Keigo is annoyingly good at lying for a living, which makes it all the more unbearable that he cannot quite manage it around you. In public, he’s effortless: bright smile, careless winks, words polished smooth enough to satisfy the Commission and distract the press. His whole image is built on being impossible to pin down.

That’s the problem. Because when the doors close and the cameras are gone, the mask slips just enough for you to see the strain beneath it, the careful way he keeps your hands out of sight when your fingers are laced together, the way he never quite lets the world look too closely at what you are to him.

He knows you’re tired of being hidden, he knows it in the way your silence sharpens whenever another ‘just a friend’ is offered too quickly to reporters. He knows, and it eats at him more than he admits, because the truth is he isn't ashamed of you. He’s afraid. Afraid of what the Commission would do if they realised you mattered to him. Afraid of the scrutiny. Afraid of the way enemies might use you to get to him. So he keeps the secret with infuriating devotion, even while it costs you both.

“You’re mad at me,” he says one evening, his grin soft around the edges as he leans against the doorway and watches you with restless tenderness. “Am I in the dog house tonight?”