Chapter 1: A Farce

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

At eighteen, Yukishiro Tomoe was the kind of beauty that felt like a quiet first snow. Her hair, a silken cascade the color of night, spilled over shoulders so pale they seemed carved from winter snow. They were delicate shoulders, the kind that looked as though the sheer weight of her hair might leave a faint, rose-colored impression on her skin.

But it was her eyes that truly held you captive—cold, clear pools of sapphire that seemed to gaze at the world from a great, serene distance. And then there was her mouth. Between lips that were full, moist, and perpetually parted, flashed twin rows of pearlescent teeth. She was blessed by the heavens, a vision so profound that no man could look away.

Tomoe could never have fathomed that just ten years later, the indifferent march of time would strip that beauty away, piece by painful piece.

The silken cascade was gone, vanished like a dream upon waking, leaving only a polished, gleaming scalp that reflected the harsh fluorescent lights of the hospital room. Her snow-white shoulders had turned sallow, defeated. Her sapphire eyes, once so clear, were now clouded, like ancient amber preserving some forgotten tragedy. Her lips, once a promise, were withered and cracked, framing a mouth that held only a few lonely teeth.

At twenty-eight, from the sterile confines of her hospital bed, Tomoe felt a bitter sea of resentment churn in her gut. The pain of her illness was a constant, gnawing agony, but it was nothing compared to the regret she felt for the man she had met a decade ago.

Memory is a locked door. No matter how firmly you shut it, you always find yourself looking back, a nagging doubt wondering if the latch truly caught.

The man she had once loved with an unwavering, almost holy conviction, the man she now hated with that same burning intensity—she could no longer even conjure the shape of his face.

All that remained was the memory of his smile. It was like the sun, a brilliant, blinding light. A memory that only grew more radiant over the years, until she felt herself dissolving, melting away beneath its impossible glare.

Tomoe’s smooth, flat stomach had slowly begun to swell, but the smile that had planted the seed was nowhere to be found.

“I… I have a fiancée.”

The words had been delivered with his face arranged into a perfect mask of guilt. It was only later that Tomoe learned the full truth: he was a son-in-law, a man adopted into the monstrously powerful Fujiwara family. A sprawling zaibatsu, a corporate empire whose shadow fell across the brand names of nearly every appliance she had ever owned.

“I’ll make it right,” he had promised, the words empty and useless.

Tomoe had simply walked away, the unspoken offer of his compensation hanging like poison in the air between them.

She often thought of herself as the ultimate fool. The girl who came home with a man’s child in her belly, a walking scandal. The subject of hushed, venomous whispers from neighbors, who branded her as cheap, as ruined. Shunned by relatives, a source of theatrical, chest-beating shame for her parents, her friends vanishing like ghosts.

There could be no greater fool in all of Japan. She had fled her hometown, cast out by everyone she knew, and still, still she had given birth to the child.

A single woman raising a newborn in the relentless anonymity of Tokyo, working dead-end jobs just to survive—there is no harder life. And she had refused so much help.

She refused the man’s money. She refused the earnest advances of a kind colleague at the bento shop. If she had just abandoned the child, she could have taken the settlement, found a simple, honest man, and started over.

Tomoe still had his number. A ghost in her cheap, cracked phone. But she hadn’t called when she was pregnant. She hadn’t called when she was struggling to feed their son. And now, as illness ravaged what was left of her, she still hadn’t called.

Her condition wasn’t terminal, not if she’d sought treatment early. But that would have required a fortune she could never possess.

Still, she refused to call. And yet, as she lay there, she couldn’t stop the ugly tendrils of resentment that crept toward her child. Her murky eyes, tinged with red, fixed on the boy keeping a silent vigil by her bed.

His name was Yukishiro Haruka. He was only ten, but the man he would become was already there, sketched in the fine lines of his face. He had inherited his mother’s lost beauty and all of his father’s damnable qualities. A purity that recalled the first snow, a radiance like the morning sun—a quiet, gentle warmth that made you want to draw closer. Men would find nothing in him to praise; women would find nothing in him to dislike.

His only flaw, if you could call it that, was a thinness that spoke of years of not-quite-enough.

Haruka felt his mother’s stare and assumed it was another wave of pain. He looked around for a piece of fruit, something to soothe her. He had rarely eaten fruit himself, but he knew it was sweet, and that sweets could sometimes blunt the sharpest edges of sorrow.

But the sterile, formica bedside table was spotless. Not a speck of dust, let alone an apple or a pear.

“What are you doing!” Tomoe snapped. Haruka, for reasons she couldn’t fathom, had suddenly placed his small, cool hand over hers.

His dark eyes were impossibly clear. “I’m here.”

The words lodged in Tomoe’s throat, and the roiling sea of her resentment grew still. After a long, quiet moment, she said, “Haruka, listen to me. If someone comes… when they ask… you tell them you made the call. You understand? You made the call.”

“What call, Mama?” The confusion in his voice was absolute.

Tomoe didn’t answer, instead murmuring to the ceiling as if in a trance. “I never begged him for anything… I never…”

“Mama, what are you saying? Begged who?” Haruka grew anxious, his mother’s words floating like incomprehensible smoke. He was so focused on her that he didn’t hear the soft click of the door opening behind him.

“You!”

Haruka heard the raw fury in his mother’s voice and spun around. A young woman stood in the doorway, framed by it, a figure of impossible elegance. He searched his limited vocabulary for a word to describe her. He’d seen so few women in his life that the only phrase he could find was that she was as beautiful as his own mother had once been.

To him, this was the highest praise imaginable, though the woman’s wine-red eyes held a chilling, predatory intensity.

“Wait outside,” she commanded the two hulking men in dark suits who flanked her. They bowed their heads in unison and retreated, pulling the door gently shut.

The woman’s gaze fell upon Tomoe. “You made the call?”

Tomoe’s lips remained sealed, a thin, stubborn line.

Haruka finally understood. He stepped forward, placing his small body between the woman and the bed. “I made the call.”

“You?” A corner of the woman’s mouth curled into a contemptuous smirk. Her wine-red eyes were so cold they felt like a physical touch.

Haruka fought the instinct to recoil. His mother was behind him. He lifted his chin and forced himself to meet her gaze. “It was me!”

The woman looked genuinely surprised. She had seen powerful men—politicians, CEOs—falter under that stare. Yet this slip of a boy held his ground.

Her tone softened, a fractional change. “It wasn’t you.”

“It was!” Haruka stood firm, a tiny, defiant guardian of his mother’s final wish.

“It was him,” Tomoe’s voice rasped, each word an effort. Her eyes, cloudy as they were, fixed on the woman with a desperate, pleading light. “He… he doesn’t want this life anymore. He doesn’t need anything from you. Just… let him have a chance. A normal life.”

The woman, however, saw past the begging to the feral hatred simmering beneath. “You hate me?”

“I hate him more! Is he too much of a coward to face me? To send you instead?” Tomoe bit her dry, cracked lips. “He must have had a very comfortable life. And look at me. I’m dying. You must be so pleased. No one is left to fight you for him now.”

“You’ve mistaken me for my older sister,” the woman said, a flicker of something like pity in her voice. “And the man you’re talking about… He died three years ago.”

Tomoe froze. The world seemed to stop. She stared blankly at the woman, whose startling youth suddenly, horribly, made sense.

Then, she fell back against the pillows, her eyes fixed on the stark white ceiling, and began to laugh. It was not a sound of humor, but a wild, unhinged torrent of sound that clawed at the air. “Hahaha, he’s dead… he’s dead… hahahaha, he died! Who was I even putting on this act for?”

A gush of blood erupted from her mouth, a grotesque flower blooming on the snow-white sheets.

“Mama!”

Haruka lunged forward, but his mother stopped him with a sharp cry. Tomoe’s desperate gaze was now locked on the young woman, searching, begging for an answer that wasn’t there.

The woman merely offered a cold, disdainful smile.

Tomoe’s own lips twisted into a tragic grin. “It was me who called. I’m begging you… please… just let him have a normal life…”

The woman’s smile faded, perhaps moved by the sheer, stubborn weight of Tomoe’s will.

“Haruka,” Tomoe called, her voice now a thread.

Unable to stop himself, Haruka rushed to her side, burying his face in her thin embrace, his small hand covering hers.

Tomoe whispered, “Haruka, you must be strong. And one more thing…” Her voice dropped to a hush.

Haruka leaned closer, his hand still resting on hers.

“…You are the ruin of me.”

With those words, she lunged, sinking her teeth into his left hand. It was a savage, grinding bite, a desperate attempt to leave a final, indelible mark. Her blood and his mingled on her lips.

Haruka didn’t cry out. He didn’t pull away. He only squeezed his eyes shut, his free hand coming to rest gently on the back of his mother’s trembling head.

A tremor ran through Tomoe’s body. Slowly, painfully, she released her jaw. For the first time, a single tear traced a path through the grime on her cheek. “Your mother has been such a fool, hasn’t she?”

“Mama,” Haruka choked out, his voice thick with shock and pain, “why would you ever think that?”

Tomoe smiled, a faint, self-mocking curve of her lips. “Be strong…” she whispered, and with that last smile, she was gone.

Haruka stared, his world fractured into silence.

The young woman looked from the boy to the corpse on the bed, her exquisitely beautiful face slackening as if suppressing a yawn.

Boring, she thought. What a profoundly foolish woman.

Life was nothing but a low-budget farce. The harder you tried to play your part with dignity, the more you ended up as the clown.

Haruka finally drew a breath, suppressing a sob that threatened to tear him apart. He stood up and turned to face her. “Who are you?”

“I was your mother’s enemy.”

The woman watched with a detached, clinical interest as his expression crumpled. “Or, to be more precise,” she added, her voice smooth as silk, “I was her rival.”

The last bit of color drained from Haruka’s face.

The woman’s hand shot out, her long, elegant fingers closing around his wrist, as effortless as a puppeteer taking hold of his marionette. “It’s time for you to come with me.”

And so, she thought with a flicker of amusement, another farce begins.