Riku's car rolled to a gentle stop by the river-park, and Yui felt the world exhale a little. The night smelled of damp grass and distant city lights—ordinary and impossibly quiet compared to everything that had been thrown at her all week.
"You sure you're okay?" Riku asked, voice steady as he cut the engine. He kept his tone casual, but his eyes were careful, watching for the tremor she couldn't hide.
Yui forced a smile and nodded. "I'm fine. Thank you for… carrying me home."
Riku quickly walked to the nearby ice-cream stall and then came running back to her . "I didn't know what you liked," he said, offering one. "So I got random."
They sat on a bench beneath a tree whose leaves whispered in the breeze. For a few minutes the world reduced to the small, mundane ritual of eating ice cream: the sticky sweetness, the cold shock against a tongue raw from crying. Yui laughed a little at one of Riku's jokes, an embarrassed, brittle sound, and that was when a dot of ice cream smudged on her cheek.
Riku noticed immediately. He leaned over, hand warm and tentative, and brushed the smear away as if it were nothing. The touch was ordinary, humane—so small it was almost obscene that such gentleness could feel like rescue.
A shutter clicked from behind the shrubs, a muted, vicious sound—someone had taken a picture. Yui glanced toward the bush and saw two girls from school, giggling, phones already pressed. The image would migrate in minutes, into messages and mocking captions.
Riku didn't react to the cameras. He offered her a handkerchief and said softly, "There. Better?" His smile was patient, not showy, a quiet island.
When he finally dropped her at her gate, he did it like any decent person would—no fuss, no proclamation. He asked his father's permission earlier in the evening to bring her home; the formality made the night feel more anchored, less chaotic. "Good night, Yui," he said simply. "If you need anything, call me."
She watched his taillights vanish down the lane and felt a loneliness unlike anything before—a tightness that was at once relief and fear.
By morning, whatever image the girls had snapped had already done its work. Rumors spread like oil on water.
"Did you see him cleaning ice cream off her face? How soft.""She's clever—acts innocent to draw men in.""She's playing everyone."
Ink stained the outside of her notebook on the short walk into school—black splotches like ugly flowers. A folded note shoved under her locker read, cheap toy. The cruelty had widened its reach; jealousy and spite had found a new target.
Yui kept her head down. She had learned that scenes made the men in power angrier, and spectacle fed Haruto. If she smiled, if she defended herself, if she made them laugh, everything would intensify. So she swallowed each humiliation like a bitter pill.
Haruto arrived late, as if by choreography. He disliked timetables—he preferred drama. He pushed through the door with that slow, predator ease that made the classroom seem to tilt toward him. The faint bruise from his father's slap still showed along his jaw—dark, linear, like a badge of some private war. When he walked in, the room inhaled.
One of Haruto's mates swiveled a phone and held the image of Riku and Yui up to him—clear, compromising only in the sense of closeness. Haruto's eyes slid over the photo, and his face masked into something unreadable. Then, like a lit fuse, a smile crept across his mouth—but it wasn't a smile of warmth.
He crossed the room with the deliberate strides of someone who wanted everyone to see. He stopped at Yui's desk and, in one movement that left the room suspended, grabbed the back of her chair and hauled her toward him. The motion was not tender. It was an assertion: a physical claim in front of witnesses.
Gasps murmured through the rows. The teacher looked ready to intervene, but Haruto's presence was a muzzle; for many students, intervening felt like stepping into danger.
He positioned himself so his shoulder pressed against hers, and then he did something that froze the air—the kiss. It was abrupt, possessive, a public act that silenced the class more effectively than any shout. Yui's face flamed and then slackened with shock; her lips parted around a sound that was more choked confusion than breath.
The audacity of it—this show of ownership—sent the murmurs into a different pitch. She felt exposed, violated in front of an audience. The kiss didn't carry romance: it carried message. It was a seal, a stake driven into public space. Everyone now knew where she stood in his world.
He stepped back and spoke loud enough for the entire classroom to hear. "She's mine. Anyone touches her, they answer to me."
The sentence landed like a verdict. Yui pressed her palms to her mouth, the shape of the kiss burned into her, left a faint taste of metal—blood from the small crack at her lip where a previous shove had split it. Haruto noticed the bleed and, with an almost clinical casualness, wiped the drop away with the back of his hand. He smiled, cold and amused. "So soft," he said, voice smooth and cruel. "So much a softie."
From the back of the room, Riku watched. He watched with a contained anger that didn't play out loud. He saw the way his brother trafficked humiliation like currency. When class ended and students funneled into the hallway, Riku moved in closest to Yui, picking up her ink-splattered notebook with deliberate care.
He crouched and met her eyes. "Stop right now, Haruto!"
Haruto watched from the corridor, framed against the sunlight like a shadow. A cold flash crossed his eyes when he saw Riku's steady intervention. It wasn't just that Riku touched her—a gentle, unremarkable act of decency—but that someone else could soothe her, could be the opposite of what Haruto offered: safety in place of havoc.
The sight stung. It wrenched something at the base of his chest that was neither hatred nor affection but a dangerous blend of both.
As students dispersed, Haruto closed the distance between him and the doorway and murmured through his teeth, low and meant only for himself, "Brother or not… I'll tear him apart if he touches what's mine."
The words were thin and lethal, and they blew through Yui's bones. The net around her tightened. The class that had watched her humiliate her now watched her become property—and the line between protection and possession blurred in the most terrifying way.
Yui stood still as the bell rang and the hallway overflowed. Riku's protective presence lingered like a heat against her skin, but Haruto's claim sat heavier, more permanent. She felt herself squeezed between two forces—one who would rip her apart for entertainment and one who would try to keep pieces whole.
The game had shifted. The rules were now crueler, and the players more determined. Yui had been pulled so far into their orbit that even the air felt like it belonged to them.
Outside, the afternoon sun struck the school's concrete in bright, cruel lines. Inside, Yui felt the shadow settle in her throat and knew, with a clarity as sharp as glass, that there would be no easy dawn.