Tokyo's rain always carried a taste of rust that no amount of scrubbing could wash clean.
Tonight especially.
Outside the emergency wing of Keio University Hospital in Minato Ward, the downpour hammered the earth. Black clouds hung so low they threatened to crush the city beneath them. Rain lashed the glass curtain walls in dense sheets, each drop a frozen whip crack against the surface, filling the air with a sound like something breaking.
Nobody cared about the rain.
Every pair of eyes was locked on the ambulance screaming toward the entrance.
"It's here! Over there!"
"Move! Get the camera on it! Don't let the other stations beat us!"
"Takafumi Wakaba! It's really Takafumi Wakaba!"
Dozens of entertainment reporters in rain slickers descended like vultures, ignoring the hospital security guards screaming themselves hoarse about emergency lane restrictions. They swarmed the ambulance's rear doors, jostling and shoving, drawn to the scent of ruin.
Camera flashes burst in a continuous chain, ripping the black rain apart with strobes of searing white.
In that blinding glare, the rear doors slammed open.
A stretcher was rushed out.
On it lay a middle-aged man drenched in blood.
He had been one of the country's most beloved comedians, the "national mood-maker" of countless variety shows. Now he looked like a watermelon dropped from a rooftop. The oxygen mask had slipped sideways across his face, exposing features warped beyond recognition by pain and terror.
That face, the one that had made millions laugh, was now nothing but wreckage.
"Wakaba-san! Did you jump because of the cheating scandal?"
"Who is the underage girl that was blackmailing you?"
"How do you think Minami Mori feels about this? Do you have anything to say to her?"
"Say something! Wakaba-san!"
Microphones jabbed toward his bloodied face like spears. Every question dripped with venom, each reporter desperate to carve one more click of traffic from a dying man's flesh.
...
Twenty meters from the chaos of the emergency entrance, there was a dim flower bed.
No lights reached it. Only the drone of industrial air conditioning units humming through the rain.
A girl in a dark blue school blazer stood there, perfectly still.
No umbrella.
Ice-cold rain streamed down her pale blue hair, plastering it against cheeks so white they were nearly translucent, tracing her jawline before dripping from her chin onto a pleated skirt already soaked through.
Mutsumi Wakaba.
Takafumi Wakaba's only daughter.
The untouchable flower of Tsukinomori Girls' Academy.
She stood at the edge of the chaos like a swan that had lost its way, alone and motionless.
In the face of a scene that would have broken most people, her expression was blank.
No grief for a father hovering between life and death. No fear of the media swarm. Not even the anger you might expect from a girl of her standing confronted with catastrophe.
Those amber eyes, clear as polished glass, held nothing. Two gold coins with no one behind them.
She watched the circus unfold.
"Out of the way! All of you, move! The patient needs surgery! This is a hospital!"
The doctors' shouting finally tore a gap through the press of reporters.
The trauma room doors slammed shut. The red "Surgery in Progress" light blinked on overhead.
The reporters pulled back, but none left. They clustered in twos and threes along the lobby, the corridors, the doorways, smoking and comparing footage, waiting for the death announcement, or better yet, for the award-winning actress Minami Mori to arrive and shatter on camera.
Mutsumi shifted her stiff neck.
The rain had seeped into her bones. Cold gnawed through her.
She glanced down at the phone buzzing in her hand.
The screen lit up with dozens of missed calls. Relatives. Her father's management company. A handful of so-called "friends" who never called and were now circling under the banner of concern, hungry for gossip.
She returned none of them.
The screen went dark. She shoved the phone back into her soaked pocket.
Then.
Click, click, click...
The crisp rhythm of high heels echoed from the staff corridor off the side entrance.
Even on a night this loud, those footsteps carried an unmistakable composure.
Mutsumi's eyes shifted. The gold of her irises caught the faintest motion.
Stepping from the shadows was her mother, Minami Mori.
The former box-office queen, still one of Japan's most bankable leading ladies, looked immaculate. Outside the emergency room where her husband was fighting for his life, she wore a tailored black designer skirt suit and carried a small folding fan that served no purpose beyond accessory. Time had been absurdly kind to this woman, depositing nothing but the lush ripeness of maturity while leaving almost no trace of age.
Minami did not rush toward the trauma room.
She stopped under the eaves, pulled a jewel-encrusted compact from her handbag, and studied her eye makeup in the dim corridor light.
"Damn this weather."
She muttered the curse under her breath, brow creasing with irritation. "My makeup's running. When the cameras find me, I need to look worn down. The strong-woman-barely-holding-together look. Fragile but never ugly."
As she spoke, she produced a lipstick from a handbag worth more than most people's rent, touched up her lips with surgical precision, then deliberately mussed a few strands of her otherwise perfect hair.
Through all of this, she did not once glance at the daughter standing two meters away, drenched to the skin.
She did not ask, "How is your father?"
Mutsumi watched.
Those amber eyes didn't so much as ripple.
This is the Wakaba family.
This is what the public calls a model household.
A father who sold laughter for a living, who was in truth a man who couldn't keep his hands to himself, and who'd finally gone too far and been driven off a third-story balcony by a handful of photographs.
A mother who sold tears for a living, and who, on the eve of what might be a funeral, was calculating how to deliver the perfect crying scene to protect her endorsement deals and film contracts.
And Mutsumi herself...
Nothing more than a prop on a stage built of lies. A doll cast in the role of a loving daughter.
Snap.
Minami closed the compact and finally "noticed" her daughter in the shadows.
She looked Mutsumi up and down, taking in the drowned-rat state of her, and frowned.
"Mutsumi." Her tone was flat. "You're soaked and you can't even think to change? What if the reporters photograph you looking like this?"
Mutsumi said nothing.
Her fingers tightened around the phone in her pocket.
"Actually, never mind. This works." Something shifted behind Minami's eyes, and the corner of her mouth curved upward. "The drowned look plays more sympathetic. If reporters come at you, don't say a word. Cry."
She stepped closer and adjusted Mutsumi's collar. The gesture held no warmth whatsoever, just the cold efficiency of a stylist arranging a mannequin.
"Remember, cry prettily. Keep the tears pooled in your eyes. No snot running down your face. This is about the last shred of dignity our family has, and about whether Mama's PR campaign works. Understood?"
Dignity.
Mutsumi turned the word over in her mind.
Then her lashes lowered, long enough to veil whatever remained in those hollow eyes.
"...Mm."
A single syllable. No protest. No anger.
The obedience of a doll.
Minami was satisfied.
"Wait here. I need to go handle the media."
She drew a deep breath, and in that instant, the cold mask vanished. In its place: heartbreak. Anguish. The raw, trembling panic of a wife about to lose the love of her life.
The actress had stepped into character.
Her heels clattered across the wet pavement as she stumbled toward the blaze of lights in the main lobby. She hadn't taken three steps before the tremor entered her voice: "Takafumi! Takafumi, where are you?!"
Mutsumi watched her mother's flawless performance recede into the distance, then took one quiet step backward, folding herself deeper into the shadows.
The rain fell harder.
This world is rotten to the core, Mutsumi thought.
...
...
Less than a hundred meters from the hospital entrance, a black luxury sedan sat parked at the curb, half-swallowed by the curtain of rain.
Wipers swept back and forth across the windshield in a steady, mechanical rhythm.
Inside, climate control sealed the cabin against the damp and cold. A faint trace of cigar smoke lingered in the air.
Seiji Fujiwara leaned back in the wide leather rear seat.
Through the tinted one-way glass, his gaze traveled past the mob, past the camera flashes, and settled on the slender figure standing in the shadows beside the emergency wing.
"What a picture."
He took a slow sip of red wine. In the dim cabin, his smile was hard to read. "A downpour. A hospital. A dying father. A mother putting on the performance of her life. And one little doll with nowhere left to go."
In the front passenger seat sat his right hand and bodyguard, Cales.
He turned and offered a tablet with both hands.
"Boss, confirmed. The woman who was blackmailing Takafumi Wakaba, the underage hostess, she's been located." Cales' voice was low and even. "She's clever. She backed up every photo and video from the love hotel to the cloud and set a timed release. If she doesn't cancel by midnight tonight, everything goes out automatically to a hundred media outlets across Tokyo."
"That's what pushed him off the ledge."
Seiji studied the thumbnails on the tablet. In the images, Takafumi Wakaba wore a dog collar and mugged for the camera in one degrading pose after another.
"People really aren't what they seem." He tossed the tablet aside with a snort. "All that nice-guy husband act on television, and behind closed doors, this is what he's into."
"Boss, the girl is already in our custody. Our tech team has intercepted the cloud data. We can destroy it on command, or... distribute it."
"Good work."
Seiji pulled out his phone, a note of pleasure in his voice, and dialed a number he'd had ready for some time.
...
...
Outside the emergency wing.
Bzz. Bzz.
The vibration in her pocket brought a faint spark of focus to Mutsumi's empty eyes.
She drew the phone out slowly.
Unknown number.
A moment's hesitation. She answered.
"...Who is this?"
Cool, clipped, stripped of pleasantries.
"Good evening, Miss Wakaba."
A young man's voice filled the earpiece. Low, textured, carrying a careless elegance that had no business existing on a night this ugly, this drenched in antiseptic and chaos.
"First time we've spoken, even if it's only over the phone. My name is Seiji Fujiwara."
Seiji Fujiwara.
The fingers wrapped around her phone tightened for just a beat.
That name.
The man who had destroyed Shouko. The man who had torn CRYCHIC apart.
"...What do you want?"
Still quiet. But colder now.
"Look up. Three o'clock."
He didn't acknowledge the ice in her voice, just gave the instruction with an audible smile.
Mutsumi raised her head.
Through the sheets of rain, roughly fifty meters away beneath a streetlamp, she saw the black sedan.
The rear window slid halfway down.
The face that graced the covers of financial magazines and evening news broadcasts emerged from the darkness.
Across the distance, their eyes met.
He was smiling.
The way someone smiles at a doll behind glass.
A wave of revulsion crawled through her.
"President Fujiwara." Mutsumi's voice was terrifyingly level. Not a single waver. "If this is about Shouko, we have nothing to discuss."
"No, no, no. Tonight has nothing to do with Shouko." His tone remained smooth, even pleasant. "I'm here to talk business. About your father, Takafumi Wakaba."
Mutsumi said nothing. She waited.
"You're a smart girl, Miss Wakaba." He dropped the bomb as if commenting on the weather. "You must already know why your father jumped. It wasn't depression. It was a set of photographs that aren't fit for public viewing, and a video that could put him behind bars for a very long time."
Her breathing stopped for one instant.
"The girl who was blackmailing him is in my hands now. So is the data." His voice hardened beneath the silk. "One word from me, and all of it disappears forever. But if I do nothing... at midnight tonight, every file goes public. Takafumi Wakaba becomes the most despised criminal in Japan."
"And you, Mutsumi Wakaba, will spend the rest of your life branded as a rapist's daughter."
Silence.
A dead, suffocating silence.
Rain struck her face. She stood in it, letting the water trace its way down her skin without wiping it away.
No panic in her eyes. No fear. Only the numbness of someone who had already imagined the worst and made peace with it long ago.
A long time passed.
When she finally spoke, her voice was dry as sand.
"...How much?"
"Money?" A quiet laugh from the other end. "Miss Wakaba, do you think the man who runs Genesis Group needs money?"
"...Then what do you want."
Inside the car, Seiji watched the girl through the rain. Shivering, soaked to the bone, and still forcing her spine straight. Expressionless as a doll. The amusement in his eyes deepened.
"Just now, watching you stand there in the rain, I had a thought..."
His voice dropped half a register, gaining weight.
"Those golden eyes of yours. It would be a waste if they never cried."
"So, Mutsumi Wakaba."
"I want you."
The three words reached her with perfect clarity.
Mutsumi froze.
Something flickered behind those glass-still eyes. A flash of disbelief.
Then disgust, deep and absolute.
She didn't scream. She didn't shout.
She gripped the phone until her knuckles went white, nails biting crescents into her palm.
Several seconds passed.
Then, into the receiver, in a voice stripped of all inflection, she delivered two words:
"...How boring."
And after a pause, one more line, spoken softly but with the weight of a stone.
"I'm not merchandise."
She hung up.
No hesitation. No window left open for him to speak again.
...
Inside the car.
Seiji listened to the dial tone. His expression didn't change.
"Drive."
"Boss, we're leaving? Just like that?" Cales sounded surprised. "No more pressure?"
"No need."
Seiji swirled the wine in his glass, watching the rain-blurred city scroll past the window. His eyes were calm and deep.
"The prey said no. But the net's already been cast."
"She can still refuse because she still has a way out."
"But once that shrewd actress Minami Mori finds out about this..."
He let the sentence hang.
The car slipped soundlessly into the black rain.
All it left behind were two crimson taillights, burning through the downpour.
The rain kept falling.
As if it meant to drown a city called Tokyo whole.
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