Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

*Chu.*

Kaede made herself keep watching. Evidence demanded collection.

The last icon of Fujimori dignity was licking a man’s chest in the ancestors’ hall, purring between passes.

Kaede’s knees, drilled through years of formal seiza, nearly went out from under her.

’She is... My sister is currently...’ The assessment refused to fit anywhere inside her, no matter which way she turned it. And none of it explained the red marks. On that single question, the investigation stayed open.

Then Ayame’s hand wandered somewhere with unmistakable intent, and Quinlan moved first.

*SMACK.*

His palm cracked across her silk-bare backside.

"Kyaa!?"

The yelp came out at full noble volume. Kaede’s body locked solid, and behind the doorframe, the investigation closed.

Confirmed. Struck, bare-handed, on the body, in front of the ancestors, and every doctrine Kaede owned held precisely one procedure for that event: steel, drawn, before the echo finished.

The Ayame she had grown up beneath would have answered an uninvited touch with a blade through the offending wrist, and if that Ayame was in no state to answer, the duty fell to whatever family stood in reach.

The family in reach owned no steel. It owned an incense stick, a servant’s gray, and a debt, and it would have to do. Kaede’s grip firmed around the stick, her weight rolled onto the balls of her feet, and the disgraced Fujimori made her peace with the ancestors on the way to the door.

"Mmnn~... Again."

Kaede stopped, one step short of the doorway.

The purr had come from her sister. She replayed it, syllable by syllable, and it did not improve on review.

She had spent this entire vigil listening for the sounds a domestically abused woman makes, and no abused woman in the history of the world had ever made that one.

"Behave."

"Make me~"

Kaede stood frozen on the threshold of her own charge and let the evidence re-file itself. The red marks, the melting, the purr, the demand, and it had unmistakably been a demand, for another one.

Nobody in that hall was beating anyone. Her sister, the heir with perfect form at dawn, the measure Kaede had spent her whole life failing to reach, was enjoying it. Asking for it.

Her amazing big sister.

Was a hopeless masochist.

Kaede’s worldview held its shape for one more second, out of pure habit. Then it caved in, all at once, and quietly.

And then, at last, the counterattack came.

She saw it start: Ayame pushed herself upright astride him, and for one shining moment the heir of the Fujimori was back, chin high, gaze leveled in judgment over the man beneath her.

"Right~" said the genius girl of the Fujimori. "That’s twice this morning you’ve struck a noble of this house. There will be retribution."

Behind the doorframe, Kaede dared one last time to hope. ’Yes. There she is. There she...’

Ayame reached down and grabbed him by the dick.

"Confiscated~" she announced. "Until further notice."

"When does the tribunal convene?" Quinlan didn’t move a muscle.

"The tribunal will issue its demands shortly~"

Kaede stopped hoping.

Her framework contained a place for submission and a place for counterattack. It contained nothing for a counterattack conducted by confiscation. By her sister enthroned on the man, holding him hostage while both parties tried not to laugh and failed.

She attempted the thought three times, and it refused to finish on every attempt.

She left.

She did not run, because one did not run on the ancestors’ ground. She walked, in flawless form, spine straight, steps measured, face crimson to the ears, back across the courtyard and around the corner of the outer wall.

Only there, in complete privacy, did the nominal leader of the Fujimori clan slide down the stones into a crouch and press her face into both hands. Properly, this time. No gaps.

From the hall, faint with distance, came another *SMACK*, another "Kyaa!? Respect the tribunal or else- Hnggh?!?!", and another round of the most carefree laughter in the world.

The incense stick in her lap had folded in half.

...

Inside the dojo, Quinlan noted in passing that the mortified presence marinating by the doorway these past minutes had finally withdrawn.

It had carried no killing intent, only escalating quantities of spiritual damage, and interrupting Ayame’s audit for anything short of an assassination attempt had been out of the question.

’She’ll recover,’ he decided generously, on no evidence whatsoever.

"Your sister is gone," he reported to the woman on his chest. "You knew she was standing there this entire time. Why let her watch?"

"What’s there to hide?" Ayame propped her chin on her folded arms. "We’re adults. You’re my lover. Besides, enjoying this sort of thing is perfectly normal for people of noble privilege~"

"Somehow, I doubt she holds the same opinion."

The grin that answered him grew a size. "Then it’s high time she grows up. That damned body of hers is already a grown woman’s..." A small scoff escaped her there, and her eyes dropped, for one sour moment, to her own chest, which her little sister’s had overtaken years ago. "She should learn these things or someone will take advantage of her again."

Quinlan merely smiled at that, electing not to comment.

Then Ayame pushed herself upright and spun around on top of him, coming face to face with the confiscated property, which stood tall, entirely unmoved by its own legal predicament.

She licked her lips.

"It’s time to dethrone Lucille~" she declared. "That bitch has been far too smug about her throat GOAT title. I’ll have you revoke it promptly."

Quinlan slid both hands under his head, arranging himself into the resting pose of a man with no unresolved problems in this world.

"Good luck."

...

It was past midday when the two of them, washed and dressed and almost respectable, walked the silent corridors of the family wing.

"One last stop~" Ayame announced, leading him deeper down a lantern-dark hallway. "There’s one thing in this place I’m not leaving behind."

She stopped at the double doors at its end without reaching for the frame.

"My room," she said.

The bratty woman and the lewd lover both had gone out of her voice somewhere in the last ten steps.

Quinlan said nothing and let her take her time.

She slid the doors open on the chamber of a duchy’s heir: wide and high-ceilinged, a canopied bed sized for a noblewoman, a full-length mirror in a lacquered frame, a writing desk beneath the shuttered windows, all of it wearing an even shroud of dust.

And in the far corner, spared by every redecoration her growing years had demanded, a small island of childhood remained: a practice stand with one child-sized wooden sword across its pegs, and a low little desk with clumsy name-strokes carved under its lip.

Nobody had lived in this room for years, and nobody had emptied it either. It had been shut the way a ledger is shut, and left.

She crossed the wide floor past the cold bed, knelt at the corner, and drew a line through the dust on the little desk, her fingertips stopping at a shallow notch in its edge, the scar of some ancient practice accident.

"The last time I was in this room," she said, conversational, to the desk, "I couldn’t stand up."

Quinlan’s eyes cooled.

They had let her lie here, her body too poisoned to rise, while her house priced her and drew up the contract.

When they finally came for her, she had left this room between two guards. The heir’s room, the heir’s bed, the heir’s little desk with her clumsy name-strokes carved under its lip, and by the end not one splinter of it had been hers. She had been an item leaving a house.

She rose off her heels.

Now she stood in the same dusty room as the true owner of the house. Of the estate around the house, the city around the estate, the duchy around the city, and every stone the Fujimori name had ever stacked on another stone.

All of it, from these floorboards to the borders, answered now to the family she had built out of nothing with her own two hands and one extremely shameless man.

She stood with that for a while.

Quinlan crossed the room, folded his arms over her collarbones from behind, and let her have it for as long as she wanted. She leaned back into him and said nothing, and neither did he, while the dust drifted through the shutter-light around the two of them.

Then she wriggled loose, plucked the wooden sword off its stand, and gave it one short test swing.

*Fwip.*

The dust on the desk relocated.

"My first sword," she declared, holding it up. It was notched along its whole edge and sized for a child. "Father made me swing it until my palms bled. I hated it more than anything alive."

"And you kept it in a place of honor."

"Obviously." She spun it once and put it away into her pocket ring. "This blade has drawn more of my blood than any enemy ever managed. It’s place is in our home."

"A priceless memento," Quinlan nodded, smiling softly.

"Mm!" Ayame beamed, happy that he thought so.

At the door she paused, one hand on the frame, and looked back once, at the little bed, the dust, the closed shutters.

"I’ll have someone open those," she decided. "It’s done being a closed box."

And she walked out ahead of him, boss of everything, brat of one man.

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