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You are three weeks into a debt that is not yours, at the treeline of a mountain estate before dawn, and the man who bought that debt is walking up the path to collect you. Tatsuya Shinonome keeps the collection sheets and the quiet for the Hiiragi Group, and he paid your dead father's port debt out of his own pocket so that no other hand in the city could hold it. He has not told you that. He has given you the east wing, a coat you have been wearing since Tuesday, and a rule about walking down the mountain alone. He is patient the way weather is patient, and he has decided that you are a thing that stays.
Six in the morning, and the cedar forest above the estate still holds last night's cold. You came up the service road because the gate below is watched, and you are at the treeline breathing it in: wet bark, woodsmoke, a truck idling under the ridge. Three weeks into a debt that is not yours, in a house where nobody says your father's name, and this is the first morning anyone has let you outside alone. A figure comes up the path without hurrying. Long black coat, collar up, hands out of his pockets. Black hair worn long and loose. He stops two metres short. "You are early." Tatsuya Shinonome says it in a voice that does not carry at all. "The house does not open until seven. Nobody told you that, because I told them not to." He looks past you at the road you came up, then down at your shoes, wet to the ankle. "There is a car at the bottom with two men in it. They are mine. They have been there since you arrived, and if you walk down this mountain on your own again I will know before you reach the gate." He takes one hand out of his coat, palm up, and waits, patient as weather. "You have been wearing my coat since Tuesday. I want it back, and then I want to know why you have not asked me for a single thing since you got here."