Hope of a life beyond the mistress’s walls.
Hope of a life with purpose.
Hope of finding meaning in a world going mad.
I had no idea what was truly being asked of me, only that it would be difficult and likely dangerous. But it would be mine.
Mypath.
Mychoice.
And to a slave,choicewas everything.
Careful not to wake Sakurai, I moved his arm and sat up. Instinct had me check the shadows, every corner of my chamber, every nook between shelves and tables and chairs. Satisfied, I replayed the conversation in Momoko’s office one last time. I saw the sternness in the woman’s gaze, the conviction in her voice, the iron will permeating every part of her being. She believed in the Empire. She fought for its people. She served the Emperor.
With a final nod, more to myself than my empty room, I whispered, “I accept.”
The moment the words left my lips, a golden shimmer caught my eye, and a coin bearing the Emperor’s visage, a coin worth ten times my life in the market square, appeared on the pallet before me.
Chapter 18
Kazashita
Ihad to get inside the House of Petals. That certainty sat in my gut like a stone, heavy and immovable. I couldn’t explain it logically. I had no evidence or proof, nothing but instinct and desperate hope. But I knew somehow. IknewKaneko was there.
The problem was everything else.
I peered at my reflection in a puddle and barely recognized the waif looking back. My clothes—the only ones I had left—were little more than torn rags, stained with fish guts and tar and reeking sweat. My face was gaunt, stubbled, and marked too many nights of sleeping in alleyways. My hands were scarred and callused, with broken nails and one finger bent at an odd angle from a crate that had slipped a few weeks ago. I looked like something a whale had failed to digest and coughed up onto the shore.
The House of Petals catered to the wealthy and powerful, men in silk robes who paid more for a single evening than I had earned in six months of dock work. After hiring the rickshaw tofollow the madame, I had onemonin my pocket. One copper coin that might buy a bowl of watery soup or a cup of bad sake.
If it hadn’t been so achingly painful, the whole thing would’ve been laughable.
But I would make it work. Somehow.
I doubled my shifts to earn extra coin, worked dawn to dusk hauling cargo, then took evening work unloading fishing vessels that came in after dark. My body screamed in protest every night when I fell onto my pallet. My muscles burned, and my back developed an ache that never fully subsided, even when I slept.
EverymonI earned went into a small pouch I kept tied inside my shirt, pressed against my skin. I didn’t trust leaving it in my room.
Over the next few weeks, the coins accumulated. Onemonbecame two. Two became five. Five became ten. It was not enough, would never be enough at this rate, but I kept working, kept hauling, kept putting one foot in front of the other even when my body wanted to collapse.
Kaneko is there, and he’s worth all of this. Hells, he’s worth everything. Just a little more. Just a little longer.
The mantra kept me moving when nothing else would.
On the twentieth day of this brutal routine—or was it the twentieth?—the days had started to blur—I stumbled into the common room of the Harbor’s Rest. My hands were raw from rope burns, my shoulders felt like they might separate from my body, and my legs threatened to give out with every step.
But I was hungry, so hungry that my stomach had stopped growling and started cramping, sending sharp pains through my gut. I ordered a bowl of soup, mostly water with a few vegetables floating like dead fish in the harbor—but it was hot, and it was food, and it cost only onemon.
I found a dark corner and sat with my back to the wall, watching the room while I ate. The common room was packed. Sailors were everywhere—drinking, laughing, shouting over each other. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of unwashed men and sake. A fight broke out near the bar, two men grappling while their companions cheered them on. The innkeeper barely glanced up from pouring drinks.
This was the scum of Bara. The bottom layer. Men like me who had nothing and nowhere to go.
I kept my head down and focused on my soup, lifting the bowl to my lips. It tasted like hot saltwater with a hint of decay, but I did not care. My body needed fuel.
Two tables over, men threw coins into a pot and dice across the table, cursing when they lost, crowing when they won. The pile of copper and silver grew, shrank, then grew again. I watched it with dull interest. Gambling was a fool’s game, a way to lose what little you had even faster. I’d seen that a thousand times with men onThe Worm.
But gods, that pile of coins. If I could win just one round—
