Seiji Fujiwara just sat there, watching her quietly.
He didn't stop her. He didn't even lift an eyebrow. That gentle smile was still on his face, as if he were appreciating an interesting little play.
Kei Shirogane pressed the phone hard against her ear.
One second.
Two seconds.
Three seconds.
There was no sound through the receiver. No dial tone, no busy signal. Only dead silence.
Stunned, she pulled the phone away from her ear.
In the top-left corner of the screen, the box that marked her signal stood completely empty.
Next to it were three cold characters: No Service.
Kei's pupils contracted sharply.
"It seems modern technology isn't always so reliable," Seiji's voice came at just the right moment.
He extended a finger and lightly pushed a black tablet across the coffee table until it sat in front of Kei.
The screen was lit.
On it was a PDF file.
The title read Corporate Loan and Unlimited Joint Liability Agreement.
The glaring red seal, and beneath it her father's signature, so painfully familiar, scalded her eyes like a branding iron.
The amount on the contract. The compensation agreement for the factory accident...
Every clause, every term, laid out in plain sight, formed an astronomical number more than enough to crush any ordinary household.
"I think we can dispense with some of the unnecessary formalities now and have a proper talk," Seiji said.
Kei set down her phone.
The route of calling the police had been physically and thoroughly severed by the other side.
She drew a deep breath and forced herself to stay calm.
She couldn't panic.
The moment she panicked, she'd fall completely into his rhythm.
"I don't have money." Kei's voice was a little dry from tension, but her tone was firm. "I can't pay a single yen of this back right now."
"I know." Seiji nodded, as if completely unsurprised by the answer.
"But," in Kei's eyes the last flicker of hope kindled, the one conviction that had kept her standing all this while, "my brother, Miyuki Shirogane, is at Advanced Nurturing High School right now. You should know what kind of place that is. The graduates of that school have limitless futures. Just give me three more years. No, two! When he graduates, we'll definitely be able to start repayment!"
Her brother was a genius.
Kei had always firmly believed in this.
As long as her brother graduated safely and entered society, with his abilities he was sure to find a high-paying job.
By then, however large the debt, there would come a day when it could be paid off.
But hearing her words, Seiji let out a snort of laughter.
Kei glared at him.
"Shirogane-san."
Seiji leisurely picked up the tablet, his fingers sliding casually across the screen as he pulled up a calculator app.
"It seems Shuchiin's teachers haven't taught you a real finance lesson. Today, I'll fill in that gap for you, free of charge."
His fingertip tapped on the screen without hurry or hesitation.
First a long string of numbers appeared on the screen, representing the principal.
"This is the principal your father owed, plus the compensation owed to the downstream companies. The total comes to this."
His tone was that of a teacher patiently guiding a student, but the content of his words was cruel as a devil's whisper.
"We're a legitimate financial company, so we only calculate legal compound interest. Even using the industry's lowest annualized rate..."
He entered the rate, then pressed the calculate key.
"...In three years, that is, when your 'limitless-future' brother graduates, principal and interest combined will have rolled into this figure."
On the screen, the number grew larger, more menacing.
"In ten years, it becomes this number..."
"In twenty years..."
Kei's face went paler with every jump of the figure on the screen.
Seiji seemed not to notice the change in her color, continuing in that same flat, instructional tone to state the cold facts.
"Calculating with the highest annual salary your brother could realistically take home after graduation... assuming he doesn't eat, doesn't drink, doesn't get sick, doesn't spend on anything, and puts every yen of his salary toward the debt..."
He paused, as if doing the math in his head, then handed down the final verdict.
"...He would need to work, roughly, for one hundred and twenty years."
One hundred and twenty years.
The number came down like a merciless hammer.
Kei's mind buzzed and went blank.
Her last hope, her one spiritual pillar, had just been shattered into dust by the man in front of her, with a few casual taps.
So... everything had only been her naive fantasy.
So... this was, from the start, a hell named "debt" from which no escape was possible.
Kei bit her lip until it bled, a faint metallic sweetness spreading in her mouth.
She lifted her head, her bloodshot eyes glaring fiercely at Seiji.
"Then... I'll file for bankruptcy!"
She forced the words out through clenched teeth, as if it took every ounce of her strength.
Yes. There was still this path.
As long as she filed for bankruptcy, as long as she gave up everything, she could legally escape this debt.
It was her last way out.
"Oh? Bankruptcy?"
Hearing this, the smile on Seiji's face only grew more radiant.
He nodded approvingly, as if praising a student who had finally caught on.
"Not a bad choice. Smart. And decisive."
He swiped a finger, closing the calculator, then with practiced ease opened another folder.
The folder was named List of Collateral Victims.
His fingertip swiped lightly upward on the screen.
Photo after photo began to slide across the screen like a slideshow.
Faces, each of them sorrowful, or numb, or despairing.
"The Matsuda family. Warehouse manager at your father's factory. During the fire, trying to save merchandise, both his legs were crushed by a falling beam. Permanently disabled. His wife doesn't have a job, and they have a son in elementary school. The whole family now lives on a meager government subsidy."
On the screen was a photo of a middle-aged man in a wheelchair, his eyes hollow.
Beside him, his wife and child, their faces clouded with worry.
...
"Mrs. Sato. Her husband was a truck driver at the factory. In the fire, he inhaled too much smoke. He didn't make it. She alone has to raise three underage children. The eldest just started junior high."
On the screen, a haggard woman clutched a portrait of her husband. Behind her stood three children with timid eyes.
...
"And them, and them, and them..."
The photos slid past one after another.
A wife who lost her husband, weeping until her tears ran dry.
A child forced to drop out of school because their father was crippled.
The elderly, scraping by in hospitals on thin savings and welfare checks...
Every family torn to pieces by that one fire.
Seiji's voice, somewhere along the way, had turned cold, stripped of any trace of feeling.
"Bankruptcy. Yes, legally, you can walk away. This debt will be wiped clean along with the disappearance of the Shirogane family name."
He raised his eyes, and his gaze stabbed at Kei like a drawn blade.
"But these families, shattered because of your father's factory, who is to take responsibility for them? Their debts, who is to repay them? Their futures, who is to foot the bill?"
"Shirogane-san, could you, with a clear conscience, trample on these people's miserable lives to start your own new one?"
Every word of this hammered down on the last line of Kei's psychological defense.
This was also the heaviest guilt and self-reproach that had pressed on her heart all along.
She could ignore the bank's losses, but these innocent families... how could she possibly not care?
"No... please stop..."
Kei could no longer hold on. Her tears burst free like a broken dam.
That strength and composure she had forced herself to maintain crumbled in an instant, like a levee swept away by a flood.
In a trembling voice, she asked,
"You... what do you... what do you want?"
The living room finally returned to silence.
Seiji rose, looking down at her from above.
"My name is Seiji Fujiwara."
"The rumors about me, I imagine you've heard some of them."
He reached out and, with the tenderness one might use on a precious work of art, wiped away the girl's tears.
"As for what I need..."
"A girl as clever as you, I think you can guess. Can't you?"
Kei's body shuddered violently.
Her pupils dilated from the extremity of fear and humiliation. Her tears fell harder still, yet she couldn't make a sound.
Of course she understood.
How could she not understand.
The man who bore that name stood at the top of Tokyo, no, at the top of the entire pyramid of Japan.
And those rumors about him... especially the ones about his particular "tastes" in beautiful young girls, were already an open secret among the upper class.
Silence.
A silence as still as death.
Time seemed in that moment to be stretched out to infinity.
In the end, Kei closed her eyes in despair.
Resigned, she nodded.
Seeing the gesture, a satisfied smile appeared on Seiji's face.
Without a single word more, he bent down and lifted the girl who had given up resisting, easily, sideways in his arms, like a trophy doll.
He crossed the cramped living room and walked straight toward her bedroom.
He nudged the bedroom door open with his foot.
Then, slowly, it closed.
Sealing in the sunset that filled the room, and a young girl's last sob.
He set her down on the narrow bed she had slept in her whole life, in the small room she had kept clean and in order through every year of going without, and she did not fight him, because she had already done her fighting downstairs and lost it to a folder of photographs.
What she would never be able to explain to anyone afterward was that she had not been dragged. She had nodded. The cool proud girl the whole street believed was made of ice had sat on her own sofa and nodded, because the alternative was the Matsuda children on relief and Mrs. Sato with three kids and a portrait of a dead husband, and Kei Shirogane had spent the whole of her short life being the one who held things up so that other people did not fall through. The debt she could have walked away from. The faces she could not. He had not, in the end, even needed force. He had only needed to be right about what kind of girl she was.
So when he pushed into her and it began to hurt, she did not scream. She turned her face into a pillow that still smelled of her own cheap detergent and she took it, the splitting first-time pain of it, the weight and the wrongness and the slow deliberate way he made certain she felt every part of what she had agreed to, and she did the only thing she had ever known how to do with pain, which was carry it on behalf of someone else. The Matsuda boy. The Sato children. She set their names down one by one in the dark behind her eyes and paid into them with everything he took out of her, because if it bought their lives back then it had to be worth it, it had to be, and that arithmetic was the last thing she still owned. He took the whole night to teach her, patiently, that he could have that too. That he could make her body answer him while her mind was busy counting strangers she had saved, and that the answering would shame her worse than the pain ever did.
By the end she had stopped doing the arithmetic. She had stopped doing anything at all. She lay where he left her, the strong sensible Shirogane girl who never complained no matter how hard things got, and found there was a place on the far side of complaining, and that she was in it now, and that no one was coming to hold it up for her.
...
...
Early the next morning, just as the sky began to lighten.
Auntie Suzuki, as she did every day, picked up her sorted bags of garbage and walked out of her general store, yawning.
The morning street was quiet, with a touch of chill in the air.
Out of habit, she glanced over toward the Shirogane home, still turning over in her mind whether that child had taken yesterday's warning to heart.
Then, her movements froze.
She saw it.
Below the Shiroganes' old apartment building, a car sat quietly parked.
A top-tier luxury vehicle, jet black all over, the kind she'd only ever seen on TV or in magazines. Its body lines, smooth as an artwork, reflected a cold and expensive sheen in the early light.
That car, appearing on this dilapidated street where common folk lived, looked utterly out of place, and carried with it an indescribable sense of pressure.
Auntie Suzuki rubbed her eyes, thinking perhaps she hadn't woken up properly.
At that moment.
The door of the Shiroganes' apartment opened.
A figure stepped out from the apartment doorway.
A handsome, imposing man. He simply stood there, and yet it was as though he had become the center of the entire world.
And in his arms, he was holding a girl.
It was Kei.
Auntie Suzuki's heart clenched hard.
Kei's head was lowered, her long bangs hiding her face, leaving her expression impossible to read.
Her steps were unsteady. Most of her weight rested against the man's body, like a doll without a soul, letting the man carry her step by step toward the black luxury car.
She was still in her Shuchiin uniform.
But the uniform, which should have symbolized youth and elite status, looked a little disheveled at this moment. There were even some... suspicious creases on the hem of her skirt.
The man tucked her into the car.
Through the whole process, Kei didn't show the slightest resistance, numb as a puppet on strings.
The car door closed, cutting off Auntie Suzuki's view.
The luxury car silently started up, glided smoothly into the street, then disappeared without a sound around the corner.
Everything returned to its usual calm.
As if nothing had happened.
The bag of garbage in Auntie Suzuki's hand clattered to the ground.
Fruit peels and scraps of paper tumbled out.
She couldn't believe her eyes.
That strong, polite, sensible good child from yesterday, the child who never complained no matter how hard life got... how could...
Confusion. Bewilderment.
Auntie Suzuki opened her mouth, wanting to shout something, but in the end, she couldn't get a single word out.
She knew that there were some matters that ordinary people like her had no business stepping into.
...
That same day, in the afternoon, after school.
In the classroom of Class 1-B, Junior High Division of Shuchiin Academy.
"Kei... took a leave again today," said a girl with twin tails, looking worriedly at the empty seat.
"Yeah. Yesterday she suddenly took half a day off, and today she's been gone the whole day. She won't answer the phone, won't reply to messages." The short-haired girl next to her also frowned. "She isn't sick with something serious, is she?"
"She lives... by herself, doesn't she? What if she's collapsed at home?"
A few of Kei's closer female friends gathered together, growing more worried the more they talked.
"That settles it. After school, let's go check on her together!" the twin-tailed girl proposed.
"Okay!"
The girls agreed instantly and went together to the street where Kei lived.
Following the address, they found the old apartment building.
"This is it."
They walked up the creaking staircase and arrived at Kei's front door.
"Kei! Shirogane-san! Are you home?"
They knocked, then rang the doorbell.
They waited a long time. There was no response from inside.
"She's not home? But she's sick. Where would she go?"
"Maybe she's at the doctor's."
"Should we wait a bit longer?"
One of the girls, the more curious sort, slipped over to the window beside the door.
The curtains were drawn tight. She couldn't see anything inside.
She brought her nose close to the gap of the window, trying to see if there was any sign of movement.
Suddenly, she caught a scent.
A strange smell, faint and elusive, drifting out from the crack of the window.
The scent was complex.
There was a high-end men's cologne in it, very faint, but aggressive.
Mixed with it was another... something she couldn't quite describe, a sweet, languid air.
That scent made her cheeks flush red in an instant.
She recoiled as if she'd been burned, stumbling back several steps, her heart pounding.
"What's wrong, Miyuki?" her friends looked at her, puzzled.
"It's, it's nothing..." she stammered, cheeks burning, not daring to meet her friends' eyes.
She had a vague guess about what it was.
That kind of scent, she'd smelled something similar on the perfume sample cards that came with those "adult" magazines her older sister kept hidden, the ones she wasn't allowed to look at.
But she didn't dare believe it.
And she certainly didn't dare to voice her guess.
That cool, stubborn, pure-as-an-iceberg Kei Shirogane... how could she possibly be connected to a scent like that?
The girls waited a while longer, and seeing no one answer, in the end could only leave reluctantly, their hearts full of worry and questions.
...
At the same time.
Inside the offices of one of the financial companies under Seiji Fujiwara's command.
The atmosphere was electric, more so than it had ever been. Boiling, even.
Every employee, as though under a binding spell, was clustered in front of the company's internal electronic notice board, staring at the personnel transfer notice that had just been posted there.
On every face, an identical look of disbelief.
Personnel Appointment Notice
Appointee: Ken Tanaka
Former Position: Assistant to the Chief of the Third Credit Department
New Position: President of Fujiwara Investment (New Subsidiary)
This appointment takes effect immediately.
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