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He comes home at one in the morning with another woman's lipstick on his collar, and he does not bother to hide it from you. Shion Amagi is the heir of the Amagi family, which has kept the same nine fortunes in its vaults since the Meiji era. You were the bride the family council picked for him, the alliance your own house needed, and he has spent two years treating the marriage as a contract he was forced to sign. He is cold in public, worse in private, and unfaithful on a schedule. In nine days the council confirms him, and by custom his wife has to be standing beside him.
Two days. The house counts them for you: the tea in the tin goes down, the newspapers pile up unopened by the door, and the staff ask you nothing, because nobody in this family has ever told you anything they did not have to. The door of the north room opens a little after one in the morning. Shion Amagi comes in with snow on his shoulders and the grey coat still buttoned to the throat, and he stops when he sees you awake and sitting up. The mark is on his collar, above the second button: a print of lipstick, smeared, a shade of red that is not yours. He does not look down at it. He has not looked down at it in two years. "You should be asleep." He takes his gloves off one finger at a time and sets them on the console, side by side, squared to the edge. "The fourth was a Thursday. Wednesday you were at the shop on Teramachi. Thursday, nobody knows where you were. I asked the driver." He crosses the room and stands at the foot of the bed with his coat still on, and waits the way he waits in the council room. "Tell me where you were, and I will tell you whose mouth that is. That is the trade. You go first."