. It wasn’t any kind of dramatic breakage. They just-- drifted.”
He says nothing, just looks at her-- really looks.
He didn’t have to say anything, because she was already turning the story over in her mind-- not just Mai and Noritoshi’s, but theirs, too.
She didn’t admit how often she thought about it all-- her final year of undergrad, Law and Ethics 101 and the sunlight filtering in through an office window.
He’s never really touched her. Just the briefest grazes, even now-- the brush of their hands as he offers her tea from a familiar mug in his apartment. Helping her with her jacket after the end of a long strategy session at the end of a long night. Always, always, this slow dance on the edge of the line.
She draws in a slow breath and lets it out again.
Finally lets herself give into the question that’s always lingered at the back of his gaze, ever since she’d strode into his office again.
“My mother died. Two weeks before finals.”
Hiromi-san doesn’t respond. Just watches her, dark eyes steady, stricken.
“She’d been dying for a while. But she was my last tie to the Zen’ins. The only part of my family I ever loved.” She pauses, lets the rumble of the waves fill in the empty space in-between. “So I left. Packed up, changed my family name to her maiden name, and moved to London. I had to repeat senior year. And then, after graduating, I went into PR. Worked my way up through middle management. And then my father died.”
She clutches at the singular pearl on her pendant. Lets her thumb run over the ridges of the jewel. “They memorialise my father. I see him on every damn plaque in the office building. But this,” she lifts the chain up, enough for the silver to glint in the dawn haze, “was the only thing I got to keep of my mother.”
The bitterness mingles with the salt on her tongue. “She didn’t even have the courtesy of being buried in the family’s main shrine.”
The warm hand reaching out to grasp her shoulder lands firm, steady. Like an anchor against a riptide. Hiromi-san’s thumb rubs her arm in a soothing circle.
“I keep thinking about it--” her voice catches, just slightly, “-- how every single day, I’m surrounded by the same people who threw her away without a second thought. And now I just want to take everything they think is theirs, if only to spite them.”
The wind billows around them, breaking up the surface of the waves into crests of white. She looks up at him. Leans into his touch. Watches as he parts his mouth silently around words that creep and retreat like the tides.
“It was such a shock when you left,” he says finally. “I kept thinking-- maybe she’s sick. Maybe something happened. But then--” he shakes his head. “--part of me wondered if it was my fault.”
She tilts her head.
“Do you remember,” he adds, quieter now, “how close I came to making a mistake?”
She glances-- not exactly away, but to the side. Her eyes slipping away from his. “It wasn’t a mistake. It just… wasn’t right. Back then.”
“I was your TA,” he responds, voice low and measured. “You were twenty-one. I was twenty-eight. It would’ve ruined your transcript and future. There were rules. Good ones, that were there for a reason.”
“My parents were twenty years apart,” she replies, but that sounds flimsy to even her own ears. Because what had that gotten them except a marriage of misery, predicated on a gulf in life experience and power that they’d never been able to bridge?
“You aren’t your parents.”
She sighs. “No. I’m not.” There’s something like relief in her voice about it.
He looks at her for a long moment. Quiet. The ocean washing over the backs of their feet, a steady rhythm to the erratic patterns of the wind.
“You never stopped being her. The girl from Law and Ethics 101. Not just Zen’in-san. Just a student who wanted to learn whatever you could. Stubborn as hell. Curious, too. You never backed down when I challenged you. And you challenged me in return. You’re still that girl.”
Her breath catches in her throat at that.
“I used to think about you,” he said, barely audible above the tide. “Wondering if I’d ever see you again. And then, there you were, on the front page of the Nikkei. COO of Zen’in Group. Walking into my office and calling me Hiromi-san like no time had passed, like you still remembered me.”
“I did,” she replies, just as softly.
She steps closer, the Mediterranean wind in her hair, and reaches up for his collar, tentative.
He leans down, slowly, carefully, as if mindful of how many ways this stolen moment could shatter, his free hand coming up to cup her jaw.
When their lips meet, it is no explosion, no crashing tsunami. Just a quiet warmth that reflected the sun’s ascent over the horizon, turning everything golden like Midas, from the points of contact between their bodies, to the eddys their feet formed in the water, to the warmth in her chest.
When they pulled apart, her eyes were closed.
“I missed you,” he breathes.
So did she.
.
Her gaze drifts across the ancient stone and carved oak of the chapel where she stands with the rest of the bridal party in seafoam green-- mostly Mai’s friends from university, Noritoshi’s groomsmen mirroring them across the altar where Naobito stands propped behind his pulpit as the officiant. The guests are a sea of faces-- bodies, stuffed into suits, stuffed into pews. People pretending to be people.
Packed in the front rows are their respective families-- Kamos on the groom’s side, Zen’ins on the bride’s. Someone had wrangled enough concealer onto Choso’s face that the tattoo has vanished. He looks almost bald without it.
The first signs of disharmony between father and son-in-law came, just days after the engagement, via some stink kicked up by Ogi about how classless it would be to have Kamo Daisuke’s former mistress sitting front row at the wedding. Ultimately, though, Noritoshi had dug in his heels, and so Fujiwara Yuko was seated right next to her son’s half-brothers, straight-backed, in a tailored silk dress she’d nonetheless seemed unaccustomed to.
On the bride’s side, Maki had faced similar marginalisation-- being packed off with the GojoCo delegates instead, next to Okkotsu, Gojo Satoru, and a few other board members.
More suits. Government liaisons. Shareholders. Executives from Zen’in Group’s subsidiaries. A handful of reporters too, camera shutters clicking merrily away in a swarm around the chapel.
The music from the quartet swells. The doors open. And everyone stands, as Mai walks in on her father’s arm.
Custom Dior that invoked Grace Kelley, her pixie cut slicked back under an Alencon lace Juliet cap-- and despite the grandeur, despite the politics, she watches as the world, according to Kamo Noritoshi, narrows to the white-clad figure making her way down the aisle towards him.
In the back of the church, she catches the glimpse of the arch of a sharp nose-- and meets Hiromi-san’s eyes. His steady gaze, grounding her in a sea of plots and strangers.
The memory of his lips pressed to hers, the surf humming in the backdrop, the wind in their hair.
Part V: He attends, blind
The reception unfurled beneath a canopy of lanterns and fragrant blossoms. Beneath citrus trees that sprinkled down petals with every gust of the breeze, the crowd is situated at lavishly set tables with gilded placards-- neat clusterings of polished shoes, custom tailoring and painted-on smiles.
She sits at the second table-- the one reserved for the wedding party, surrounded by Mai and Noritoshi’s bright-eyed university friends, awestruck at the grandeur of the chateau without knowing the rot that lurked beneath their feet. She pitied them. She envied them.
A hush descends as Naobito gestures to an aide-- and clambers to his feet, assisted by Aunt Masae at his elbow. A microphone is produced, with a brief screech of feedback, he takes the metaphorical stage at the head of the main banquet table-- as the most senior of the bride’s relatives.
“Today,” Naobito clears his throat, “We not only commemorate the marriage of my favorite niece to her husband, but the joining of two of Japan’s greatest conglomerates in a union.”
Mai and Noritoshi, in their place of honor, lift their glasses-- polite, measured-- the very image of the elegant young couple who were now the stewards of the Zen’in and Kamo futures. She wonders if she’s the only one seeing how tightly Mai’s clinging to Noritoshi’s hands under the elegant table-drapes.
Naobito lifts his whiskey glass, hand trembling slightly with the vestiges of the stroke from last year. She raises her own wineglass, along with the rest of the cousins at the table. Her fingers hold steady, but her breath holds in an arrested suspension. “I may be an old man, but seein’ all the young faces around me tonight… the future’s in good hands.”
He grins, then. “To the bride and groom. To future alliances, and future generations-- may they be fruitful, may they endure.”
A beat of silence. She waits-- Naoya waits, all the siblings and cousins-- as does the rest of the Zen’in high command. For the pivot that must surely come.
But then Naobito waves off the conclusion to the speech without flourish, and slumps down with a faint groan, muttering into the still-live mic, “I need a drink.”
And that was it.
No proclamation of heirs. Just a toast.
A ripple of genteel applause echoes through the crowd as the waiters begin to serve up the courses, the orchestra playing on in the background.
.
“Zen’in-san.” Gojo Satoru approaches with his usual cocksure grin, in a sky blue button-down and navy trousers. He bows, low and exaggerated. “May I steal you for a dance before the sharks start circling?”
She blinks slightly, waves Naoharu off from where he’d been droning about investment in artificial yeast. “…Gojo-san.”
“You looked like you needed saving,” he’d said, jerking his chin toward her cousin.
She shrugs instead. “I had things handled.”
“C’monnnnn,” he whines, batting his lashes in a way that might have seemed completely gauche on any other man. “For old times’ sake?”
With a reluctant sigh, she places her hand in his. “One dance.”
The movement is practiced, smooth. They’d grown up together, in a manner of speaking. He’d been her dance partner at her coming-of-age ceremony despite her having a year on him and him sulking through the entire affair-- given that he’d always stood head and shoulders above her. Even now, the muscle memory of formal waltzes and western-style cotillion rehearsals remain.
“So, Gojo-san,” she quips, eyes fixed on the space above his shoulder, “is this an act of charity? Or are you just trying to get away before some family elder starts bugging you about marriage prospects again now that even your baby cousin’s run off with mine?”
Across the dancefloor, Maki’s being dipped by Yuuta in a flourish too theatrical for the stately baroque filtering through the space-- sharp and defiant. Zaito Nagisa’s being wheeled about by Naoya, her face a perfectly impassive blank. She thinks she catches a glimpse of Hiromi-san with the suits that seem more interested in talking shop than socialisation, and then she’s being twirled, and the vision blurs away.
He chuckles, wrinkling his nose. “I liked it better when you used to call me Satoru instead. Can’t a man have a dance with the woman his grandparents almost tied him to in a loveless political lavender marriage without any gossip?”
“We would have been miserable,” she laughs. “You hate my family.”
“I hate pretense,” he corrects as he whirls her about, as easygoing and unrepentant as ever. “But for right now, I’ll behave. Yuuta-kun needs a good role model, after all.”
She rolls her eyes with mock relief. “Thank goodness. Because I’m already dreading the engagement contracts our uncles are going to try to resurrect after this little stunt.”
He grins. “God forbid. The eccentric and the spinster.”
“It sounds like the tropes from a bad novel, doesn't it?” she agrees. “But don’t worry, I’m not interested in pursuing you.”
“You wound me, Zen’in-san,” he pouts. “Everyone loves me.”
She hums under her breath again. “Be careful, Satoru, or you might have to duel over my honor.”
“What?” He raises a brow. “Does the Zen’in-san have a man now?”
She thinks of Hiromi-san, probably stuck in some lecture at the corporate guest tables, and silently sends him an apology. “Something like that.”
.
It’s easier to sneak away now, today of all days-- when all eyes are turned elsewhere. The wedding-goers congregate around the head table, all clamoring for their moment to kiss up to the bride and groom-- a sea of toadies, executives, extended family, and distant well-wishers.
Noritoshi, to his credit, remains steady-- a hand on Mai’s back, a shield as much as a spouse. She’s grateful for it. Grateful that someone is there to stand by her cousin, to anchor her, while their family crowds around her with artificial warmth and lip-service congratulations, as if they’d never treated her as a second thought.
She slips from the courtyard without notice, descending the stone steps toward the lower terrace. The hum of music and clink of champagne flutes fade behind her, while the iron gate where sand meets stone comes into view.
There, she pauses to toe off her heels, leaving them neatly by the wall. The stone underfoot is cool, rough, but the sand is soft, moonlit, kissed by the wind. The waves ebb and flow before her, gentle and endless.
And he is already there.
He cuts a solitary figure against the silver-capped surf, his blazer folded over one arm, sleeves rolled up, trousers hiked to his knees. His shoes and socks lie abandoned somewhere along the shore, half-buried in the sand. The breeze stirs his hair, the hem of his shirt.
She watches him for a moment, uncertain whether to disturb the quiet.
“Hiromi-san,” she says finally, the wind nearly snatching the words away.
He turns-- as if he’s been waiting for her. The pensive countenance and furrow in his brow relaxes into a smile. “Hi,” he whispers.
She hitches the hem of her dress up carefully as she picks her way through the sand to stand by him, just at the edge of the water. Within arm’s reach.
“You danced with Gojo,” he says quietly. There’s a hint of a question in his tone-- not hurt, exactly, more-- curiosity.
She tilts her face toward the moonlight, watching the pearlescent disc shine down upon them. “You don’t have to worry. That was just diplomacy.”
“I’m not worried.” He pauses, hands in his pockets. “I just... sometimes forget you’re not mine.”
She glances sideways at him. “Would you want me to be?”
He hesitates. Then, he huffs out a laugh, toeing at the sand. “Since you were in undergrad, and I felt like a sleaze for it,” he admits.
They’re no longer the people they were then.
She’s older. More bitter, in some ways. Still hurting like a damn kid in others.
He’s older, too. More tired-- she can see it in the lines of his face, the sag of his shoulders.
Eight years, she thinks to herself. Eight years ago, the timing just wasn’t right-- and they weren’t, either. Not quite yet. She turns to face him then. “And now?”
“Now…” he runs a hand back through his hair with a sigh. The gelled part has long since broken down under the weight of the long day and the wind. “Now, I wonder what you’d even see in an old man like me.”
“You’re not even forty,” she says, with an amused exhale. “And I like you. I always have.”
With a sudden spark of boldness, she reaches across the span between them. Grasps onto his hand, turns his palm over so she can thread their fingers together.
“I just don’t know if I can subject you to all of this. My family. The expectations. The rot.”
He squeezes her hand right back, and she lets out a lungful of tension into the Mediterranean night air, letting her eyes flicker shut. Thinking of all the gamepieces. What it would take to claim the board for herself. What it would take to destroy it.
“I’m not asking for your last name,” he breathes at long last. “Just a night. Just you.”
He’s had her for far longer than that.
He had her from the moment he let out that noncommittal, unimpressed little hum during their round table discussions and asked whether Japan’s immaculate conviction rate actually made its legal system just.
She remembers the jolt in her gut, the drop of doubt that gave way to a stubborn determination. The way he watched her with those half-lidded eyes, all irony and exhaustion and razor-wire intelligence. How he interrupted her rebuttal with a question about the ethics of a society engineered to prevent wrongdoing by crushing the possibility of dissent.
She’d been well and truly doomed since then.
She crashes into him with all the force of the sea meeting the shore, with all the gravity of the moon and its invisible string on the tides.
The first kiss is graceless, quick, hot-burning-- too young for their weary hands and aching hearts, and she’s nipping at his lips, their noses smushing together.
He breaks it just to laugh, the lines creasing at the edges of his eyes. “Impatient,” he murmurs, clicking his tongue as if to chide her.
She flushes then, despite the night breeze dancing in between their forms. “Eight years, and you’re calling me impatient,” she huffs, meeting his lips again.
The second kiss is deeper. Slower. If the first had been about satiating hunger, the second is about savouring the way it lingers.
His jacket falls to the sand, forgotten, as his hands come up to grip her hips-- just careful enough to remain reverent, just hard enough to hold her steady as he continues mapping out the shape of her mouth with his.
Eventually, when they part-- just barely, and only because they cannot breathe kisses, he leans in, his voice low and warm against her ear. “Come to my room later.”
She should say no.
There’s too much at stake. Too many eyes watching. Too many suits and sharp knives. She’s already playing on a tilted field.
She closes her eyes. Feels the caress of the wind over her face, his hands running gently over her body, like she were something fragile, and delicate to be worshipped.
And for a moment, she lets herself be selfish.
“Yes,” she whispers.
.
He wakes her with a kiss to her bare shoulder, just as the cool grey wash of dawn begins to seep through the linen curtains.
“Good morning,” she replies, voice gravely with sleep, her face tucked against his chest.
Hiromi-san noses into the space between her neck and her shoulder, exhaling slow and warm against her skin in a way that lends a curious prickle to her skin. “You should go. Before the house starts waking up. And you need to get ready for the family brunch, too.”
“I know,” she rasps in response, but makes no effort to move. Nor does he extricate her from his arms.
Not yet.
Instead, they remain pressed against each other, letting the quiet stretch between them. Her hand rests flat against his chest, palm over his heart, memorizing the slow, steady beat beneath it. The curve of his ribs. The warmth of his skin. His hand splays over the small of her back, legs tangled together.
She can still feel the desperation of how they’d reached for each other the night before-- fingers trembling as they pulled at buttons, kisses breathless and urgent. The hunger with which he’d consumed her, like flame curling paper into ash. Every gasp she’d muffled into the side of his neck for fear of being heard through the crumbling walls of the villa. The raw, ragged edge of it all still burns beneath her skin.
In the burgeoning dawn, it feels like a spell being broken when she’s forced at last to sit up, groaning slightly from the exertion. She collects her shoes. Her clothes, Hiromi-san watching from where he sits at the edge of the bed, pulling on his own clothing.
There’s something soft in his gaze. Something delicate, that lances through her chest even as she wraps the layers around herself again. Invulnerable armor, the polish and perfection they all expected of her as COO, her only guard against returning back into the snake’s nest outside his bedroom doors.
By the time she’s padded barefoot down the back stairwell and crept along the master’s corridor, the sun has barely begun its ascent over the hills. The hem of her bridesmaids’ gown whispers along the marble tiles, and her calves ache from the effort not to click her heels over the floor.
For a moment, she dares to imagine she’s made it out undetected, but then, she hears a bright chirp of, “Good morning, senpai!”
She stiffens and turns, slowly.
Ranta stands there, holding a mug of fresh coffee, a scent that stings at her nostrils and makes her stomach growl.
“Good morning,” she replies.
His eyes go wide as they flick from her dress, clearly from last night, to her heels, and she can see the gears turning in his head. The silence scrapes past painfully between them, like Ranta is waiting for her to volunteer more information.
He may be young, and bright-eyed, and somewhat distinctly puppylike, but he’s also Naoya’s intern. And that means the man’s already well on his way in shaping Ranta into a snake-- for all that Naoya’s dismissive, and crude, and demeaning towards his staff. Because that’s how every Zen’in in this goddamn hellhole was made. Her included. Ranta will be no different.
Which thus means that right now, Ranta’s deciding whether or not he should drop mention of seeing Naoya’s hated rival skulking about the villa in last night’s clothes to his mentor.
She smiles at him-- deceptively bright, and says, “Ranta-kun. You’ve got your entire career ahead of you. Why stop dreaming of just being Naoya’s intern?”
That gives him pause.
“Say nothing,” she says, voice dropping several degrees further, “and maybe I’ll have an admin position in my department for you before the next round of promotions. Say something-- and you’ll find out why Nobuachi’s no longer invited to New Years’.”
.
A cold spike of paranoia has taken root in her chest by the time the family convened for brunch on one of the terraces overlooking the sea-- half of them hungover, the other half pretending not to be.
She reaches for her espresso martini and downs it like a lifeline, sunglasses shielding the wary glances she cast around the table.
Naoya had raised his own mimosa glass to her as she took her usual seat next to him-- was it her mind playing tricks on her again, or did his customary smirk seem more self-satisfied than usual? Across from her sits Fushiguro, sandwiched in between Naoharu and Naohide, and looking all the sorrier for it, peering at his plate as if the chinoiserie edge of the porcelain held the answers of the universe.
Her fingers gripped tight around her cutlery as the courses are served, and she drowns out the brief hums of conversation and the clink of metal against porcelain as they continue eating.
At the head of the table, Naobito rises with a champagne flute in hand, a curve to his mouth.
“Before we all disperse,” he says cheerfully, “I thought I’d share a bit of good news.”
He toasts the couple of honor again-- after all, with the Kamo buyout, and her having maneuvered Noritoshi onto the board, he was as good as a Zen’in now, even if tradition still dictated that Mai take his name instead.
And then--
“Zen’in Group has stood the test of time, shaping the destiny of Japan for over a century and a half.”
Her stomach flips-- this was it. The end of this ugly past two years of maneuvering, serving, strategizing.
It had to be.
“And now, it’s time to enter a new era of the company.”
It was just like Naobito to save it all for the last day of the wedding anyways. He always had a flair for the dramatic.
“As of this morning, I’ve initiated preliminary discussions regarding a potential merger of equals with GojoCo.”
The entire terrace seems to freeze-- even breaths were held with the news.
The silence stretches across the table for the span of several heartbeats. And then, the dam breaks.
Jinichi's brow furrowed-- rare, and never a good sign. Naoya’s brows twitching with barely-suppressed outrage. Ogi’s lips compressed into a silent question mark.
She takes small comfort in the knowledge that they too didn’t know about the merger.
“A merger of equals?” someone repeated, stunned. “With them?”
“What?”
“You’re joking.”
“Not with the Gojos.”
Despite the shouts and clamors of protest, her uncle remains composed. “A strategic partnership,” he shrugs, taking a sip of his champagne. “It’s a new world. Once the Kamo collapse goes public, GojoCo and Zen’in Group will be next on the list. But we can stop the tide if we make ourselves too big to sink.”
.
After the meal, she finds him in the chateau’s study, swirling a pour of whiskey in a cut-crystal glass. The doors were half-closed, just enough for privacy. Good. The last thing she needs is Naoya or Ogi eavesdropping.
“You really think the Gojos will agree to this?” she asks her uncle. “That Maki will let us sink our claws into her husband’s company?”
He takes a slow sip before answering. “Gojo Satoru’s no fool. He sees the storm coming just as clearly as I do. It’s not just private equity sniffing around-- it’s market volatility and regulatory pressure. If we don’t get ahead of it, someone else will. And when the audits come?” He chuckles. “We’ll all have our necks on the block then.”
She pauses. Nods. “And I imagine that the steering committee will comprise of our current board.”
“You included, girl-- don’t look so depressed,” he huffs. “It’s not like I’m puttin’ you out in the cold. You’ve done much better than I thought you would when I first brought you on. Thought the spot woulda ate you alive by now. We’ll find a place for you once the restructure is done.”
A place sounded patronizing to the point of concern. She thinks back to her conversations with Hiromi-san by the beach. Wonders if she’s a killer, like Choso says.
Her eyes drift to the window, to the clear skies beyond the shadowy corners of the study that they’re currently skulking in, before returning to meet her uncle’s gaze. “And once we’re in, we quietly reassign GojoCo’s board seats to our own loyalists,” she muses, the rest of his plan coalescing crystal-clear in her mind, like a chessboard. “Absorb their structure under the guise of a mutual partnership-- until they’re just a subsidiary in all but name.”
Naobito doesn’t deny it. “That’s how the game is played,” he shrugs. “Merger of equals or not, someone always ends up with the steering wheel. And I don’t plan to let go of it. Are you?”
She exhales. “There’ll be backlash. You heard the rest of them at brunch. Too much volatility, and GojoCo’s going to gain the edge over us in market cap. And the PR storm from your… incapacitation has just calmed down.”
“That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?” he raises his glass again, in imitation of a toast. “Just like the rest of 'em. Gunnin' for that top role. You’ve got potential, though. I won’t deny that.”
“Question is, are you willin’ to kill for it?”
.
By the time they’re ferried off to the airport in Marseille, the news has broken across the Nikkei. NHK. Financial Times. South China Morning Post. Bloomberg Asia.
“Your cousin approached me after the brunch,” Hiromi-san says casually, an hour after they’ve taken off from France in the charter plane. “She wants to know if the JFTC could block the deal from going through.”
She drums her fingers against the leather seatrest. “Maki?”
Of course it would be her. Like she’d mentioned to Naobito, there was no way her cousin was going to let the Zen’ins get their claws on her husband’s company. And if it were anyone else, the news would have gone through to Furudate-san instead.
The girl hadn’t been invited to the family brunch. No-- the rest of them were far too petty for that. Ogi would sooner die than recognize her as his daughter again.
She wonders who could have told.
But then again, given that the potential merger was now splashed across the front pages of every financial outlet in the world, Naobito must have expected someone to leak the news.
It was just like him, in a way, after all.
He always did like an audience. The wedding, the villa, the family brunch, the performative civility under vaulted ceilings-- it was all just theater. Pretending they weren’t the kind of family that slit throats over trusts and shares, the metaphorical crowns like they were the kings and feudal lords of old. But life was never knights on horseback. Life was a number on a ledger. A fight for a knife in the mud.
Domino pieces falling into place like a perfect Rube-Goldberg machine.
Across the aisle of the private cabin, Hiromi-san watches her in silence, the hum of the plane engine like a blanket of white noise that enveloped the two of them.
“You’re quiet,” he says finally.
“I’m thinking.” Her eyes stay fixed on her phone. Watching the numbers tip and waver. The lines jerk and then ascend like the altitude map of an aircraft.
A pause stretches between them.
“What move are you going to make?”
Her hand stills. There’s something in his voice-- not quite caution, not quite accusation. But something close. A note she’d come to recognise when she was in undergrad.
She doesn’t answer right away. Thinks about the burn of his touch on her body, and the unfettered way he’d sighed her name like a benediction. Thinks about Naobito huddled alone in his study, drunk before noon and praising her potential. Swallows. Shuts off her phone and turns to face him.
“I’m entering the brawl.”
Hiromi looks at her. Half-agony, half-hope, bracing for the other shoe to drop as much as he’s bracing for the punchline.
She doesn’t say anything further, just lets the silence stretch on.
“You are.” He blinks, slowly, straightening in his seat. “I thought you wanted out.”
“I wanted to win,” she says. “That’s what I’ve always wanted, Hiromi-san.”
She doesn’t tell him that she’s tired of not knowing what else she wanted. What else she was allowed to want. That London was another gaping pit of loneliness when she was truly alone and out. That walking away now, when she’s clawed her way up despite her family’s scorn feels like surrender.
That sitting here across from him feels like her respite against the rest of the maelstrom. That the idea of telling her family that she wants him, chooses him, feels like skinning herself alive and offering her head to the chopping-block.
Hiromi-san’s gaze softens. “You don’t have to prove anything to them,” he says.
“I’m not,” she counters. “I’m proving it to myself.”
Part VI: Hide the pieces, where they may be found
The call comes just as she’s stepping off the elevator.
Her phone buzzes once-- then again, more insistently. By the third ring, she’s picked up.
“It’s Naobito-sama.” The voice on the other end belongs to Zaito, uncharacteristically clipped, shaky despite the woman’s usually precise tone. “He-- he collapsed as soon as we landed. Convulsions. Unresponsive. EMS is on the way.”
A pit forms in the bottom of her stomach that she can’t swallow. The ground shifts beneath her feet. “How long ago was this?”
“Seven minutes. Maybe ten. I’ve alerted the rest of the board. Naoya, Naoharu, and Mrs. Zen’in were accompanying us--.”
She’s already turning back toward the elevators. “Good. Don’t let the press get wind of it yet.”
But even as she’s racing to the airport, she knows that the sharks will start to circle before the body even cools.
By the time she reaches the tarmac, the chaos has sharpened to something colder. The stretcher descends from the open aircraft doorway, a still form covered in a white sheet.
Someone is rattling off vitals in the background as the ambulance doors open for him. As if it mattered. Because her uncle’s time had run out.
There had been signs, of course. His first stroke. The fervor with which he threw himself back into the business. The endless drinking at Mai’s wedding. But Naobito had waved them off with Zen’in-bred bravado. Too busy playing emperor to sit still for something as pedestrian as dying.
He was the one who rose up when her own father faltered, when their second uncle was encouraged to “step back” after the scandals with Toji’s name in the press. Who helmed the group through bankruptcy, scandal, family infighting, and brought the Zen’in name into the 21st Century.
A giant.
And now here he was.
A lump in an ambulance in front of Haneda Airport’s goddamn Ground Control.
Behind the paramedics, Aunt Masae descends the plane, face red-streaked with tears, Naoharu propping her up as if she too, might collapse any minute.
“The press is already circling,” Zaito says as she paces down on rapid feet. “We need a statement. Now.”
Then there’s Naoya. Staggering down the stairs. Shoulders stiff, jaw tense, hands clenched by his side, looking around wildly like a lost little boy.
One look at him-- and she’s stepping forward. “I’ll do it.”
.
Her image plays on a loop in the boardroom.
Volume low. Glitching slightly in the overhead monitor. The same speech, the same careful cadence, repeated over and over until the shape of the words are etched into her brain. She could get up and recite them right now, if she wanted, like a ventriloquist’s doll.
In accordance with our leadership protocols, I will be acting as company representative until further notice. We understand the concerns that may arise in the wake of Chairman Zen’in’s passing. But to reassure our investors, our partners, and employees: the Zen’in Group remains committed-- to excellence, to stability, and to honoring my uncle’s legacy.
We will proceed with all strategic initiatives currently underway, including ongoing negotiations with GojoCo.
Static fizzles in the screen as it loops back to the start.
“Mind telling us what this is all about?”
Ogi doesn’t raise his voice-- not that he needs to. The contempt is baked into every syllable.
Naoya lets out a low snort from his slouched seat by the window. He’s still in the same crumpled suit he wore off the plane, though it’s been twelve hours since landing, the knot of his tie hanging loose. “Ain’t it obvious, Uncle Ogi? She thinks she owns this place now.”
She wants to snap at Naoya. But there’s something haunted about her cousin right now-- Zaito sitting adjacent to him with her hand on his shoulder, wide-eyed, as if he hasn’t been able to blink since the plane touched down.
“Emergency protocol,” she replies instead. “It’s in the 2018 board governance charter we all signed earlier this fiscal year. If the Chair is incapacitated, the COO assumes all interim public duties until such time as a successor is sworn in.”
Ogi sneers. “You appointed yourself as the company rep. Without a board vote. I’d say that’s enough overstepping to constitute a vote to remove you altogether--”
She bristles. “I did what needed to be done, which was--”
“Right. Because we should totally trust the woman who shoved her face in front of the cameras before Pops was even declared dead,” Naohide cuts in. his voice low, dry, acidic.
“Come off it-- you haven’t attended a single board meeting in the last year. You think you can come crawling back to crown yourself king?” she fires back. The best defense was a good offense.
And this time, she doesn’t need to be good. Not exactly. She just needs to dangle the bait, and hope they don’t bite her in the process.
Naoya takes it-- hurting like a damn kid and indiscriminately vicious because of it. “Oh, don’t worry. ‘Hide thinks he’s dad just ‘cause he yells at people ‘n drinks too much.”
Naohide bares his teeth in a snarl. “Better than bein’ a kicked dog. You gonna cry on mommy’s shoulder every time someone tells you ‘no’, Naoya-sama?”
Zaito tenses, her hand slipping off Naoya’s shoulder as he stands half out of his seat.
“You want CEO?” he snaps, bracing his knuckles against the table. “You don’t even have a board seat anymore. But fine. Let's see how long you last before the HR documents all come spillin’ out.”
“I’d outlast you, that’s for sure,” Naohide fires back. “At least my brothers don’t hate me enough to point an actual gun at me.”
“Enough,” Naoharu says blandly, from the far end of the table. “This isn’t productive at all, guys.”
The rapidness with which both Naohide and Naoya’s heads swivel around to their brother, like owls hearing the snap of a branch that indicates nearby prey, would almost be comical if she didn’t feel like she were just drowning in a barrel of sludge and rot, even though they’re sitting in a polished meeting room with floor-to-ceiling views over the Tokyo night sky.
Naoya’s laugh is bitter. “‘Course you want us to play nice. That’s your whole thing, right?”
“The world’s blandest, beigest pillow,” Naohide adds. “All laid out for the shareholders to fuck.”
“I’m just saying we should be focusing on transition logistics--”
“Oh my god,” Naoya groans, flopping back in his chair, “someone check if he’s made of porridge.”
“-- And maybe I should be interim CEO,” Naoharu finishes, mostly to himself.
Naohide snorts. “You’d need a personality first.”
“I--” Naoharu blinks. “Fuck you, you’re the least constitutionally well-equipped person at this table to take on the role.”
She sees it before Naoharu does-- Naohide loosening his tie, fists clenching like he’s about to throw a mean right hook at his older brother, and stands.
“Would everyone just shut the fuck up?” she snaps, slamming her hand down on the table with enough force that the glass reverberates.
Quickly, she turns to Ogi. “Uncle, I apologise for the quick decision made when Naobito-sama passed, and the lack of consultation from you. Nonetheless, Zaito-san had advised me ahead of time that we needed to act quickly in order to control the media narrative, which I have done so, with minimal market upheaval and fallout attached-- which can be evidenced by the numbers holding.”
Ogi narrows his eyes. “Fine,” he mutters.
“If anyone wants to contest the clause that we all signed-- go right ahead. But don’t come crying to me when everyone from here to Munich starts trying to strip this place for parts because they caught wind of infighting amongst the board.”
From the end of the table, Jinichi scowls at her-- having been a surprisingly silent observer the entire meeting, his eyes bouncing between the three brothers like a game of ping-pong.
“We need a united front,” she says finally, “and until the board elects a new chair, I am the face of this organization. So unless one of you wants to take that statement back and face the vultures-- be my fucking guest.”
.
Interim CEO. The title hums under her skin like a live wire-- electric and dizzying.
There’s the wake tomorrow, and then a family-only meeting at the estate about funeral arrangements in the afternoon. Nitta’s penned in a talk between her and the Gojos the day after.
But tonight, she can just-- be.
She knocks on the ever-familiar door in front of her-- three sharp raps.
Hiromi-san opens it, eyes softening the moment he sees her. He’s in a pullover and sweatpants, barefoot, like he’s winding down for the night. She’s still in her suit-- creased after a long day of wear.
“Are you all right?” he asks gently, stepping aside to let her in.
“Yeah,” she shrugs, brushing past him. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
She toes off her shoes and shrugs off her blazer as he shuts the door, tossing it on the back of the settee before whirling to face him with a smile that’s all teeth.
“I’m the interim CEO.”
He exhales. “Congratulations.”
Hiromi-san doesn’t stop her when she cups his face in both hands and kisses him.
Doesn’t move away when she pushes him back a step, then another, until his leg bumps the couch where they had spent countless evenings mulling over corporate strategy. Sinks down into the cushions with her straddling him-- and he breathes her name, like a gasp. Like a prayer.
“Are you sure this is what you need right now?” he asks as she pulls off her blouse atop him. Eyes scanning her form, thumbs circling gentle over her hips. So gentle with her, even now, like he’s afraid she’ll break-- or he will.
Her hands are already at his waistband. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Your uncle just died,” he reminds her, soft.
“Yeah,” she breathes. “And I’m in charge now.”
His mouth is warm and familiar against her own-- and clarifying. She can feel the corporate sludge slough off of her, leaving nothing but this. His body against hers. The taste of victory in her mouth.
Hiromi-san’s breath catches as he gasps through the kiss. His right hand cups her cheek, brushing back stray hairs that have escaped in their hurry to the couch.
When they break apart, she’s panting, a manic glitter in her eyes. “You don’t need to be gentle with me tonight.”
His fingers tighten on her waist, his pupils blown so dark that they swallow all the light, that she can see herself reflected within them like a dark pool. “I wasn’t going to be.”
“Good,” she whispers, leaning down again.
Drunk on power. Drunk on him.
Uncaring of the difference.
.
The estate is hushed. Still.
Black curtains hang over every mirror. Black sashes drape solemnly across the thresholds, looping down like dark tears over the facade of every wall.
After the last stragglers from the extensive guest list have departed, they convene in the study-- dark-suited, all of them, like a murder of crows perched in the stiff-backed chairs. Aunt Masae huddles by the fire, tended now by a subdued Naoharu, the sleeves of her black kimono tugged tight around her body like another cloak.
Ogi sits at the head of the table, in the chair that was once Naobito’s, as if trying it on for size-- imposing, steel-hewn, as if trying to cast himself prematurely into the role of the next CEO.
The guest list is first up on the agenda-- because Zen’in isn’t just a family name, but a brand. A conglomerate.
She flips between the suggestions of donors, investors, and business partners, before turning her face towards the rest of the table.
“I still say we keep it close-knit,” she murmurs, tapping her pen against the wooden surface. “No press. No investors. Just family.”
A few murmurs of assent follow-- limp agreements, mostly because everyone else has much better things to do, like stabbing each other in the back. Aunt Masae nods vaguely, as if grateful for someone who’s willing to draw boundaries in her place.
Naoya’s voice cuts through the quiet like a knife.
“So no invitation for your lil’ lawyer, then?”
She looks up sharply. “Excuse me?”
Naoya leans back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest. Smug as a cat. He’s cleaned up since yesterday, in a neatly pressed black suit, but the brittleness remains in the lines of his sneer. As if she was never meant to see him so shaken, and now, he was lashing back out at her in retribution.
“You know,” he drawls, tilting his head, “the one you spend all your off-hours with. Your plus-one to Mai-chan’s wedding. Higuruma, was it?”
Fuck.
Something like panic blooms in her chest, something she squeezes at viciously until its beating wings slowly droop.
How much had he seen? How much had he known?
The burn of Hiromi-san’s fingers dragging down her thigh as he knelt in front of her from last night feels less like adulation, and more like a brand of shame in the daylight.
She sets her pen down slowly.
“I’m sure Higuruma-san would be touched by your concern for his social life,” she replies coolly. “But this funeral’s family-only. Not professional contacts.”
Then she lifts her eyes towards the rest of the table again. “Naobito spent the last few days of his life surrounded by family. That’s who this service is for.”
The silence that follows is taut.
She doesn't break it.
Lets Jinichi cough, “So, are we thinking white chrysanthemums, or lilies?”
.
Ranta and Nobuachi get the dubious honor of starting with the foot bones.
The heat of the crematorium has long since dissipated, and now the family gathers, dark-garbed, chopsticks in hand. Like vultures, here to literally pick at the remains of Naobito’s corpse in the kotsuge ceremony.
She shudders slightly from where she stands, halfway up the skeleton as one by one, they pass the bones of what used to be her uncle into a lacquered jar with their family crest engraved into it. Shards of his legs. His knees.
As they ascend up into the torso, the air changes-- tightens, with some kind of enmity.
“Uncle Ogi,” Naoya says, all faux deference with his chopsticks on a piece of his father’s ribcage, “surely as his son, I’ll handle the nodobotoke,” he says, as if he doesn’t have two brothers also standing sentry.
Ogi smiles back. “Shouldn’t it be reserved for the elders of the family?” he asks, voice oily, lifting a piece of the forearm with Jinichi and clinking it into the ceramic pot.
Aunt Masae, with Mai’s aid dropping a piece of Naobito’s finger into the urn, says, “Boys, maybe this isn’t the time--”
“Oh, but it is, okaa-san,” says Naohide, with an almost glee at steamrolling over the woman and plucking out one of his father’s collarbones, “And I think it should go to a son also-- Naoya, whaddya say we split it?”
Naoya has many weaknesses and vices as a person-- and one of the chief amongst them is that he never wants to share. Not his toys. Not his time. Not his money. And certainly, it won’t be this-- the most spiritually significant of the bones to place into the burial urn, like the metaphorical Holy Grail or Sword in the Stone.
Naoharu speaks up from the back as he drops the sternum into the pot. “Shouldn’t the honor go to someone who’s actually aware of what they’re here for? Mourning?”
But it wasn’t mourning for any of them, least of all Naoharu. They’re counting out the bones, divvying them up like stocks and votes.
“How poetic,” Naoya says with a grin with a piece of Naobito’s arm-bone grasped in-between his utensils. “Isn’t this what it’s all about? Who gets to pick up what he left behind?”
The rest of the form picked clean, the spine shines in the bed of ashes.
She scans the line-- and suddenly she sees it, like a Buddha with his hands clasped together in prayer, the node protruding like a head and nestling into the next vertebra.
Her eyes alight on it, and as she moves, so too does a pair of chopsticks across the tray from her.
Fushiguro holds the other end of the bone steady as they free it from the remaining vertebra.
Ogi scowls. Naoya grits his teeth. Jinichi frowns.
Carefully, they lower the nodobotoke into the jar with a soft thud.
The ritual continues on. More bones to be picked. But it’s already over for the rest of them-- she can see it in their faces.
.
Afterward, outside the crematorium, she finds Fushiguro under an awning, stiff-backed in his suit and squinting against the brightness of the sun.
“Thank you,” she says softly. “For stepping in.”
Fushiguro glances over, hands in his pockets, as if surprised that anyone would actually deign to speak to him. “I didn’t really know him. I just don’t think it’s right that they wanted to argue over his bones, too.”
She nods. “Still. Thank you.”
He looks at her for a moment. Then, a little awkwardly-- “Sorry for your loss.”
The condolences slip off her like water over a pebble. For all that she grew up calling him uncle, she hardly knew the man, either. She glances over. “Does your father know?”
He shrugs, looking surprisingly unperturbed-- the practiced glance of someone for whom father was also a concept rather than a comfort. “Dunno. He ran off again. He’ll find out eventually, though-- but you don’t have to worry about him coming to fight over the inheritance or anything.”
She nods. “Toji was my cousin, you know.”
“I figured, yeah.”
They stand there like that for a little while. And then she says, “When he was a little younger than you, he got arrested for the first time. I still dunno what it was, to this day. But Zen’in money meant he never saw the inside of a jail cell-- not while he was still here, at least.”
“He moved out at nineteen with help from our great-uncle. Allegedly cleaned up his act for a few years and only wrote on holidays, that must be around the time he had you-- but then we got the call.”
Fushiguro’s jaw tenses, watching her.
“There was some club he wound up at. Gojo Satoru was there. There was a girl, too. I think the younger sister of one of Satoru’s friends-- too young for the party, at any rate. Two cars drove off into the night. There was a crash. Satoru was in a coma for close to a month. The girl died. Her brother broke, like, half the bones in his body. Toji was charged with drunk driving and negligent manslaughter.”
She sighs then. Wraps her arms around herself. “The press almost buried our family alive. His father had to resign as chair. The next day, he wrote Toji a fat check, and told him to disappear.”
“I was nine then,” he says. “He did. Disappear, I mean. Came back half a year later with a new woman and my stepsister and changed all of our names to Fushiguro after my mom. He’s been running ever since. But I used to think he was just like that. It pissed me off to no end. I didn’t realize this,” he gestures, “was what he was trying to run from.”
“And now… I can’t really blame him, I guess.”
.
The apartment is warm, but she doesn’t take off her cardigan.
It smells like him-- crawling into her nose, permeating her very marrow. Reminders of another night with her heart pulsing out of her chest, his mouth on her skin, the graceless tides of desire washing her up on this very couch. She flushes at the memories, as if his hands have burned themselves onto her body, permanently branding her like she were something to be owned, something to be loved.
He pours her tea without asking. She accepts it wordlessly.
There’s a familiarity to the silence that stretches between them.
“This round of restructures should carry us until the vote,” she says, drumming her fingers against the proposal. “Just a few redundant figures across the entry to mid level company -- generous severance packages included, of course, but the downsizing should push the margin back to where we need it.”
Hiromi-san hums, quiet and measured. “It’s ruthless. But it should win over the board.”
“That’s what matters right now, isn’t it?” she asks him, blithe.
He meets her gaze.
“You used to trust me,” he says quietly.
The words hang there between them. Half accusation, half confession.
She sets the pen down and leans back, arms folded. “I still do.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. Then he rises slowly from his seat and crosses the space between them. Stoops down just beside her seat on the couch-- not dramatic, or pleading, but enough that her body remembers. Another night, another time. Power in her veins like a live wire under bare skin, and not the exhaustion she feels cloaked in now.
Her breath catches-- barely, but he notices.
When he speaks, his voice is low. “Then why won’t you let me kiss you?”
She looks up at him. The ceiling light casts soft shadows across his cheekbones, his jaw, shadows pronounced under his wide-set eyes. Curiosity and longing mingling in his gaze in some dark abyss.
She answers, slowly. Carefully.
“The vote’s coming up. You said yourself, that we need to win over the board, right? We’re just professional colleagues,” she continues, as if trying to force the words into her own head, as if trying to etch it into her own beliefs. “It’s just-- strategy, that’s all. I have to stay clean right now. If we blur the lines now…”
He steps back before she can finish.
Not dramatically. Not in anger.
But enough to make the room feel colder.
“Understood,” he says. And his tone is flat again. Deliberate. Professional, just as she’d demanded.
It hurts more than she thought it would.
.
The waiting room is saturated in morning light, high above the sprawl of the city. The GojoCo building is all open air and a nearly awe-inspiring height-- futuristic, eye-catching, and neatly fitting the aesthetics of its CEO, as if the building itself had reshaped itself to his will and persona.
She arrives fifteen minutes before the proscribed meeting time, firstly to beat traffic, and secondly because the only time she seems to have for herself nowadays, is in being early. On-time, and she has things to do. Overtime, and everyone wants something more from her.
She waits for ten minutes before Satoru’s loud voice rings out from inside the closed office door-- “Ah, what the hell, Ijichi, she can come in now.”
She stands, offers Satoru’s executive assistant a kind smile, and strides into the office. Satoru’s already leaning back in his chair, legs kicked up on the polished glass table. His eyes-- blue and razor-bright-- are locked on her the moment she enters.
“Zen’in-san,” he says sunnily. “Or should I call you Chairwoman now?”
She shakes her head. “Not yet.”
“So,” Satoru says, leaning back. “Naobito’s cold in the ground. Your board’s at each other’s throats. And the Zen’in Group looks like an estate sale with too many bidders.”
She raises a brow and sighs. “Pretty much, yeah.”
“Any next moves I should be aware of?” Satoru asks.
“Same old, same old, really,” she winces. “Unless Naoya goes off the rails and tries to let Naotaka out of jail just claw back the old guard votes.”
“Doubt he’ll get his seat back after that crashout though,” Satoru rolls his eyes. “But look at you, all popular now.”
“I just got lucky that I was first on the tarmac. Naoya was too traumatised, and Naoharu has the personality of a wet piece of cardboard,” she shrugs. God forbid it was Jinichi, or Ogi.
Satoru hums. “Naoya and traumatised doesn’t seem like it should be in the same sentence.”
She laughs a little. “Right. He’s just rabid most of the time anyways.”
Satoru swings his legs off the desk in one fluid motion, and settles back in his chair the proper way again. Like it were a throne-- which, for all intents and purposes, it was. The smile fades somewhat. “I am sorry about Naobito, though.”
She raises an eyebrow. “You hated Naobito.”
“True. But I liked the game better when I knew the player. Now?” He stands slightly, pacing over to the window. “Now we’ve got a merger on the books that’s more a stunt for the shareholders than in either of our interests. With Naobito gone, your C-Suite’s descended into infighting. You’ve got no patriarch who can take the wheel and steer. You’ve been holding it down the fort these past few weeks. Barely, given the fact that half your family doesn’t think women should wear pants, let alone take the interim role. If you were any other damn bastard in that place, I’d just sell you some rope so you can hang yourself. But in my opinion as a friend? You’re fucked.”
She folds her arms over her chest. “You think GojoCo will buy us out?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” he says, turning to face her, “It’ll be open season soon.”
.
The elevator chimes, clear, sunny, as she descends down. Stopping three floors under Satoru’s office.
When the doors slide open, Maki is standing there.
For a beat, Maki’s eyes widen-- just a flicker-- but then she sets her jaw. Squares her shoulders the way she does before a fight, and then she steps in anyway.
“Didn’t think I’d run into you here,” she offers, softly.
Maki tugs the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her arms, resolutely not looking over at her. “Dropping off Yuuta after a lunch date,” she shrugs.
Right. It was odd to think of her little cousin as a married woman now-- both of them. Out of the three girls in their generation, she never thought she’d be the one to become the spinster-- but then again, no one had ever told her to chase her TA from undergrad into an illicit affair that would absolutely tank her reputation with the board should it come out, either.
“I never said congratulations,” she adds. “On your wedding. You looked… happy.”
Maki grunts. “You here for business?”
They don’t mention the elephant in the room-- the multiples of them, in fact. So many elephants that the elevator is metaphorically plummeting straight through the shaft. Maki’s estrangement. Naobito. The merger.
“As interim chair, I have to be,” she shrugs. “And the last thing Naobito talked to me about was this merger.”
“That’s cute,” Maki replies. “Like you’re propping up his corpse in the CEO’s throne and trying to rally the company with ‘Zen’in’ on a banner.”
“I’m just trying to salvage what’s left of it,” she says. Quiet. Like she’s on the verge of admitting the lost cause to herself.
“You know,” Maki says, quietly, as they watch the numbers on the elevator tick down. “The thing about having a family that doesn’t love you, is that you learn to live without it. Is that it’s easier to set yourself free.”
.
“Are ya tryin’ ta ratfuck me?” Naoya had cornered her practically the moment he had returned from his ‘sabbatical’-- a week-long bender in the States with just enough plausible deniability to qualify as bereavement leave-- and he’s so close that she has to force herself to fix her gaze on his teeth, all pearly whites save for the singular caffeine stain on his left top canine-- a relic of the shitty breakroom roast that he’d been fond of in some odd way, the same way he bleaches his hair and wears eyeliner to put on the airs of rebellion and idiosyncrasy despite being all of twenty-seven.
“No,” she replies, blinking-- “What’s wrong?”
He brandishes his phone in her face-- article emblazoned bright as day across the front page. “HERE’S what’s wrong,” he snarls, and half the disembodied heads occupying the cubicles pivot towards the two of them.
WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS ISN’T STAYING IN VEGAS:
Zen’in Group CTO cozies up with Director of HR
A grainy video, and she recognises the backdrop of the club-- Falling Blossom, one of the properties Naobito had bought in his foray into the entertainment sphere, heavy bass and strobe lights lending to the chaos of the scenery.
Naoya in the background, recognisable with the bleached hair, and there’s-- oh. Zaito Nagisa, her fingers fitted around Naoya’s jaw like she owns him, tugging him down into an open-mouthed kiss. No room for interpretation. Just a sloppy makeout caught on camera in 480p.
Well, that’s Zaito’s board vote she can definitively strike off on her potential list of allies.
She bites down on her cheek to tamp down the hysterical cackle that threatens to bubble up in her throat, affecting the most dull-eyed look of confusion she could muster-- “I thought the two of you already went public?”
Her cousin’s face spasms so violently that she, for a brief, shining moment, wonders if he’s also having a stroke. “Shut up. Tell me what kinda statement I need to write about this.”
He sounds genuinely lost. It makes her almost feel bad for him.
Almost.
Because under the calculations of whether to sink Naoya or offer him a life vest, she feels the resentment burn through her.
The jealousy.
Because he gets to be sloppy. He gets to be kissed within an inch of his life in public, hands in his hair and no fear of consequence. He gets to flaunt their HR director around his dead father’s nightclubs, and at the end of the day, the board won’t even blink.
Because he didn’t have to pretend.
Part VII: Often he reckons, in the dawn
The elevator doors ding open with a muted chime. She steps in without thinking, still thumbing through an email on her phone-- something about the proposals for the steering committee structure that wouldn’t even come to fruition until after the merger vote. Nitta said it could wait, but she’s desperate for a distraction-- disquiet humming underneath her skin.
There’s someone already in the elevator-- a diminutive blonde form wrapped in a pencil dress and blazer.
“Nishimiya-san!” she greets, surprised but pleased to see a familiar face. “How are you? I don’t think I’ve ever thanked you personally for the good work you put into the Future Minds gala--”
“Zen’in-san,” the girl mumbles, ducking her head with a bow and a wavering smile-- so at odds with the young woman who’d charged headfirst into organizing an entire charity auction armed with nothing but Mai’s disinterested signatures of approval. “I got the email this morning-- just-- grabbin’ my stuff, that’s all…”
Something twists low in her chest as the realization drops into her stomach like a lead weight.
She goes still.
“Oh,” she breathes. “Nishimiya-san-- I didn’t…”
But of course she did. She forwarded the proposal. Let the pride blossom in her chest when even Ogi offered a minute nod of approval at the numbers she’d fixed up. Signed the release.
She just didn’t see her in all those names.
“I’m so sorry,” she says quickly. Too quickly. The kind of quick that makes it about her guilt, not the other girl’s grief. “I didn’t realize. If I had known--”
The elevator dings softly, doors sliding open. Without another word, the younger woman walks out-- spine straight despite the tremble in her steps.
She flinches. Her hands fall uselessly to her sides. The elevator seems to shrink around her.
Later that afternoon, she drafts a message to Nitta-- Connect with Nishimiya from Marketing. Let her know I’ll write her a personal recommendation and she can reach out to me for anything she needs.
But it’s not enough.
When she shuts off her laptop, her reflection stares back at her in the black screen. And she can no longer pretend she’s doing any of this for any purpose except to feed her own ambition, and then plastering money over the cracks she’s leaving behind her.
Too little. Too late.
.
Hiromi-san’s bachelor pad had always been a tidy, neat place. Sure, it felt lived-in with the books on the shelf sorted into some esoteric system she’d teased him over, and their battle strategies strewn over the coffee table, but there were no stray dishes, or clothes, or pieces of correspondence as had been the case with some of the other men she’d known throughout the years.
She’d slowly let down her walls here, in this space. Let him coax her into laughter. Into dressing casually. Into late nights that stretched on too long to just be strategy. Into stumbling into the equally-tidy bedroom, their clothes long lost on the sofa hours earlier.
But tonight, it just feels cold. Claustrophobic.
“You met with Gojo again,” Hiromi-san says quietly, without looking at her, standing at the kitchen counter, hands around a mug of tea.
“I’ve been meeting with a lot of people,” she replies, tilting her head at him. There’s something brewing underneath his tone. Something she can’t quite read just yet-- like a still pond that concealed a raging whirlpool beneath the surface.
“Don’t do that.” He sets the cup down with a thunk. Runs his hand over his face. “Don’t avoid the question.”
She crosses her arms. “Then don’t interrogate me.”
Silence stretches out between them. Long enough for the hum of the fridge to feel unbearably loud.
“You know what hurts the most?” he says finally, voice quiet. “It’s not the politicking. It’s not the merger. It’s that you still keep agreeing to take our meetings here. And then show up with that armor closing around you again, like I’m just another line item to check off on the agenda.” He laughs, rueful. “A month ago, you were in my bed. Now you’re taking after-hours meetings with the ex-fiancee you were dancing with the first night we spent together.”
She clenches her teeth, feeling defensive-- after all, given her gender and the upbringing she’d been slotted into, it was fairly inevitable that most of the business associates they were close with were floated with marriage in mind to her at some point or another. Yet somehow, Gojo seemed to bother him more.
The jealousy would have been understandable if she were a nobody. But not with two empires on the line in a merger deal. Not with the entire global economy-- at least that of East Asia, hanging onto this string.
“It’s just business with Sat-- Gojo,” she says, after a pause. She tries to keep her voice calm. Tries to keep her words professional, clinical-- what she’s good at. “And we-- were a lapse in judgement, Hiromi-san. I should have behaved with more professionalism.”
“God,” he mutters. “You make us sound like a filing error.”
“It wasn’t!” she tries to argue, like she’s all of twenty-one and bullshitting her way through some ethical dilemma in seminar again. “Not in the way you think.”
“Then for fuck’s sake-- what are you so afraid of? That you want me? That I love you?” His voice cracks, his shout ringing through the air like thunder.
She flinches-- stomach roiling, and realizes-- this is the first time he’s ever raised his voice in her presence.
Not in all the time he’d taught her class, and it had been chock-full of imbeciles and lazy undergrads who never did the required reading or shut up about weekend bar crawls during lectures.
But he’s yelling now. Because she’s a big, stupid idiot who wanted to have her cake and eat it too. Because she’d known what she was getting into the moment she walked back into his office and paid that retainer. Because she’d been a Zen’in from the start-- waving money around to get what she wanted. Brushed it off the moment it didn’t serve her.
“You’re not a bad person for wanting something. You’re not your family. You’re allowed to feel, you know-- and it fucking hurts that you’re not going to take a stand for the one thing I’m sure that you want! Beyond the damn CEO chair and merger!”
“You said you’d help me win--,” she retorts, jolting to her feet, trembling, words hollow in her own ears. “I’m just trying to make sure we survive until that vote!”
He exhales sharply, runs a hand through his hair. “Then why are you pushing me out?”
She wants to answer. She wants to say-- because you saw me when I was weak. Because you knew me when I was just a girl on the cusp of ruining everything for a minute more in your office.
Because you want me, and not the Zen’in name, and now I don’t know where it ends and I begin.
Instead, she says nothing-- and her silence condemns her.
He nods, jaw tight. Hurt radiating off him in waves.
“I’m resigning as your counsel,” he says quietly. “You’re right. We’ve been acting along a breach of professional relations. I’ll have the paperwork sent over in the morning.”
She opens her mouth to protest-- but what could she even say at this point? That she needs him? That she wants him? That she loves him?
That the thought of losing him like this kills her more than anything the family ever attempted?
And then, haltingly, like it hurts to even say it-- like it’s a wound opening up all over again-- he adds, overly formal, and exceedingly distantly, “Goodnight, Zen’in-sama.”
The title cuts sharper than any insult, weighed down with everything he’s letting go of her for.
She turns, blinking hard, hot tears that she hadn’t known were collecting in the corners of her eyes finally spilling down her face.
She turns, pulling her jacket tighter around herself. Grits her teeth as the door shuts behind her like a gavel during a sentencing.
It’s been the first time she’s cried. Not just in front of him-- but in years. Not since her mother died, and she’d finally let herself crumble, alone in her business-class plane seat to London.
Not for the merger that she knows she can’t win. Not for Naobito, a set of bones six feet underground.
But for what she had-- and what she lost-- and the fact that she’d only held him in her grasp for one brief, shining moment, because of her rotten, stupid ambitions.
.
Satoru’s already there when she’s shown into the private dining room, slouched in his chair with his blazer off, fingers laced behind his head like he owns the sky.
After the week’s end and the merger passed, he just might.
The omakase in Aoyama is overpriced, shadowy, and discreet-- the perfect kind of place for the wretched bastards with their kinds of names and trust funds. She slides into the seat across from him. Immediately orders a whiskey.
A gourmand would frown upon mixing the taste of delicate fish and strong liquor-- but she can always come back another day for the omakase when she doesn’t feel like retching her heart up and then throwing it into the nearest furnace. What was money for, if not to blow on meaningless bullshit like this, anyways?
“You look like hell,” Satoru offers cheerfully.
“I feel worse,” she replies. “Let’s get on with it. I’ll vote to pass the merger.”
A beat of silence.
Satoru blinks at her, tilting his head almost theatrically. “That’s it? No catch? No fine print? No poison pill?”
“I don’t care anymore,” she says flatly, knocking back her drink. It burns on the way down. It’s the only thing she wants to be feeling right now.
Satoru hesitates with a piece of deconstructed tofu halfway to his mouth, clearly uncertain whether she’s being serious. “Y’know, I could name Maki as the new chair as soon as the vote passes. Just as a bit. Just to watch Naoya crash out.”
“Do it,” she mutters. “I’d actually pay to see that.”
Satoru chuckles. Then frowns-- because they’ve been close enough to needle one another-- two miserable heirs pushed together in playdates, in cotillions, as if their families were playing dolls, and they were the Barbie and Ken the Gojos and Zen’ins wanted to make kiss. But never close enough to ask-- what’s wrong? Are you okay?
Not when her cousin nearly killed him. Not when her mother died. And not now, when she’s oozing heartbreak like an oil spill.
She sets her glass down. “Kamo votes how I vote as part of his deal for marrying Mai. I talked with Furudate. He’ll support Naobito’s last wishes. We just need to break the old guard Zen’in voting bloc, because they hate you. And me. And they think you’ll most likely name me chair to spite them or somethin’.”
“Is your hat no longer in the ring?” Satoru raises a brow.
“Somethin’ like that,” she mumbles. “We have three. We need three more.”
“Oh! My CFO used to be friends with that Kusakabe guy. Same Masters’ program,” he explains. “Mei-san can angle for him. Usami too, but I heard the-- situation-- they were in went sour so that wouldn’t be the best approach.”
She resolutely ignores the implications that Usami was apparently screwing around with Satoru’s CFO and ticks down one finger, with two remaining. “Gakuganji?”
Satoru blows an overly dramaticised raspberry, unheeding of the waiters coming to clear their half-eaten plates for the next course. She orders another whiskey. “Nah. That geezer hates me.”
“Ogi’s definitely a ‘no’. The sons are too volatile. Zaito has her tongue too far down Naoya’s throat to vote in any other way.”
“Are you sure we can’t work the Naoya angle?” he asks. “You still need two votes.”
She freezes, blinking. “Wait. Explain.”
Satoru pauses to pop a piece of tuna nigiri into his mouth with a satisfied hum. “Well, he’s always been that instant gratification kinda guy from what I’ve seen of him. He probably thought he’d be crowned the next king by now. Not stuck in this protracted war of attrition-- which he’s gonna lose, by the way, because he has no patience. He’s already cracking. Even I’ve seen the images out of Vegas at this point.”
Sometimes, she forgets that he isn’t just stupid, silly Satoru who sulked his way through her debut whilst obligingly leading her through the dances like an overgrown dandelion-- sometimes, she forgets that the jokes are to obfuscate the weapon of a man behind one of Japan’s Big Three conglomerates. Razor-sharp and untouchable, and aiming right for the Achille’s heel.
Someone doesn’t become GojoCo’s youngest-ever CEO without a taste for blood, after all.
She sighs, sits back. “So you’re going to wine and dine him before the vote. Tell him you’re strongly considering him for CEO if he supports the merger. Especially if you add in an element of him getting to fuck his brothers-- he won’t be able to resist that part.”
Satoru’s nose wrinkles. “Dinner with Naoya sounds like torture.”
“Poor Satoru,” she coos, reaching across the table to pat his arm. “We all must sacrifice for the cause.”
“You think Zaito will fold if Naoya does?” he asks.
“I don’t wanna play into that glass ceiling bullshit, but I think she’s in love with him.” the word sits heavy on her tongue like a mockery. Love.
Not for the first time, she feels a strange spark of envy in the pit of her chest.
Gojo leans back again, a smirk returning to his face. “Look at you. Still playing strategist even when your whole world’s falling apart.”
She doesn’t rise to the bait. Just folds her hands and exhales. “That makes six.”
“Bingo.” Satoru grins in a sing-song voice. “And then I’ll move my stuff into that fancy CEO suite, and evict the rest of ya.”
“No objections there,” she huffs, exhausted. “Let dad and Naobito and grandfather and everyone else spin in their graves. As long as you offer me that golden parachute, I’ll jump out the plane myself.”
Gojo narrows his eyes, like he’s trying to read her thoughts. “Ya sure?”
She looks away. “It’s not worth it.”
.
The door to her penthouse apartment clicks shut behind her with a softness that almost feels mocking.
Two years, she’s lived here-- ever since she returned from London. But it remains nearly as austere as the day she moved in-- vaulted ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows, stainless steel kitchen, beige and wood furniture that would have collected dust if not for the cleaning service that came through twice every month to dust off the diorama.
It’s quiet-- no hum of the dishwasher, no noise filtering through from the street below or neighbouring units. Just silence, as pristine and cold and tomblike as the marble floors under her feet.
All except for the master bedroom.
She pauses at the door before opening it, sliding the French doors open before flicking on one of the switches-- flooding the space in a warm, golden light. Strips off her jacket, toes off her shoes onto the rack by the threshold.
She staggers over to bed, half exhaustion and half liquor, depositing her work satchel at the foot of the space.
On string of fairy lights above her head, like a mobile of memories, is the sum of her life. Grainy photographs taken from family albums at the estate. Polaroids and drugstore prints.
Her mother, with a rare, open-mouthed laugh, waving a sparkler during a summer festival. Her, gap-toothed and knobbled kneed, only elbow-height, the two of them dressed in matching yukatas.
The sunset over the Okinawa waters, captured through the lens of her first Polaroid camera.
Mai and Maki, wrestling in the grass at a family retreat-- one of those rare moments they were allowed to be children, and misbehave, instead of being forced into the roles of the young misses of the Zen’in family.
A candid of a sulking Satoru as the dance instructor used him as an example to waltz around the studio in preparation for the western-style debut.
The campus of Keidai, with its distinctive Gothic facade.
And then-- the newest addition, tucked in-between the pages of some poetry book she’d only pretended to get through-- printed after one too many whiskeys a few nights prior--
Sharp nose in profile. Black turtleneck to ward off the chill that lingered in the air. Stray hair still falling over his forehead. Notebook in hand, a brief moment of unguardedness-- he’d been trying to get the cap off, the pen lodged between his lips.
She fishes it out from between the pages and stares at it now. The ache in her chest something other than alcohol.
A month ago, she’d been in his apartment. In his bed. Held like she was something precious, her name falling from his lips like a prayer.
Now, the only thing left of aside from the memories is the resignation letter. Formal, printed. Zen’in-sama. A scrawl of his signature.
Her head tips forward, elbows on her knees, photograph between her fingers. Hunched up at the edge of her bed, shoulder against the headboard. Pressing her lips together in a bid to hold the tears back.
But it’s no use-- the hurt swirls around behind her eyes and spills over. Silent sobs-- because tears were an indulgence and a weakness, and even before being a person, she was a Zen’in.
The weight bears down on her shoulders-- an Atlas of her own making. As if she could have climbed the ranks the way Naobito had asked her to. As if she could have beaten the rigged game. As if she could have played against the house and won on nothing but her own wits, because that was how it always was in the fairytales.
But life wasn’t a fairytale. Life wasn’t knights on horseback. Life was a number on a sheet of paper, a fight for a knife in the mud.
And the truth is-- she’s so fucking tired of fighting.
Coda: No one is ever missing
She’s been in the bathroom for ten minutes now-- pacing, heels clicking against the granite. Technically, to relieve herself, and then to touch up her lipstick, but the toilet’s been flushed, and Ruby Woo looks perfectly fine, and now she’s reduced to a bundle of nerves-- lovesick and slightly hungover.
The worst combination to be.
She wishes she could be the killer that Naobito always thought she’d had underneath the surface. Instead, she’s hurting like a damn kid all over again, trying to pretend that going out to face Uncle Ogi didn’t scare the living daylights out of her.
Because whatever the outcome is of the vote today-- tomorrow, she’s not coming back.
She opens her phone-- scrolls through the texts, as if there’s anything in there she’s missed.
Opens up the contact labeled hiromi-san, hesitates for a moment longer.
Types.
You were right about everything. I love you.
Hits send before she can lose her nerve or regurgitate last night’s convenience-store dinner up into the sink.
The read receipt pops up nearly immediately-- and she fumbles for the shutdown switch before shoving her phone deep into the recesses of her purse.
One last look in the mirror. One last set of breathing exercises as her hands itch to turn her phone back on.
Then she’s out of the bathroom. The board glances over at her as she takes a seat-- offering a sunny, dispassionate smile that’s more the bared teeth of a prey animal than anything else.
“Shall we begin?” Furudate asks from the head of the table.
In the end, they scrape by. Barely.
Ogi began the vote-- no. Then Jinichi. Then Naoharu.
When it comes to him, Naoya leans back in his chair, all swagger. “Yes.”
She lets out an imperceptible sigh of relief.
Zaito’s next-- “Yes.”
Then Gakuganji with no.
Usami taps his fingers against his tablet, unreadable for a moment, and then-- “Abstain.”
Furudate votes with a long-winded speech about the importance of carrying on their predecessor’s wishes-- “Yes.”
Noritoshi votes “Yes” without any hesitation.
And then it’s her. “Yes.”
The smug grin begins to melt off Naoya’s face into something halfway to suspicion as Kusakabe also nods his assent-- but it’s too late. The votes have been tallied. The motion is passed.
GojoCo will acquire the Zen’in Group in a historic deal.
Satoru enters to sign off on the deal like he’s storming the castle-- an entire cohort behind him, a shit-eating grin on his face, and a boy by his side that she’s becoming well acquainted with. Fushiguro glances around the room, hands in his pockets, standing behind Satoru as if the questions aren’t already brewing in the minds of everyone on the board at the companions he’s arrived with. His eyes lock on hers briefly with a barely perceptible nod.
“I had my lawyers talk to your lawyers,” Satoru announces grandly to the gathered board members, clapping his hands together once. “Nanamin, do the honors.”
A blonde man with a long-suffering air unfurls the documents from his briefcase, clearing his throat. Furudate scoots over as well to review the contracts. Ijichi hands out pens. Ogi tries very hard to contain the murderous rage writ clear across his features as he scowls, flipping through the pages, and then signs with the force of trying to slit someone’s throat.
The paper comes to rest in front of her.
This is it.
The Zen’in Group won’t be dissolved-- no, that would be too much of a tsunami, too many lives jostled in one fell swoop. Thousands of employees worldwide, trillions of yen in the global economy. Satoru might be the only one of them with the actual aptitude to land a killing blow, but he’s not that cruel.
“The name’s going to stay on the building, of course,” Satoru continues as Ijichi and Nanami gather the documentation back up. “Everyone, meet your new CEO. Fushiguro Megumi.”
She blinks at the boy. He looked equally nonplussed.
Furudate’s the one who speaks up this time, as Naoya’s jaw unhinges. “According to Zen’in Sanjuro’s will, through the postwar charters, the eldest male-line heir of the Zen’in family will become the chair in the event of an acquisition or unequal merger.”
“That’s-- not-- I’m the--” Naoya stutters, the realisation dawning on him that he’s just signed away his birthright.
But he’s not. Never has been. Because even if Naobito were the eldest-- which he wasn’t, Naoya had four elder brothers, one of whom is sitting at the table, looking increasingly miffed.
She thinks on it wistfully for a moment-- the idea that if she’d been born the boy her father had wanted, the crown would be hers by right now. But the fantasy is fleeting. She’s here for the golden parachute. Nothing more.
Photo ops. One last spin around the offices-- not that there’s really anything she’s missed here-- not really. Just a cage made of floor-to-ceiling windows and a weight no one was ever made to carry.
Maki’s voice echoes in her head. The thing about having a family that doesn’t love you, is that you learn to live without it. Is that it’s easier to set yourself free.
She walks out of there head high, golden parachute in hand. Alive. Freer than she’s ever been in her life-- no longer chained to the Zen’in name.
She thinks of Noritoshi-- still in the boardroom she’d set him up in. Fushiguro, the dark horse head of the Zen’in Group. Satoru, who outlasted the rest of them in the end.
Choso’s family-- equally convoluted, equally fucked up, and his dedication to trying to ensure all his siblings got out.
Her mother, who’d died in the cage. Her father, Naobito, her grandfather-- all these men who’d spent years calcifying under the sediment of their own ambitions.
The settlement sits heavy in her purse. Stock options. Shares. 25 billion yen.
Hiromi-san’s standing in the lobby-- mussed hair, dark undereyes, a wrinkled suit. The minute differences that distinguished him from the countless white-toothed suits that milled around the building at any given moment.
She stops short the moment she sees him-- breath departing her lungs. Oh God. She had missed him. “You came.”
“I got your message,” he’d said, softly, over the din of the murmurs in the lobby.
It’s real. The alacrity with which he’d reached out as she paces towards him, catching her hand in his-- his palm warm over hers. She gasps, and then laughs-- eyes scanning over his form. “You’re real.” The words tumble from her lips before she can stop them, wondering in its weight.
Hiromi’s grip tightens slightly around her hand-- like he’s anchoring her, or maybe himself. “I’m sorry for pushing you away,” he admits. His voice is rough, the fatigue evident, but there’s a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
She’s still running off nerves and fumes and last night’s drinks. But she’s here. Still standing. And the man she’s always loved is here-- and there’s nothing else between them now. The ghosts have been exorcised. The board as she’s known it no longer exists. If she kisses him now, in the lobby of her family’s business, that’s no one’s concern but her own.
“So, is it really over?” he asks gently once they part-- breathless, lingering.
She nods. “It’s passed. Fushiguro’s chair now. I cashed out. I’m done.”
Hiromi whistles. “Poor kid.”
“He has Satoru’s people,” she replies. Hopes that it’s enough to create a new era of the Zen’in Group.
“I know.” He tilts his head slightly, eyes soft. “So… what do you want now?”
She looks up at him, at his mussed hair and the familiar steadiness behind his gaze. It takes no thought at all.
“We disappear,” she smiles, then adds, “I want you, Hiromi-san.”
“I want to go to see the ocean again, this time just the two of us. No meetings. No plots. I want to wake up to you, and the sunlight and the sound of the ocean and not a single notification on my phone from someone who wants something.”
He’s still smiling when he says, “Alright. Okinawa first. Then we’ll go wherever you want next.”
She leans into him as he wraps an arm around her shoulder. And just like that, the rest of the world fades into the background-- a distant cage with the door swinging off its hinges.
Finally free.
A/N:
- HOLY FUCKING SHIT. This is the longest oneshot I've EVER written in my life. I feel like that crusty squidward meme rn. u know the one. Thank you so much for sticking with me to the end of the fic <3333
- Family Trees
- Again, congrats to @nanamisbbygirl for hitting 2k!!! Yay Honey!!! thank u also for letting me annoy u with the fic concept lmfao
- This was truly our Succession <3
- Insufferable bitch MCs are my fave to write bc I like to pretend people will like me even though I'm like an ice cold killer bitch LMFAOOOOO
- Zaito Nagisa is my OC I made once upon a time that's just the Gerri to Naoya's Roman in every universe <3 true love <333
- Apologies for any inaccuracies regarding Japanese corporate structure, law, or culture I got too lost in the Succession sauce.
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