I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

The feast hall’s noise faded behind him as Nathan pushed through the side door and let the night air take over.

It was a good night. Clear sky, no wind to speak of, the capital’s lights scattered below the castle’s elevation like something that had been arranged deliberately rather than grown organically over centuries. The stars above were the kind that only appeared properly when you were away from enough torchlight — dense, indifferent, older than anything happening beneath them.

Nathan looked at them briefly, then at the sake bottle in his hand, then sat down on the garden grass with the executive decision of a man who had fulfilled his social obligations for the day and was done.

He had shown his face. He had eaten their food, spoken to their nobles, sat across from their political problems, and declined to become involved in any of them. That was sufficient. Kaguya understood what his attendance meant and the nobles would process it in whatever way served the alliance best.

Tomorrow — the meeting, the army commitments formalized, and then the road back to Tenebria.

For now, the grass was cool and the sake was warm and the garden smelled of cedar and night-blooming things he didn’t have names for.

He drank.

He had to be honest with himself — sake was genuinely extraordinary. He didn’t understand how he had spent this long in a world with sake available and not made better use of the situation. Each bottle went down with a smoothness that made the next one feel like a reasonable continuation of a good idea rather than an escalation of a questionable one.

He had lost count somewhere around the third.

He could feel it — not the helpless spinning dissolution of genuine drunkenness, his resistance was too substantial for that, but a pleasant sluggishness at the edges of his thoughts, a slight softening of the constant low-grade pain from Pandora’s curses that usually lived in his bones like a second skeleton. The sake sat on top of that pain like a warm cloth over a wound. Not healing it. Just making it temporarily quieter.

He lay back on the grass.

The sky was very large from this angle.

He would take a short nap. Twenty minutes, perhaps thirty. Then back inside, sleep properly, wake before dawn, prepare for the meeting.

His eyes closed.

What a wasteful day it had been, honestly. He had spent ten hours in a ceremony he didn’t understand, a feast he didn’t particularly want to attend, and political conversations he cared nothing about. He had barely spoken to Kaguya in any real sense. He had watched his stepsisters from across a hall and not gone to them because the room had too many eyes.

All of it for the sake of appearances. For the slow, patient accumulation of diplomatic credibility that would make Kaguya’s position stronger and his future requests easier to grant.

Necessary. Tedious. Done.

He slept.

Time passed in the garden’s quiet — an hour, perhaps more — while the feast continued distantly and the capital’s night settled into itself around the castle walls.

Then footsteps.

Nathan registered them without opening his eyes — the particular weight and cadence of a single person moving without urgency, not trying to be quiet, not approaching with any energy that his instincts flagged as threatening. He stayed still, riding the edge between sleep and wakefulness with the practiced ease of someone who had learned to rest without fully surrendering attention.

Silence.

A pause. The specific quality of pause that meant someone had stopped and was looking at something.

“You are sleeping on the ground like a beggar.”

Nathan opened his eyes.

Rena stood above him with the expression she reserved for things she found specifically beneath acceptable standards — not anger exactly, more the aesthetic offense of encountering something that had no business being where it was. Her kimono was still immaculate despite the hour. Her honey-blonde hair had developed two loose strands that she hadn’t noticed yet.

She looked, even from this angle, even wearing that expression, quite lovely.

“What does it matter to you,” Nathan said. His voice came out slightly slower than usual, the sake’s soft edges audible in it.

Rena’s eyes moved to the sake bottle beside him. Her expression shifted slightly — recalibrating, reading the situation with the quick precision she applied to most things.

“It matters,” she said, with the crisp certainty of someone stating an obvious fact, “because I sit here every night. This is where I come.”

“Sit there then,” Nathan said, not moving. “I will give space on my lap.”

“I sit on the bench!” Rena said shouted out, her face flushing red. “The bench. Not on the dirt ground!

“Then sit on the bench,” Nathan replied reasonably. “I’m not stopping you.”

“You are occupying my spot.”

“You said you sit on the bench.”

“The bench is behind me and you are in the way of—” She stopped, visibly reorganizing her argument. “I am usually alone here. I come here specifically to be alone.”

“Since when,” Nathan said, his eyes drifting back toward the sky, “do you own a garden that belongs to the royal castle of Kastoria?”

Rena’s mouth opened.

Closed.

Her expression cycled through several positions before settling on the compressed, tight-jawed not knowing how to answer exactly.

Rena delivered her “hmph” with the finality of a closing argument and turned on her heel to walk past him — past this ridiculous man lying on the garden grass like he’d lost a fight with gravity, past the sake bottle, past the whole aggravating situation — and back toward the castle where she could be irritated in private.

Nathan’s hand closed around her wrist.

Not hard. Not rough. Simply present, and then pulling.

“Kyaaa—!”

The kimono was the problem. Beautiful, formal, layered in a way that distributed her weight and center of gravity in entirely uncooperative directions the moment she lost her footing. She had no clean way to catch herself, no angle that worked, and the pull was too precise and too sudden to counter.

She landed on Nathan’s chest.

For a single suspended second neither of them moved.

Their faces were perhaps four inches apart. Her hands had flattened against his chest in the instinctive arrest of the fall, and she could feel his heartbeat under her palms — steady, unhurried, entirely unlike her own which had immediately become an architectural problem.

She pushed back.

Nathan’s arm wrapped around her back.

She pushed again. The arm didn’t move.

“What are you doing!” She glared at him with the full force of every layer of dignity she was currently failing to project from her position directly on top of him.

“I told you to sit,” Nathan said.

“Not on the ground! Not on you! Who do you think I am?!” The words came out with more heat than she’d intended, which she blamed entirely on the inconvenience of the situation.

“Why won’t you sit on the ground?” His voice had that sake-softened quality to it — slightly slower, the edges rounded off, the usual precision still present underneath but wearing it differently.

“It’s dirty!”

“You’re worried about your kimono,” Nathan said, and the small smile arrived. His hand moved slowly across her back — not urgency in it, just warmth, tracing the line of the fabric with a deliberateness that registered everywhere it touched.

Rena’s breath caught.

“A beautiful one,” he said quietly. His eyes moved over her face with the unhurried attention he gave to things he found genuinely worth looking at. “Perfectly hugging every curve.”

The words arrived against her skin more than her ears.

Rena’s face was fully, completely, unmanageably red. Her heart was doing something she was going to be furious about later. His golden eyes at this proximity had no right to exist at this level of intensity and she wanted to say this out loud but her throat had temporarily stopped cooperating.

Silence held between them for a moment — the garden’s quiet and the night and the cedar smell and four inches of charged air between their faces.

“Did you go to that party?” she asked. Her voice came out steadier than she deserved credit for. “The one those four invited you to.”

She had watched him leave the feast hall. She had not been watching for him specifically — she had simply noted the exit the way she noted most things, automatically, without meaning to. She hadn’t seen him return. And now here he was in the garden, half drunk, sprawled on the grass with the exhausted ease of someone whose evening had run long.

Nathan’s brow drew together slightly. “How long have I been out here?”

Rena read that as confirmation — the vague response, the mild confusion, the sake — and something ignited in her chest that she absolutely refused to name.

She pushed against his chest with renewed purpose.

“Let go of me—”

Nathan pulled her back.

Closer this time — properly, completely, until the warmth of her through the kimono’s layers pressed fully against his chest and the four inches between their faces became something considerably less.

His lips found hers.

“Hmmfff—!”

Rena’s eyes went wide.

Every thought she had been organizing — the anger, the accusation she’d been assembling, the exit she’d been planning — dissolved simultaneously and completely, the way candles go out in a sudden wind, all at once and leaving nothing but dark warmth in the space they’d occupied.

Rena’s hands, still flat against his chest, neither pushed nor pulled.

Rena’s eyes had gone glassy at the edges — not tears exactly, but the particular moisture that arrives when composure is being held together by the last available thread and the effort of it shows in the only place she couldn’t fully control.

She pushed against him. Her hands pressed against his chest but there was hardly any real effort in her motion.

Nathan kissed her through it.

His hands moved across her back — slow at first, learning the shape of her through the kimono’s layers with a patience that was its own particular form of pressure. Then less slowly. The fabric shifted under his palms and Rena made a small sound against his mouth that she would have been furious about if she’d had the spare attention to notice it.

Then he moved.

One clean shift and Rena was on the grass with Nathan above her and the night sky enormous and star-filled behind his white hair, and the world had reorganized itself entirely in the space of two seconds.

He pulled back from the kiss.

“Haa…haan…hmm…”

The air between them was warm despite the night’s coolness. Rena’s chest rose and fell with unsteady rhythm, and she looked up at him with an expression she had never shown anyone but him— open, unguarded, stripped of every layer she normally kept between herself and the world.

Vulnerable. Genuinely, completely vulnerable.

Nathan looked down at her.

“I want to fuck you,” he said.

The sake had removed whatever filter might have dressed that differently. It was simply what was true, stated plainly, with the directness that alcohol lent to things that were already true to begin with.

Rena said nothing.

Her whole body moved — a single full shudder, involuntary, traveling through her from somewhere deep before she could think to stop it. Not revulsion of course. Something considerably more complicated than revulsion, threaded through with fear and awareness and the particular nervousness of someone standing at the edge of something they had thought about more than they would ever admit out loud.

Nathan reached toward the folds of her kimono.

Rena’s hand closed around his wrist.

Not strongly. The grip had almost no force behind it — fingers wrapped around his arm with the pressure of a question rather than a refusal.

Nathan stopped.

He waited.

If she said no he would let go. It would be genuinely, specifically disappointing given the current state of him, but he would let go.

Rena breathed.

The unsteady rhythm gradually found something closer to evenness. Her eyes, which had been on his, moved sideways — not away from him exactly, but to the side, to somewhere that wasn’t his direct gaze, the direction people look when they are saying something that costs them something to say.

“Not here,” she said quietly.

Nathan’s mouth curved.

“HYAAAAHH—!!”

But right at that time, the shriek tore through the garden’s quiet like something physical — sharp, high and panicked, coming from somewhere inside the castle’s upper levels with the force of a sound that had no interest in being contained by walls.

Both of them went still.

Nathan’s head turned toward the castle in the same instant as Rena’s.