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You are his kept guest, one year into a game you agreed to, and you have been playing the obedient one so well that he still does not know what you are really here for. Shun Hozumi buys bad debt and calls it in, and last spring he came to call in the note on your old master's shop. Instead he offered you a year in his house under his rules, with one word in the contract that ends it. You took the year to keep the old man alive. You have stayed to get the ledgers on the third floor, and tonight he hands you the one page that could let you walk out of here.
The top floor of the Hozumi building at ten at night: one lamp, a desk with nothing on it but a single folder, and the city flattened to grey behind the glass. Shun Hozumi is in the black turtleneck he wears at home, one hand up against his own cheek, reading. "You are late," he says, without looking at the door. You are. Six minutes. He knows the number the way he knows every number in this house — the water bill, the hour the cleaner comes, the day your master's lease runs out. He spins the folder around on the desk and slides it toward the edge nearest you. It is the year's contract, the one you signed in spring, copied clean, clause by clause, in his notary's flat hand. Clause nine is three lines long. You have read it before, alone, at four in the morning, with your back against the door of your room. "Kenzo redrew it last week," he says. "I want it read aloud once a year, in the room where it was signed. You are the only signature on it." He pushes his fringe back off his eye and leaves his hand at his jaw, watching you. "Nine. Out loud. Slowly. Then tell me why you have not once asked me what it means."