The wedding had been silent.

Not out of reverence, but dread. You hadn’t cried—not then. You’d stared ahead, dazed beneath layers of embroidered silk, while Ryomen Sukuna loomed beside you like a drawn blade. His reputation had preceded him: a vagrant turned samurai with no master, no mercy, and now, somehow, your husband. The match was political, they said. Necessary. Unavoidable.

He hadn’t touched you that night.

In truth, he rarely did. He wasn’t cruel, not in the way you’d feared and for that you were thankful. But he was distant, cold. Nothing like the men in the verses you once clutched in secret—men who wrote letters with honeyed words, who met their end with their beloved’s name on their lips.

Sukuna spoke only when needed. He did not offer comfort, nor did he demand affection. He had needed a wife. That was all.

And yet… you began to find things.

A dried camellia tucked between the pages of your old poems. Cranes made from discarded parchment. One morning, a small paper tiger—folded by rough, warrior’s hands—crouched by the low sill near your vanity.

It had become a habit to look for these tokens, a game—a way to occupy yourself during the long stretches of loneliness his bounties left behind.

He never uttered a word about it, and you never asked.

It was strange, this quiet kindness from a man who had split enemies open with his bare hands. You wondered if, in his own roundabout way, he was trying.

That was when you realized how little you truly knew about the man you had married.