When Tsuzuki found the room he and Muraki had shared tea in rearranged, he knew something was up and that he wasn't going to like it. The furniture had all been moved against the walls, or else removed to another room entirely. Anything valuable or breakable was gone. Including, Tsuzuki noticed, the Persian rug that had graced the floor, replaced by a much plainer, rough-woven one.

Tsuzuki almost turned and walked back out of the room when he saw Muraki waiting for him there, in shirtsleeves, sans tie, unbuttoning the cuffs of his sleeves so he could roll them up.

"No," Tsuzuki said. "I told you no."

Muraki just shrugged. "Humor me. I should have made the connection long ago, but it took strapping you to a cot for me to realize it. You never properly learned to defend yourself, did you?"

"Of course I know how to defend myself."

At least, that was what Tsuzuki started to say before he felt the side of Muraki's arm connect with his jaw. Stunned and whiplashed, he didn't have time to resist when Muraki grabbed his arm, and threw Tsuzuki over his shoulder.

He hit the floor hard, the breath knocked out of him. And when his vision cleared of red spots, Muraki was kneeling over him, without any of the malice their previous session might have led him to expect.

"I'm surprised. I would have thought hand-to-hand combat to be one of the first things they teach you as a shinigami."

Muraki got back to his feet, and extended Tsuzuki his hand.

But if he thought Tsuzuki was going to take it, he was mad. "I learned how to use fuda to defend myself, and I worked hard to win twelve loyal shikigami. I know enough to suit my needs." Tsuzuki groaned as he pushed himself into a sitting position. The bruises would heal soon enough, but that knock to the jaw still smarted. Though Tsuzuki supposed he deserved that after their last exchange of blows. "We don't typically need to use hand-to-hand combat in our line of work."

"Nonsense. That's a skill anyone in any line of work can benefit from."

"Except, see, you can't punch a demon back to Hell, or full nelson a stubborn soul on to Meifu. You're welcome to try, though—er, the punching a demon thing, I mean. I really don't want you trying to do my job for me. You've screwed that up enough as it is."

Muraki chuckled at that, but Tsuzuki hadn't meant it as a joke and bristled. (And really, he should have known better than to be so glib about human lives around Muraki.) "I see your point. However, one cannot always rely on some powerful guardian god swooping in to the rescue, either, can they? A lot of good your twelve, loyal shikigami have done you here."

"Give me a bow and arrow, then. I'll show you how good a shot I am."

"I'm sure you will. Right between the eyes. Eh, Tsuzuki?" Muraki shook his head. "What do you take me for?"

That hand still hovered in the space between them, inviting him to take it. Tsuzuki glared up at it, and then Muraki; and the doctor must have finally taken the hint. He let it fall back to his side.

"The whole point of hand-to-hand combat is that you have some means of defending yourself when you have no other weapon at your disposal. Nor do you need one, if you know what you're doing. You are the weapon." At the start of Tsuzuki's protest, Muraki raised a hand, begging understanding. "I don't mean how you think I mean it. Any man, or woman, possessed of their limbs and wits and a basic grasp of the laws of physics and anatomy, already has at their disposal the means to defend themselves from most forms of attack. Of course one's fists are no match for an ancient god, full of fire and brimstone. But—"

No sooner had Tsuzuki got back on his feet than Muraki was on him again, seizing him around the throat and pulling Tsuzuki back against himself. This was where Tsuzuki was supposed to break free, fight back, but old habits died hard. Pressed up against this man he knew wanted to do unspeakable things with him, he froze.

"If you know how to disable the one controlling the god, on the other hand," Muraki muttered in his ear, "your chances of surviving increase dramatically. You start with a familiarity with your enemy's vulnerable points. Throat," he said, giving it a gentle, demonstrative tug with his arm before releasing Tsuzuki from its grip. "Underarms—"

The fingertips abruptly jabbed into that sensitive area made Tsuzuki jump, and curse himself for it.

"—abdomen, underneath the rib cage, where the vital organs are easily accessed. And the groin."

Tsuzuki sucked in a breath at the press of Muraki's leg between his, the hint of it against the hollow of his backside. There was nothing violent in the action itself, Muraki's point being merely to educate, to elucidate; but the suggestion of intimacy in such a casually delivered gesture was shocking. Tsuzuki felt his cheeks color, abashed by his own reaction, as Muraki moved on.

"Never underestimate that one," he said, smiling to himself as he slowly circled Tsuzuki to face him again. "It may seem like a low blow, but everything is fair when you are fighting for your life. Or, I suppose, in your case, someone else's. The hands and feet are remarkably sensitive as well, as the Romans understood all too well, and amazingly simple to disable. Why don't you strike me, Tsuzuki."

He didn't spend much time thinking about it. Something primal in Tsuzuki took over at that command, something that he been waiting for a reason or an invitation for some time. He took one glance at those cold, calculating eyes and wanted to smash the man's glasses into them.

But Muraki caught his wrist before he could land his blow, and with a jerk of his hand, his fingertips twisted like screws into nerves Tsuzuki didn't even know he had. He cried out, surprised by the pain, before he could catch himself, and tears sprang unwanted to his eyes.

"See what I mean?" Muraki said dispassionately.

When he released him, Tsuzuki massaged the pain out of his hand and swore. Point taken. Now their past encounters took on a new light. In Nagasaki, and again at sea, he had thought Muraki a coward for going after his vulnerabilities rather than facing him head-on. It wasn't really cowardice, though, was it, when one played to win? Scruples, while noble and just, were just dead weight if they kept you from reaching your goal.

And maybe that was it, what was bugging Tsuzuki so much about all of this. "Isn't this just a waste of your time? I know this stuff already."

"Oh, I know you know how to fight. When you're properly motivated."

"You just want me to do it on command."

"That is correct."

"Even though I'm just going to take what I learn and use it against you?"

Muraki grinned at that, as if at some private joke. He removed his glasses, and placed them on the mantel out of harm's way. "Believe me," he said, "I am aware of that possibility—"

"More like eventuality," Tsuzuki said.

"You certainly have the right to try and kill me for what I've done, I will not deny it. And, as I have said in the past, if I have to die at anyone's hand, I would prefer it be yours. I believe, however, that you have greater enemies than myself that demand your attention—enemies we share in common."

"You're talking about Enma." And if he expected Tsuzuki to turn against his old friends, no matter what had become of them in his absence . . .

Muraki, however, gave him a sideways look at that name. "I'm glad if this means you are finally entertaining the possibility that there are factions of your world who want to use what you have to their own advantage. Or have you eliminated. With those shikigami at your disposal, you pose a formidable threat."

It was a powerful image, as well, the thought that popped into Tsuzuki's mind as though planted there by the doctor. Of the Judgment Bureau's dome crumbling under Suzaku's wings and Byakko's crushing talons, the cherry trees made fiery torches by Touda's breath. The rush of such immense power flowing into and through him from all directions, knowing it was his to command. That vengeance could be had with the point of his finger—

No—it was a horrific thought, and it felt like tempting fate even entertaining it. What Sargatanas had made Tsuzuki feel when the devil was in control of his body was abominable, a gross perversion of himself. He loathed himself even now for being too weak to do anything but ride along. But it was true what Muraki said. For that business with Sargatanas, and many other incidents in his decades of service, Tsuzuki knew he was hated in Meifu. Feared. Condemned. That some people there really did think the world would be better off if he ceased to exist.

"But I was actually referring to Hell," Muraki said, as if reading Tsuzuki's thoughts.

And Tsuzuki remembered that night at Ukyou's house, being unable to move or utter a word in his agony—unable to do a single thing as Mitani's white and ruined face peered down at him, in triumph. I let you die, had been Tsuzuki's first guilt-ridden thought, forgive me, I failed you. But then he recognized the devil beneath the leer. Focalor had stared at him the same way, from inside Izuru's corpse. What do you think of me now, shinigami? Not as destroyed as you believed me to be?

Still: "I don't know what Hell would still want with me, seeing as I want nothing to do with them. I've made that abundantly clear. Or what good kung fu or whatever you plan to teach me is going to do against demons."

"They still have Ukyou," Muraki said through gritted teeth, "and, lest you forget, your child. Whom they will undoubtedly raise to take your place in your absence. Do you plan to sit back and do nothing, let them have their way with your own flesh and blood?"

"I don't see what I can do. Not from here."

But even as he said it, Tsuzuki felt as though perhaps he understood. He had shed tears over the professor's body, had felt the anger boiling righteous within him over all the lives Focalor and Sargatanas had taken, whether innocent or not. And he could not deny the appeal of the prospect of revenge.

Was that Muraki's purpose in invoking them? To give him a purpose, a target on which to focus his energies? A target other than Muraki himself?

Or perhaps a bit of hope, to think maybe—well, Hisoka may have been a lost cause, but there was still someone out there he could save?

"But why not. Seeing as I'm stuck here until you decide otherwise, it's not as though I have anything better to do. Your library is a snooze-fest, by the way." And if anything good came out of this exercise, maybe he would learn something about Muraki's vulnerabilities as well. Tsuzuki could take a page from that man's book, about the virtues of patience and lying in wait for the perfect moment, when his enemy's weaknesses exposed themselves.

After perhaps an hour or so of "instruction," however—and Muraki ran a trial by fire, expecting Tsuzuki to pick up the proper technique as he went along, seemingly by osmosis—Tsuzuki felt no more learned in hand-to-hand combat than he had been before. Though he was a hell of a lot sorer for it.

"You're allowing your passions to run away with you," Muraki corrected him, after he caught Tsuzuki off his guard and tripped him for the umpteenth time that day. "You think they give you strength, but they really only make you impatient, sloppy—"

"You want me to fight you in cold blood."

"Yes! Precisely that! Every time we met in the past, when you attacked me it was only after your anger had gotten the better of you."

"And I always won," Tsuzuki said, wiping the sweat from his chin. "Ipso facto, anger works."

Though, if he stopped to think about it, that was an overstatement. Just because he had somehow made it out of all those encounters intact didn't mean he had achieved a victory, or even earned one. Could he say it counted if it had been putting his and Hisoka's heads together that had saved them, or if Tatsumi had been the one to step in before all was lost? Or if he only found the anger necessary to go on the offensive after people he might have been able to save had been hurt? Muraki knew it, too.

"The one time you nearly had me," he said, "I had been too consumed by my own passions to see you coming. My lust for revenge was nearly my downfall. While you, calm and collected, knew exactly what you were doing, putting that blade in my gut."

His fingers went to the spot, as if he could still feel some trace of the stabbing at the memory.

Tsuzuki, however, had only the faintest recollection of it. "I don't remember." In a way, he would have liked to. It would have been a boost to his confidence, at very least, to recall a time when he had succeeded in wounding that man gravely.

"You may have been in a fugue state at the time. I put you through some incredible pain shortly before, so I would not be surprised if your conscious mind had gone . . . somewhere else. It's a perfectly normal, perfectly human defensive strategy, to disconnect mentally from the source of pain and distress."

What little Tsuzuki remembered of that final night in Kyoto seemed mostly like a dream. Though he knew consciously that he had summoned Touda and ordered the fire in that university lab, he wasn't aware of doing any of it until Hisoka had startled him back to himself. Likewise, he knew vaguely what Muraki had done to him in the hours before, but it was like it had all happened to someone else. Someone else whose regenerative powers Muraki had tested, someone else whose throat had been slit down to the bone.

But if his mind had gone away somewhere else, where had it gone? It felt as though there was a room in Tsuzuki's mind whose door was closed but not locked, for his terror to enter ensured it stayed that way better than any deadbolt or chain.

Of all the questions he had from that night, one weighed most heavily on his mind. "How did you survive?"

Muraki grinned. "You still need to ask, knowing that you survived your own repeated attempts at suicide—knowing I share your blood?" He shrugged. "The wound should have been fatal, it's true, from loss of blood alone. But it healed."

"I'm not talking about that. I mean the fire. It should have destroyed everything in that place." Tsuzuki narrowed his eyes at him. "I know how I got out of it."

Tatsumi had confessed his intervention sometime after. How he had wanted to let Tsuzuki have his way and end his pain, but had been unwilling to sacrifice Hisoka to the flames as well—at least, that had been his excuse for rescuing them both. He hadn't wanted to speak of it, the trauma of his own death instilling a fear of fire in him that he was loth to even discuss; or maybe it was the generous side of him that others only rarely were allowed to see, yet somehow Tsuzuki was privileged to time and time again. The side that wanted everyone to forget any good deed that Tatsumi ever did them.

That didn't explain how Muraki had survived Touda's fire, though. "How did you get out?"

For once, it seemed he had hit upon a subject that Muraki didn't want to discuss. Those cold eyes shifted, as though paging through possible answers, but none was forthcoming.

"You had help, too. Didn't you?" It was the only reason Tsuzuki could see for his silence. Muraki had someone of his own to protect. "An ally? Not that friend from the brothel, I bet. No human would have gotten through that fire intact. So who? A demon?" A darker thought occurred, but it gave Tsuzuki some relish to voice it, to entertain the thought that it could be someone he already knew who deserved his wrath: "Someone from Meifu?"

"I think that's enough for today." Muraki began rolling down his sleeves, then retrieved his glasses from the mantel.

Did that mean Tsuzuki was on to something? "Wait." If he was that close, he couldn't let it end there. "There is someone, isn't there? Someone on the inside helping you? We suspected as much when you brought Fujisawa back to life." Tsuzuki had seen the body himself when it was pulled out of the bay at Nagasaki. No one could have come back from injuries of that boy's sort without some sort of divine intervention.

Muraki paused in wiping his glasses. "You don't think I could have brought him back myself?"

"I wouldn't put anything past you where medical experiments are concerned. But we should have been alerted when you took back his soul—"

"I thought you wouldn't put anything past me."

He shot Tsuzuki his most disarming smile, the kind that probably fooled everyone else into thinking Muraki was anything but a psychotic killer. But Tsuzuki knew better. Muraki was refusing to answer because it suited his purposes to remain mysterious.

He wants me to suspect there's someone in the Judgment Bureau in his pocket—maybe even someone I worked close to. This is what he's always tried to do: sow doubt, distrust. Give the illusion that we've been destined for each other all along, that no one else understands me but him. That's the only reason he doesn't insist on taking all the credit himself. He wants me to think I can't trust anyone but him—which is precisely why I can't trust him at all.

But even telling himself so, Tsuzuki had to wonder if there wasn't an ounce of truth to it. It was too convenient, how Muraki was able to play fast and loose with the laws of life and death—and kept getting away with it, too. Was he really that good—had his grandfather really provided him such a sturdy foundation from which to bring back the dead, Frankenstein-style? Or had someone been helping him out with the big stuff the whole time?

"I'm going to find out," Tsuzuki swore. When Muraki scoffed as though to say, From here?, Tsuzuki shot back: "Or my coworkers will. This isn't the sort of thing they can just write off, let go. Whoever you're working with, they'll figure it out and put an end to whatever benefits you're getting."

"Oh, I have no doubt they will. That secretary fellow of yours seemed to have a particularly strong dislike of me. I'm sure he will be especially zealous about exposing all my secrets. But it won't do them any good. I'm afraid I may have already called in my last favor."

It was Tsuzuki's turn to force a laugh. "Let me guess. Me."

"Not everything is about you, Tsuzuki." But it wasn't a denial either.

"No, not everything." Tsuzuki allowed him that. "But this is. Isn't it? It's about you and me. At least . . ."

He took a step toward Muraki. Looked up at him through his lashes in that way that always made Tatsumi, for all his policies and principles, capitulate to whatever Tsuzuki's excuse or plea was at the moment. "That's what you keep telling me. That's what you've gone through all this trouble to make me understand: that it's been about us from the beginning."

There. Let him try and deny it.

But, of course, Muraki couldn't. And he wouldn't. He stared at Tsuzuki for a few seconds, tight-lipped, and if Tsuzuki could claim any victory, perhaps it was this one. That he had finally said something to put Muraki at a loss for words.

But in his mind, a warning sounded. He couldn't take this too far. Back home, it might have been only a game. He might have used this tactic on his coworkers or a case to get what he wanted, but that didn't mean Muraki would take it the same way. Knowing him, he would take it as an invitation. Or worse: a sign that he was wearing Tsuzuki down. So Tsuzuki could throw those words at him, he could stare Muraki down with all the defiance he could muster, but that was all he dared do. If Muraki reached out to touch him, Tsuzuki was sure he would recoil from it just the same as always, and all his defiance would prove a mere weak gesture.

Eventually, the spell broke. Muraki turned away with a smile.

"Allow me to tell you a story, Tsuzuki."

What is this, show and tell? But Tsuzuki only said, "Okay."

"Nine, almost ten years ago now," Muraki said, "I laid a trap in the hopes of seeing you. By that time, I had some inkling of your work and some suspicions about what you were, but—I am a man of science, after all—I had to test my theory.

"So I found myself a subject." A slight laugh. "Or is it fairer to say he found me? The opportunity that presented itself was too perfect not to take. So I made him mine, practically scrawled my own name in his body, and cursed him to remain just on the very precipice of death for the foreseeable future. In excruciating pain, at every waking moment, terrified of falling asleep—wanting so much to die, but unable to do anything but keep living. Remind you of anyone, Tsuzuki?"

Hisoka. Guilt flared up strong again within Tsuzuki. It wasn't enough to rub the responsibility for Hisoka's final death in his face again and again. Muraki relished this: reminding Tsuzuki that it was all his fault from the beginning. Before he had even known Muraki, before that man's existence had been a blip on the Summons Division's radar, he was doing evil in Tsuzuki's name.

But that wasn't entirely what Muraki meant, as he stood there meeting Tsuzuki's defiant gaze with one much mightier. You did that to him . . . for me. Deep down, perhaps Tsuzuki had always known it. Suspected it at very least. But when the words were said aloud—when he could not run from the truth any longer, when he had to confront it, it took on meaning he'd never felt before. "You were trying to . . . to copy what had happened to me?"

"Of course, I must have read Grandfather's journals about you a thousand times. I wanted to see for myself what it would look like, for a soul to be trapped in a body that's turned against it—a body that will not cease to live. But, as you know, unlike yourself, the boy was human. He had to be kept in that state by artificial means."

Tsuzuki felt like he was going to be sick. He felt behind him for something with which to brace himself, but there was nothing. By now, the depths of Muraki's sickness didn't much surprise him; but it had been so much easier to think that that sickness, that perversion, had been the sole cause for Hisoka's death. But it was my fault. It was always my fault. Hisoka. . . . If I had known. . . .

What? What could he possibly have done?

"To be frank, I didn't expect it to take three years for the boy to die," Muraki said, as though it were merely the length of time that troubled Tsuzuki so visibly. "I was certain the proper authorities would intervene before it could go that far. Perhaps, I thought, I had done something wrong, that Enma did not register the boy's soul as living dead. But I was mistaken. My little love letter had reached the Judgment Bureau's attention after all. They did send someone to investigate."

Just not whom Muraki had been expecting. And not anyone from Summons. Tsuzuki remembered that much for certain. Hisoka's official record had his death as a mysterious illness. How difficult would it have been to uncover the truth?

Or had Enma known the truth all along? And if he had, why had he covered it up?

"They just didn't send the right someone. Or perhaps they just didn't care."

Tsuzuki's teeth hurt so hard from gnashing them. With a growl tearing out of him, he lunged. He grabbed a fistful of Muraki's shirt, aiming his other fist at Muraki's head, throwing all this strength and all his hatred for that man and for himself behind it.

He heard more than felt the lens of the glasses crack beneath his fist, and Muraki's grunt of surprise and pain was more satisfying yet. His heart fluttering with a surge of elation, a grin just tugging at the corner of his lips, Tsuzuki hit him again, and again—

Until his blow was blocked, his wrist caught in Muraki's grip, and the doctor slammed his forehead down on Tsuzuki's. Pain exploded in his skull as he heard his nose break. It seemed even the ability to breathe had been knocked out of him, and he folded in on himself.

Muraki was there to catch him, however, enfolding Tsuzuki in a farce of an embrace that did not match the ice in his words when he whispered in Tsuzuki's ear: "I'm counting on that rage, Tsuzuki. But you will never be strong enough to win until you embrace it fully. Control it, lest it control you."

Tsuzuki managed to push himself away to arm's length, even if for the moment his vision was reeling so much he still needed Muraki for support. "Bastard—"

"You'll learn to thank me. Once you've come to appreciate your true value. You'll see that everything I've put you through is for your own good."

How had he survived? It was true what Tsuzuki said, the serpent's fire should have killed him.

Yet he remembered his consciousness returning slowly. With amazed relief. He was alive. Or, at least, aware. Since such things as shinigami existed, he could not count out that his consciousness of his surroundings was not that of his deceased soul, awakening to a new level of existence.

". . . should have let him perish in the flames. This one will cause more trouble than he's worth."

"But Our Lord has plans for him. He cannot serve his purpose if he no longer exists."

The voices reached him as if through a dense fog, and his damaged eyes could only make out vague shapes, impressions and outlines. Man-like shapes, but with heads of animals. A horse, or perhaps an ass, with a long snout and tall, pointed ears. The horns and ring-pierced nostrils of a bull on another. . . . Wasn't Enma reported to have servants such as these guarding his throne? "Blasted half-breed clone," said the first creature that had spoken, whose nasal voice Muraki presumed belonged to the horse-headed demon. "Such a thing should never have been given life in the first place."

"But he was. And he is. And it is not for you lot to question my will."

The voice that spoke now was sweet—the gender, almost impossible to determine, and age even more so. It spoke with an authority that even he, in his defiant heart, felt a yearning to surrender to: the undeniable attraction of great and ancient power. He had an impression of skin black as charcoal, hair as long and fine as his mother's, a delicate hand passing like the brush of a feather over his face. Power, yes, but mercy also. So this, he thought, is what it is to be in the embrace of Death. How oddly comforting, to know there was nothing left to do. How wonderfully heavy he felt, like after a particularly satisfying night of love-making, to know that very soon he would no longer have to fight.

Just a little longer, and the fog would pass from his eyes, allowing him to look upon the face of he whom Muraki had defied for so long, he whose tyranny Muraki would oppose until his—undoubtedly close-at-hand—last breath: the Great King Enma, Lord of the Dead.

But when his vision cleared, it was a different face he found looking down into his own, like the Virgin in a pietà—a face he was already familiar with. And why should it still surprise him, that demons could imitate the angels better than anything else was able?

"My dear, dear Kazutaka," the sickly-sweet voice of Ashtaroth said, "surely you did not think I would allow you to slither out of our deal as easily as that? Not when I still have such use for you."

"Sir?"

Muraki looked up from his thoughts to see Sakaki standing in the kitchen doorway. The concern was clear from the man's tone. And Muraki was well aware how he looked, with a damp cloth held over one side of his face, his shirt front still spattered with blood from Tsuzuki's broken nose.

"It isn't mine," he assured his man of the latter.

"And I suppose that isn't either?" Sakaki said when Muraki lowered the washcloth, revealing the smattering of cuts and dark bruises already forming around his left eye.

Muraki grinned, as he had as a boy. "You should see the other guy."

And Sakaki sighed, taking the washcloth off Muraki's hands and running it under fresh water. "And you still think this is a wise course of action?"

"Didn't you think it was wise when you did the same for me?"

"That was different. You weren't hell-bent on killing me."

On that point, Muraki knew better than to argue.

And he was grateful to the man. Sakaki's had been the first face he saw when he returned to consciousness in his own world.

Once upon a time, he had been Muraki's father's driver as well, and his butler, valet, secretary—whatever the Muraki household's need was at the time, that man seamlessly filled it. Maids were replaceable—particularly after Shidou Saki had entered the household—but Sakaki was as much a fixture in his father's house as the unmovable boulders in its garden. Muraki never did know as a boy where Sakaki had come from, only that this stoic, impeccably dressed man had shown up sometime shortly after his grandfather's death, and never left. He had paid Sakaki's comings and goings little attention, until that fateful day, after the funeral for his parents, when all the guests had gone home. . . .

It was one of those moments a person has when he first recognizes the humanity of another individual as equal to his own—the moment when one understands that he is not the only self-sovereign soul inhabiting his world. Looking up at Sakaki through the smoke of a just-fired shotgun, Muraki saw the man through new eyes. Or, perhaps, truly, for the first time. In doing so, somehow he also saw himself as Sakaki did, as possessing of some quality worth protecting. And it was that, more than the immeasurable gratitude he owed the man, that haunted Muraki still.

Most people never saw the monster that lurked in him until it was too late. But Sakaki, it seemed, saw some goodness that even Muraki himself was hard-pressed to acknowledge.

So when he had awoken after the fire in Kyoto to find himself in his grandfather's European-styled home, Sakaki waiting patiently by his bed with an old book across his knee, Muraki did not wonder how the old man had brought him here, or feel ashamed of having his needs taken care of like he was a child again. He owed Sakaki more than he could ever begin to repay. And Sakaki would not hear a word of it. Maybe he saw his continued service as penance for failing to save Muraki's father. But, then again, perhaps that was overthinking a simple matter. Perhaps it really had been the young Kazutaka he'd been hired to watch over from the beginning.

Sakaki placed the cool cloth to Muraki's temple, garnering a small hiss. But this wasn't how Muraki wanted his servant and mentor to see him. He snatched the washcloth back, not caring if Sakaki took offense at that. Muraki was not a boy anymore. He could be trusted to decide for himself what needed to be done.

"I must at least insist that you forgo your glasses," Sakaki said, "if you insist on continuing this."

"Good night, Sakaki," was all Muraki said to that, and let that be the man's cue to release him of his care for the evening.

There was still so much more that could be said. But Sakaki clenched down on any further protest. It would do him no good anyway.

"Good night, young master."