For a Price
Summary: Welcome to a world where your fantasy's can come true. Where the most beautiful women will indulge your every desire, where your sins are encouraged. Where your secrets are kept. This is a place where even the purest of lights may be extinguished by the night. Kagome is a girl bound. Her innocence is her most prized possession, not only to her but to the one that binds her. Inuyasha is a young man who is seeking redemption. Plagued by the ghosts of his past, he has turned his back on all that he knows. But when fate brings these two together, will they be able to see through all the lies and save one another before it is too late?
Rating: T for most chapters, M/NC-17 for excessive violence, adult language and adult themes.
Disclaimer: Any and all characters used from the Inuyasha series and franchise does not belong to me.
Warning: A/U, OOC
Prologue
It can all end in a moment. One single fracture in time and it all comes crashing down around you. The wrong words spoken, the wrong route taken, the wrong choice made; all leading to a finale that you never could have prepared for. And when this happens, where do you go from there? Do you pick yourself up and try to piece together any possible remnants of the past? Do you forego clinging to the familiar and instead, choose the unknown? What if you didn't have a choice? What then?
My father wasn't the best of men. He was certainly no saint but he had a loving heart and a warm smile that had captured the heart of my mother the day they met. He had been the son of a Shrine keeper that had stepped out of the shadow's of his family name to begin a business as a Ramen chef. He was noted for his dishes and had gained popularity from the soldiers and nobility. My mother was a second cousin of the Emperor, the only daughter to his cousin Tomo.
Their romance was one that was not looked upon with approval. She was to be married to a young lord, and my father was nothing but a commoner. But when love is involved, the game changes and everyone begins playing by a completely different set of rules. My mother ran away from the life she had always known and began a new one with my father. They immigrated to The United States and found work running a tea house in New York City. I was born two years later on April 17, 1925.
Seven years later, I was given a brother, Souta. He would be the bane of my existence and the primary source of my happiness from then on. I cared for him, especially after mother became very sick. When father began to come later, reeking of booze. He was never a mean drunk. He was always just very sad. He had to watch the love of his life wither away in front of him. I couldn't blame him. When my mother died, my father lost himself completely. He lost his restaurant. He lost our savings. He drank and gambled away everything until the NYC underbelly came to reclaim it.
At the age of seventeen, I was left with a ten-year old brother and a roof about to be taken from over our heads. I was running out of options. That was when I was approached by one of the men my father had gambled away his life to:
Shichinintai Bankotsu.
((A/N: This is perhaps THE shortest prologue I have ever written. I have an interesting idea written for this particular story. I am still writing the other stories. I am merely exhausting some of the creative beasts that have been raging in my head. I will be updating Playing Dead first, followed my A Malicious Game and possibly Deceit.))