I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 713: Ayame’s Demand (1)

A brothel inn was never quiet. That was simply the nature of the place — pleasure was its commerce and sound was its constant currency, drifting through the walls and floorboards at all hours, the mingled voices of men and women doing what men and women came to such places to do. The girls who worked the lower floor had long since stopped registering most of it, the way people who live near rivers stop hearing the water.

But the sounds from the upper floor that afternoon were a different matter entirely.

They started sometime after the mysterious Ronin had gone upstairs with his hooded companion and didn’t stop for a very long time. A man’s voice, low and unhurried. And a woman’s — not the practiced, performed sounds that the inn’s patrons usually drew from its working girls, but something rawer and less controlled than that, real in the way that only genuinely overwhelmed things are real, rising and falling in long rolling waves that came through the walls and the ceiling with enough presence to make the lanterns seem to flutter.

Mitsuri paused in the middle of refilling a cup and looked at the ceiling.

The other girls looked at each other.

Outside the room, someone pressed a palm flat against the wall and felt it — a faint, rhythmic trembling in the plaster, intimate and relentless.

It went on through the afternoon. The other patrons of the inn, for their part, either pretended not to notice or stopped pretending entirely and simply listened, their own conversations losing momentum, their cups going untouched. The sounds coming from that upper room had a quality that was difficult to ignore — not just the volume but something beneath it, something that bypassed the ears and registered lower and more privately.

Eventually — when the light coming through the paper screens had shifted from afternoon pale to the deeper amber of early evening — it stopped.

The inn exhaled.

Inside, the room had gone quiet in the way that only rooms with sleeping occupants go quiet — a warmth to the stillness, the soft sound of breathing, two people folded against each other on the mat with the complete bonelessness of total exhaustion.

Yukihime slept.

She slept the way someone sleeps who has not truly slept — not rested, not peacefully — in longer than any ordinary reckoning of time could measure. A thousand years of existing in cold isolation, never touched without consequence, never held without distance, and now she lay with her silver hair spread across Nathan’s shoulder and her pale skin warm for the first time in memory and her face carrying an expression of such absolute, unguarded peace that it looked almost foreign on features that had learned to compose themselves against the world.

It really had been the best day of her life. That wasn’t sentiment. It was simply the arithmetic of a thousand years of nothing set against one afternoon of everything.

Mitsuri’s knock was soft — two light taps, respectful, careful not to intrude more than necessary.

A pause. Then the door opened.

Nathan stood in the frame, his black kimono slightly open at the collar, the sash retied with the practiced indifference of someone dressing quickly rather than carefully. He looked, Mitsuri noted with a warmth that traveled immediately to her cheeks, extremely and unfairly good, the way some people simply do after the fact of intimacy — like the activity agreed with him.

She looked up at his face and forgot for a moment what she had come to say.

”Is Ayame here?” he asked, without acknowledging her expression.

”Y... yes.” She gathered herself. ”Chiyo-sama wishes to see you. The same place as before.”

Nathan nodded and pulled the door closed again.

He turned back to the room.

Yukihime was already awake — or perhaps had never fully gone under again — seated upright on the mat with her hair loose around her shoulders and that expression on her face that had no precise word for it. Satisfied was too simple. Complete, perhaps. She glowed the way people glow after something has filled in a space they had stopped believing would ever be filled, her pale skin luminous in the evening light coming through the screen, her dark eyes finding Nathan with the quiet, uncomplicated certainty of someone who knows exactly where they are and is at peace with it.

”We’re leaving,” Nathan said. ”Get ready.”

”Yes,” she said, her cheeks still carrying that warmth, and began reaching for her robe.

They came downstairs a few minutes later — Yukihime’s features hidden again beneath the hood of her cape, her eyes lowered, her silver hair out of sight. It didn’t entirely help. The girls of the inn tracked her passage through the room with a collective, barely-concealed jealousy that was less about her appearance — which they still couldn’t fully see — and more about the sounds that had come through the ceiling all afternoon. Several of them looked between Yukihime’s retreating figure and Nathan’s back with expressions that contained complicated feelings.

Yukihime kept her gaze down and followed Nathan out without once acknowledging any of it.

Nathan walked ahead, following Mitsuri through the inn’s side passage toward the street, and it was somewhere in those first few steps outside that he felt it properly for the first time.

His hand moved to his neck before he consciously decided to raise it — fingers finding the site between his neck and shoulder where Yorimasa’s fangs had driven home. The skin there was hot. Not the focused heat of a bruise or a clean wound, but a spreading, deep heat that had grown in intensity during the hours since the fight, radiating outward through his shoulder and up the side of his jaw in slow, branching lines.

He pressed against it once and the pain answered sharply enough that he let out a quiet, controlled sound under his breath.

The venom had been sitting in him for hours now, and his body — Demigod blood and all — had been containing it rather than defeating it. The exertion since then, the expenditure of the Curses of Pandora, the physical demands of the afternoon — none of it had given his system the rest it needed to fight back effectively. He could feel the low-grade fever beginning to assert itself beneath his skin, a warmth that had nothing to do with the evening air or anything pleasant.

He lowered his hand and kept walking.

Careless. The word sat in the back of his mind with the flat neutrality of honest self-assessment. He had let Yorimasa find that opening — had tracked the blade correctly and missed the secondary intent entirely, and in the fraction of a second the regenerated head had reoriented, it had gone not for a killing strike but for a delivery mechanism. A final move from a dying man who had known exactly what his venom could do to something that had just beaten him.

He was strong. His body was not what an ordinary person’s body was. But strength was not immunity, and the venom of the Yamata no Orochi was not an ordinary poison. It had a name that carried weight even in myth, which meant whatever it did to mortal flesh, it had been designed — if poisons could be said to be designed — with something considerably more than mortal flesh in mind.

He needed Ayame. And he needed her now, before the fever climbed any further and the burning in his neck became something that even stubbornness couldn’t hold at arm’s length.

He followed Mitsuri forward through Minato’s evening streets, Yukihime quiet at his side, and said nothing about any of it.

The tunnel smelled of old stone and lamp oil, the same as before, the passage running its familiar length before opening into the hidden room behind its unmarked door. Mitsuri knocked. A guard opened it. Nathan stepped through without waiting to be invited, Yukihime a half-step behind him, and the room’s occupants registered their arrival with the particular stillness of people whose attention had been waiting in that direction for some time.

”The great Ryo.”

Ayame sat exactly as she always seemed to — composed, unhurried, one leg crossed over the other, the posture of a woman who had decided long ago that rooms existed to accommodate her rather than the other way around. Her smile was present and controlled and told him very little about what was happening behind it.

”I heard there’s been considerable panic up in the Hebi-Yama,” she said. ”Soldiers running in circles, a temple in ruins. All manner of interesting rumors finding their way down the mountain.”

”Yorimasa is dead,” Nathan said.

The room flinched.

Not dramatically — these were women who had survived Minato, who had built something functional and dangerous out of nothing in a town built on survival of the most ruthless kind. They didn’t startle easily. But the words landed with enough weight that the collective composure in the room bent visibly under them, faces tightening, eyes cutting sideways to each other, the unspoken question moving through the group like a current.

He actually did it?

Even Ayame — who had heard the rumors, who had sent this man north herself, who had watched him dismantle Morosuke’s operation with her own eyes — couldn’t entirely prevent the shock from reaching her face. It lasted only a moment, quickly gathered back in, but it had been there.

”Is that... truly the case?” she asked.

”Why would I have come back otherwise?” Nathan replied, the faint edge of irritation in his voice.

Ayame looked at him steadily. ”First Morosuke, now Yorimasa.” A pause, something genuinely searching in her eyes beneath the composure. ”Who exactly are you? One of Kaguya’s special instruments?”

Nathan didn’t answer.

”Now.” His voice shifted — not louder, but flatter, with the particular quality of someone stating a fact rather than issuing a request. ”You are coming with me to the Capital. I removed the threat against your women. The Daimyo who held this town in his grip is dead. We are leaving.”

”Hm.” Ayame tilted her head slightly. ”I appreciate what you’ve done. Truly. But I’m not quite ready to leave yet. There are arrangements—”

The aura came out before Nathan consciously released it.

Not a weapon, not a directed pressure — just a leak, the way heat leaks from a wound, the ambient force of something that had been contained all day through a fight and a flight and a fever and was now, in a warm room with its guard slightly down, finding the edges of its container. It rolled through the space quietly and completely, and Ayame’s women felt it the way you feel a temperature drop — in the skin first, then in something deeper.

Their faces went pale in sequence. Two of them stepped forward immediately, placing themselves between Ayame and Nathan.

”Shall I handle them, Ryo-sama?”

Yukihime’s voice was warm and pleasant, entirely at odds with what she was proposing. Her hand rose slightly at her side, and the temperature in the room answered it — a visible ripple of cold moving outward from her palm, frost threading along the edge of the nearest wooden surface in a delicate, creeping line. Her hood had slipped in the motion, silver hair spilling free, and her face was fully visible now — that carved, luminous, deeply unreal beauty landing on the room like a second shockwave on top of the first.

Even Ayame’s guards faltered. Not in their positioning — they held — but in the quality of their attention, something involuntary and helpless pulling their eyes toward Yukihime’s face before discipline dragged them back.

Ayame looked at Yukihime. Then at Nathan. Nathan had said nothing, but the shape of his silence was very clear — he was not going to stop her, and everyone in the room understood that with complete certainty.

A long beat.

Then Ayame rose.

She came to her feet slowly. She raised one hand toward her guards — a small, firm gesture — and they parted, reluctantly.

”Ayame-sama, please—”

”It’s fine,” she said.

She walked forward.

The distance between her and Nathan closed in steady steps until she stood directly in front of him, close enough that she had to tilt her chin up to hold his gaze. She looked at him — those black eyes, the fever-warmth visible now in the faint color at his cheekbones if you were close enough to see it.

Ayame held his gaze for a moment. Reading it. Finding, as she had found before, very little give and no performance — just the plain, unadorned reality of someone who meant exactly what he said.

”If you want to take me,” she said quietly, ”then take me.”