Kyoto Estate

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The car sounded tired.

Not dying. Just deeply offended.

Every time Sasaki changed gear, it responded with the mechanical sigh of a machine that had seen my career prospects and found them underfunded. Kyoto slid by outside in soft evening fragments—shop lights, bicycles, laundry shadows, the whole city looking politely unaware that I was on my way to a third date with a man who had already done irreversible damage to my internal balance.

Sasaki drove in silence for exactly long enough to make me nervous on purpose.

Then, calmly, without looking at me, he said, “This is not the correct moment for a relationship.”

I turned in my seat. “Good evening to you too.”

He kept his eyes on the road, hands exact on the wheel. “You should be focusing on your career. Your label will not approve. Your schedule will not support it. Your image will not benefit from it. A new life generally stabilizes more efficiently when not complicated by romantic attachment.”

I folded my arms and looked out the window, mostly so he wouldn’t see how quickly the word romantic had lit up my whole nervous system again.

“I’m allowed to have a life,” I said.

“You are attempting to build one.”

“Yes,” I shot back. “And, surprising though this may be, I would like that life to include joy.”

Sasaki’s expression did not move. “Joy is not the issue.”

“Really? Because from your tone, joy seems extremely much the issue.”

He drove another few seconds in silence. The engine grumbled. The street narrowed. Somewhere ahead, apparently, was Edmund’s address—an address I had not expected to be real enough to require this much driving.

That was the strange part. For a painter, he was not exactly poor. Not obscenely rich either—not in the vulgar, obvious way—but well-off enough that the whole picture had become slightly confusing. The family background Sasaki had run on him had come back clean. Respectable, even. Nothing criminal. Nothing theatrical. Just money, land, an old Kyoto name, and a son with flowing blond hair calling himself Ithion in galleries.

It was annoying.

I preferred my mysteries with more visible damage.

“You don’t trust him,” I said.

“No.”

“That was immediate.”

“There is also the other matter.”

I didn’t answer right away.

Because I knew what he meant.

Of course I knew.

I stared at the windshield.

“Sasaki—”

“If you choose to take this relationship further,” he said, still maddeningly calm, “you know what the consequence will be.”

I went hot all at once.

He did not need to say the word. He knew I already had.

The key.

My hands tightened in my lap.

Outside, the city kept moving as if this were a perfectly normal conversation for a teenage pop singer to be having on the way to see a man she absolutely was not thinking indecent thoughts about every five minutes.

“That,” I said, with great dignity and a completely betrayed face, “is wildly premature.”

“It is fact.”

“It is inappropriate.”

“It is relevant.”

I turned to him in open outrage. “We have seen each other twice.”

“Correct.”

“Twice.”

“Yes.”

“That is not exactly the threshold at which one begins making… irreversible metaphysical decisions.”

He gave me a brief glance, which was somehow worse than a lecture.

For a while I thought Sasaki had taken a wrong turn and decided not to admit it out of principle.

Kyoto had already fallen behind us in layers—streets, houses, shops, then quieter roads, then something stranger. Trees. Long stretches of trees. Gravel under the tires. Low stone walls appearing and disappearing in the dusk. We had been driving through what looked suspiciously like a private park for long enough that I finally turned in my seat and asked, “Where are we?”

Sasaki kept his hands on the wheel.

“Inside the estate,” he said.

I stared at him.

“The estate?”

“Yes.”

I looked out again, harder this time, and felt my whole mental image of Edmund Fujiwara begin to collapse in expensive silence. Because this was not a painter’s house. This was not even a rich painter’s house. This was the kind of land people inherited from wars and then pretended it had always belonged to them. We passed figures walking along the internal roads—garden staff, tenants, maybe household workers, all moving with that peculiar calm of people who belonged to a property large enough to contain its own weather. Somewhere behind us we had crossed an outer gate. Then another. And now, ahead, the inner gate came into view, black iron set into stone, flanked by lamps already lit for the evening. A pair of guards stepped forward, recognized the car, and let us through without delay.

And then the house appeared.

No—house was not the word. Manor was trying. Mansion was embarrassed. This thing rose out of the darkening grounds like some aristocratic hallucination, all pale walls and towers and impossible breadth, a lavish palace-like structure on the outskirts of Kyoto that looked less built than summoned. It had the posture of a castle and the vanity of an English fantasy. Gables, terraces, wings, windows catching the last blue of the sky like it had personally ordered the sunset. I leaned forward without meaning to.

“What,” I said slowly, “are you talking about, this guy not being rich?”

Sasaki did not answer.

I kept staring as I neared the entrance.

The front doors opened, and I entered the kind of hall that made breathing feel underdressed.

Everything inside seemed arranged not by decorators but by a dynasty with unresolved power issues. Polished floors wide enough to host diplomacy. Ceilings so high they could had clouds. Flowers placed with military precision. Portraits watching from the walls with the relaxed confidence of people who had owned lands and islands for generations. I became aware of my clothes all at once. They were perfectly fine. Sensible. Nice, even. But in that hall, against all that inherited grandeur, they stopped looking like an outfit and started looking like an apology.

We passed through another set of doors—because apparently this place had outer layers like an onion designed by royalty—and that was when she appeared.

She came slicing down the corridor at speed, a short figure with the kind of certainty that made servants and architecture seem equally willing to move out of her way. She looked maybe a little older than me. Her hair was an impossible white-blonde, nearly silver in the light, and she wore a blue-and-purple mini dress with the silhouette of an eighteenth-century court gown translated through money, nerves, and very modern intentions. It was the sort of dress that did not so much cost money as consume it. She came in close to the butler first—territorially, efficiently—then turned and took me in with one long glance.

Not hostile.

Worse.

Curious in the manner of a collector assessing whether a newly discovered animal should be fed or framed.

“Impressive,” she said.

The butler bowed immediately. “Miss Fujiwara, this is Erika Takamine. The young master’s guest.”

“I gathered that,” she said.

And then, just like that, her face changed. A smile opened across it—warm, elegant, perfectly managed, and therefore much more dangerous than open rudeness.

“You are welcome in this house, Erika Takamine,” she said. “I am Iliana. Edmund’s sister.”

I bowed as if I had done this sort of thing before and was not, in fact, improvising under social artillery.

“Nice to meet you.”

She circled me once more with a small smirk, apparently not yet finished with her field research.

“You’ve dated my brother twice now, haven’t you?” she asked. “How far have you gotten?”

For one full second I forgot every language I spoke.

Not because she sounded cruel. That was the unnerving part. Her tone was perfectly civil. Light, even. She delivered the question with the gentle ease of someone asking if I preferred tea or coffee, which somehow made it ten times more lethal.

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I opened my mouth, ready to perish where I stood—

“Not far, step-sister,” a voice said from above. “I assure you.”

I looked up.

And there he was.

Edmund—not Ithion now, not the golden apparition at the stall, but Edmund in his own house, on his own stairs, looking somehow even more dangerous for being slightly undone. Blonde. Tall. Built like a greek god commissioned by someone with scandalous taste. He wore only a shirt, half open at the collar, sleeves rolled up, with faint paint smudges still on his hands as if he had only just stepped away from a canvas. Which, naturally, made everything much worse. Impeccably dressed Edmund had been one kind of problem. Edmund half-dressed from work looked like temptation with family money.

He smiled down at me.

“Welcome, Eden” he said. “Join me.”

I bowed quickly to Iliana. She returned it with perfect grace, then walked off with the speed of a woman who had already caused exactly the amount of damage she intended.

“Bring her to the ball tonight, Edmund” she called over her shoulder.

Ball?

My mind hit the word, bounced off it, and returned with only one conclusion: this house was no longer operating under normal laws.

“Ball?” I echoed.

“Excuse my sweet sister,” he said.

And then he smiled again.

“No harm,” I said much too quickly. “It’s all good.”

“Come,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

We began walking, and I learned two new things in the space of twenty seconds. First, each part of the house should have been its own municipality. Second, standing close to him did not make me calmer. It made me dramatically worse.

“I hope reaching this place wasn’t too difficult,” he said.

“No, not at all,” I replied. “Although I wasn’t expecting you to live in a palace that could rival Versailles on the outskirts of Kyoto.”

He glanced at me with that quiet certainty of his, as though absurd wealth were simply another medium he happened to work in.

“I assure you,” he said, “it doesn’t hold a candle to Versailles.”

That should not have been attractive.

It was deeply, offensively attractive.

“Ah,” I said, trying to get ahead of my own nervous system before it embarrassed me again, “then I’m guessing you want to show me your studio?”

“And some of my works,” he said.

Obviously I had prepared for this.

The moment I realized Edmud Fujiwara might be the kind of man who owned both a painter’s name and a private principality, I had gone straight to the library and taken out every modern art book I could carry without looking mentally unstable.

Then I had gone home, stacked them on the floor, and made Sasaki explain the whole thing to me like I was cramming for a diplomatic summit in a foreign religion. Kyoto money, apparently, liked modern art in the same way it liked silence, imported liquor, and emotionally inaccessible architecture.

Abstract things. Serious things. Paintings involving squares, circles, lines, violent beige, and titles like Interior Field No. 4 or Stillness in Red Geometry or Untitled Composition with Absence.

I had stared at pages full of black rectangles floating in white voids and works that looked like somebody had thrown paint cans at a wall during an existential dispute and then charged admission. Sasaki, traitor that he was, had explained them all with complete sincerity.

I found most of it repugnant.

Not boring, exactly. Worse. Important-looking in a way that demanded approval while resembling accidents. Feelings to convey? Fine. But not like that. Not with one blue square in the corner and three scratched lines pretending to be grief.

So my strategy had been simple: be honest, but graceful.

Then he asked, as we walked through the endless elegance of his house, “Have you ever been in love?”

And for one bright, fatal second, the answer that nearly came out was: Maybe I am now.

No. Absolutely not. Arrest that thought immediately.

“Not really,” I said instead. “I was practicing too hard to become an idol.”

The moment the words left my mouth, I knew it was a bad call.

“In love with your dreams, then,” he said.

“Yes,” I replied quickly. “Yes. Something like that.”

He nodded once, as if filing it away under a category more revealing than I intended.

“I am devoting all my life to my calling as well,” he said.

Oh no.

Oh, no no no.

He’s going to show me abstract art.

I could feel the trap closing around me in tasteful lighting.

Because I had been prepared to be honest. Brave, even. Graceful and direct and maybe a little witty.

But that had been before he said calling in that voice of his, before he turned the subject into devotion instead of preference. Now if he walked me into a room full of monochrome canvases and circular arrangements of painted despair, I could not possibly tell him what I truly thought.

I could not tell this beautiful man, who looked like a half-dressed Renaissance catastrophe and spoke about art like it was blood, that I found certain kinds of modern painting silly, ugly, tasteless wastes of wall space.

He opened the studio door, and I stepped into something that looked less like a painter’s workspace and more like a Florentine bottega accidentally displaced into modern Kyoto.

Ramps. Scaffolds. Tables crowded with pigments, brushes, charcoal, stretched canvases, and jars clouded with mineral dust. The air carried linseed oil, stone, varnish, and labor. Real labor. Not curated chaos. Not decorative mess. Work. And then my eyes lifted—and the rest of me stopped.

The ceiling.

No way.

Across the vault above us, unmistakable even to me, was the Creazione di Adamo—not copied carelessly, not referenced, but painted with such command that for one irrational second I felt as though I’d walked into the wrong century.

And on the colossal wall at the far end of the hall, still unfinished, still unfolding in charcoal marks and painted sections and raw ambition, was the Giudizio Universale.

I just stood there.

Abstract art vanished from my mind so completely it might never have existed.

This was not abstraction. This was not rich-people geometry. This was the summit. The impossible summit. Renaissance painting, scale and nerve and human anatomy and judgment and heaven and terror and beauty all at once.

My mouth was open.

I was aware of that. I simply had no intention of fixing it.

“Did you do these?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, continuing inward as if this were a reasonably modest fact.

He stopped, then turned back toward me.

“What do you think?”

For one second I couldn’t answer at all.

Then I looked up again at the painted ceiling, at the vast unfinished violence and glory on the far wall, and said the only honest thing my body would allow.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that if you would show me one black square on a white canvas after this, I would have had to assume civilization had collapsed.”

He laughed.

Not politely. Not as a favor. Genuinely laughed.

And I laughed too, mostly out of relief, partly because the sound of it did dangerous things to my internal structure. For just one brief second, though, something cold moved down my spine—some tiny chill I couldn’t name fast enough before it was gone.

Then he took my hand.

Everything in me went up at once.

My pulse. My thoughts. My chances of behaving like an adult.

My eyes snapped to his.

“We do have some modern art paintings somewhere,” he said.

I smiled, flustered in the most positive sense available to human language.

“But we only put them up when there are certain guests.”

That made me laugh again. “Oh, so this is a personalized art tour for me?”

“More than that,” he said. “Would you help me?”

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I drew back half an inch with another helpless smile. “I can’t paint. Not at all.”

His hand rose and came to rest lightly on my arm.

And at that point I could really feel him—his warmth through the fabric, the impossible calm of his touch, the perfect scent of his skin, clean and close and completely unfair.

“I’ll guide you,” he said.

That did not help.

It made everything worse.

Because being looked at by him was already difficult enough. Being touched by him while he said things like that, in that voice, in a studio full of impossible beauty, felt less like conversation and more like stepping into a trap lined with silk and good lighting.

My mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

I was suddenly aware of my own heartbeat in absurd detail.

“You,” I said, with what I hoped passed for composure and what probably did not, “are making this very difficult to refuse.”

He led me up the scaffold with the kind of calm confidence that suggested he had no fear of heights, paint, or the effects he was having on me. The platform ran along the half-finished wall in a narrow strip, close enough to the plaster to feel intimate, far enough from the floor to make the whole room drop away into colored silence. He handed me a brush, then another, rejecting the first with a small shake of his head.

“Not that one,”