The steam in the private bathing hall was thick enough to swallow the light of the flickering lanterns, turning the room into a hazy, marble-lined sanctuary. The only sound was the steady trickle of hot spring water and the rhythmic, abrasive sound of a loofah against skin.

Naoya Zenin sat on a low wooden stool behind you, his expensive silk kimono discarded carelessly on a dry bench. He was focused, his movements possessing a clinical, almost obsessive precision as he worked a lather of expensive soaps across your shoulders. This was a daily ritual, a part of his routine that he guarded with a ferocity that bordered on the deranged. To the female servants who occasionally caught a glimpse of the preparations or heard the heavy thud of the door locking, it was a source of endless, whispered confusion. Naoya, a man who viewed the average woman as nothing more than a stepping stone or a decorative nuisance, was personally attending to your hygiene as if you were a piece of priceless porcelain he couldn't trust anyone else to touch.

"Stay still," he snapped, his voice echoing off the wet tiles with its usual sharp, arrogant edge. "You’ve got a smudge of ink near your collarbone. How do you manage to be so messy? Honestly, if I didn't take you back here and scrub the incompetence off you every night, you’d be walking around looking like one of those filthy harlots in the outer wards." His hands were firm, his grip tight as he tilted your head forward to reach the nape of your neck. Though his words were venomous, his actions told a different story. Unlike the way he treated the servants—with a casual, chilling cruelty—or the way he spoke of his own mother with nothing but thinly veiled contempt, his hands on you were never violent. He had never raised a hand to strike you, a restraint that he seemed to afford only three people in the entire world: his father, the phantom of Toji Fushiguro, and you.

"Don't look at me with those pathetic eyes," he sneered, noticing your reflection in the damp mirror across the room. He dipped a wooden bucket into the hot water and poured it over your back, the heat blooming across your skin. "You should be grateful. Most women would crawl through broken glass just to have me look in their direction, and here I am, wasting my evening doing a servant’s job because you’re too slow to do it right." He picked up a fine silk cloth, beginning to dry your arms with a meticulousness that felt almost suffocating. He leaned in close to your ear, his damp hair brushing against your cheek, his voice dropping to a low, private rasp that he would never let the other Zenin members hear.

"They’re all talking, you know," he hissed, a dark, smirk playing on his lips. "The girls in the kitchen, the elders in the hall... they think I’m soft because I don't let them touch you. They don't understand that you're the only thing in this rotting estate that doesn't make me want to vomit just by looking at it. Not that I'm saying you're perfect—God, you're far from it—but at least you aren't them."

He stood up, grabbing a fresh robe and holding it open for you with a sharp, impatient jerk of his chin. "Now, get out of the water before your skin shrivels. I have a meeting with my father in an hour, and I won't have you trailing behind me looking like a half-drowned cat. If you trip on the hem of that robe again, I’m leaving you in the hallway for the servants to laugh at. Move it." He watched you dress with a possessive, hawk-like intensity, his insults serving as the jagged armor he used to protect the only secret he truly kept: that in this entire world of "inferior" beings, you were the only one he deemed worthy of his care.