I sincerely hope everyone is staying safe out there. I'll try to get the next chapter out soon so you guys don't pull a Misery on me. In other news, I'm now also on AO3 under the name CheshireKat5mile. A lot of my old story files got corrupted, so I'll only be posting Cochlea's Janitor and future stories on AO3. Postings on AO3 will be one week later than on Fanfiction .net. Don't ask me why, that's just how I'm doing it. Don't forget to leave a review!

Nao stared down at the check in her hand, her brows knitting in confusion.

"Are you paying me in advance?" she asked, looking up from the printed amount to her boss, Shinichi. He hadn't looked at her when he'd handed over the check, his focus barely parting from the checkbook and the timesheets spread out on his desk. Shinichi's attention was still on it as he replied,

"No."

Nao looked at the check again. "It's nearly double what I usually get. And I didn't pull in any new customers," Nao stated.

Shinichi paused in the middle of his writing, finally glancing up at her. He was silent a long moment. "The amount is correct, Kohana-san," he said firmly. Nao stared at him, her silence a request for a proper explanation. Shinichi's jaw clenched, his teeth gnawing on the inside of his cheek. "I sold the earrings Nishikawa gave you." Nao felt a frown pull at the corners of her lips. Before she could so much as open her mouth, Shinichi issued a command. "Let this be the last time we talk about him." Nao swallowed, heaviness collecting in her chest as she hesitantly nodded. Suddenly the paper in her hands felt like lead. As if it were sopping-wet with blood. "Send the next girl in on your way out," he said dismissively, his attention already back on the checkbook.

Reflexively her feet turned to go before a thought occurred to her. She froze, half-way turned toward the door. Nao looked back at him. "May I ask you a question?" Nao asked.

His eyebrow twitched. Shinichi looked up at her, barely lifting his head and making it look like he was glaring at her from beneath his eyelashes. "Is it insulting?"

Depending on how he took the question, maybe it would be. Rather than say this aloud, Nao answered instead, "It's invasive." He raised his chin to regard her properly, his brown eyes darting over her face momentarily before he nodded for her to continue. "Were any of the people you've dated human?"

Shinichi was silent for a long while. His eyes narrowed in suspicion as he asked, "Why do you want to know?"

The night before, Nao had been caught in a philosophical quandary, debating the lines of humanity between humans and ghouls. The more she had gone over their similarities and differences, the more convinced she had become with an uneasy revelation: that the only true line separating humans from ghouls was diet and organs. Which would lead them away from being truly monstrous and closer to that of humans. A dangerous thought to have since it made her sound like a ghoul-sympathizer. 'Ghouls are humans with a monstrous appetite' is a line that would get her sent to a prison cell.

When she was in high-school she hadn't thought much of ghouls, preferring to think of them more as story-book monsters than actual threats. Back then they were just creatures that existed in congested metropolitan areas; creatures that lived in sewers and wore nothing but rags and came up to eat people. What a stark difference it was to know they wore three-piece suits. It was strange how far she had come from her past self to seeing them not as soulless monsters, but as actual complex beings.

Nao wasn't sure whether she should be fascinated or horrified at the discovery she was making thanks to Yamori. Which brought her back to the reason why she was still in Shinichi's office rather than hurrying home to sleep at an appropriate hour. Nao could only get so far with a man who gave out information only when he felt like it. Even then he had said himself that he didn't tell boring lies—a statement that didn't stop him from telling interesting ones. Not to mention that given the specific question she had in mind, Yamori was more than likely to bullshit her.

Shinichi was her only other option.

"I'm just curious," Nao replied after a heavy beat.

Shinichi tapped the end of his pen against the desk, weighing his answer before he said carefully, "Yes. A few women and men were."

"Isn't that dangerous?"

"Unlike your stalker, I have control over my appetite," he scoffed. "Why do you want to know anyway? Curious if they're still alive?"

Nao opened her mouth to deny his line of thinking; faltering before a single sound could come out. Now that he brought it up, she felt a twinge of concern. "I just wanted to know how close the line comes between eating and sex," she said.

"Are those mutually exclusive?" he asked, his mouth skewing into a half-smile. At her frown Shinichi's smile faltered. Covering up his poor joke, he went on to say, "What's a "ghoul" anyway, Kohana-san? Are we a separate species, or are we a subset of the human race? What do you think about ghouls? Why do we look, walk and talk just like you?"

"To…blend?" Nao answered, but it felt weak. Plenty of other predators blended in with their surroundings, but Nao could not fathom why—with how strong and vicious they could be—why ghouls would need to bother.

Well. Until the CCG was created and gave humans a fighting chance.

But predators did not resemble their prey. Snakes didn't look like mice, they looked like foliage. And if ghouls didn't look like their surroundings, then why did they look like humans? Why did they resemble humans so closely? "Maybe you're just cannibals," Nao murmured, her statement nothing more than an outspoken musing to herself. She couldn't fully think of Yamori as human, though most of his proclivities spoke to the sadistic nature of humans. Was he always this vicious or was it a result of his trauma?

Shinichi rolled his eyes; his pen tapping against the tabletop, a background noise to their conversation. "Well I'm not anyway."

Her eyebrows drew together. "Don't you eat humans?"

"Not a cannibal of humans, Kohana-san. A cannibal of other ghouls." Her eyes widened in surprise. She asked him to elaborate further. "It's fucking disgusting. Something that only happens in areas that are rife with ghouls and very little prey—no offense." It was an afterthought, but Nao didn't really care. Humans were prey, she'd known this for years. "I heard your friend Jason does it a lot."

"He's not my friend," Nao answered immediately before lapsing into silence.

"If that's all you wanted to know, you can leave now," Shinichi informed her.

"You didn't answer if they're still alive," she remarked, shelving the new information she had received for later. Tucked right between "Stuff she didn't know about ghouls" and "Shit she didn't know about Yamori". Shinichi was becoming a wealth of information she didn't have to jump through hoops for. She prayed she wouldn't take too much advantage of this, or that some form of payment would come later.

Shinichi gave her a snide little smile, like the answer should be obvious. "They always look for the boyfriend first, Kohana-san," he told her, "Why would I risk myself like that?"

She did not know how to take his candor on the subject. He didn't kill his girlfriends and boyfriends because it would have made him look suspicious. Which meant that whatever sentiment he held toward humans stopped at his sister.

"I'll send the next girl in," Nao said quietly, nodding her thanks and leaving his office.

Strewn around the barroom sitting on couches and barstools, women in shimmering gowns and flirty dresses waited their turn to get their bi-monthly payment. Nao blindly pointed at the nearest one before making a beeline for the locker room. Payday was private, and while the rates were the same for everyone, no one had the same number of customers or visits per week. It was meant to keep each other from getting jealous, but Nao wondered if the reason she'd been called in first was because of the abnormal amount and Shinichi wanting to be done with the inevitable question it came with as quickly as possible.

In the empty locker room Nao slipped the check into her purse, binding it securely with a paper clip to a stack of crumpled sticky notes.

That was not how she had planned that conversation. In her mind, hours earlier in the office breakroom, she had imagined it going several different ways. Nao groaned, the cavity of her locker echoing the nonsense sound around her ears. She supposed she could take this as her answer. It was not entirely satisfying, but Nao let it lie. Given his familial relationship with Minatsuki and his views on humans and ghouls, Shinichi could just be considered an outlier. It was just one ghoul's opinion against hundreds of others. And while his reasons for letting them live were self-serving at best, at least they were still living.

Nao arched her back, unzipping her dress and letting it pool around her ankles. Goosebumps rose along her arms. Nao hastily shrugged on her blouse, her fingers quickly buttoning the fabric. She shook out her skirt, smoothing the fold lines before she stepped into the circle of the waistband. She zipped it up against her hip before bending to retrieve the discarded dress.

Behind her the door to the bar swung open and a few women stepped inside. More were going to come in soon—those who had either gotten paid or wanted to leave directly after. Nao hung her dress on a free hanger and stepped out of her heels, placing the pair in a cubby along the wall. She needed to leave before it got crowded; already the sound of chatter was beginning to rise in volume. Slipping on her office flats, Nao grabbed her purse and coat and quickly escaped from the locker room into the alley.

Biting her tongue against the cold, Nao slipped her coat on, her hands trying and failing to do up the zipper as they shook. Beside her, people strode by in singles and pairs, unencumbered by the weather as they walked past Nao's desperate display. She hated winter. Its only merit was the softly falling snow and the precious warmth people sought because of it.

The teeth finally catching, Nao zipped her coat up to her chin and burrowed half her face behind the collar. She took out her phone, shooting Misa a quick text that she was heading out without her. She next glanced at the top of her screen to check the time and instead caught the flash of a notification.

Nao stared at the flashing red blip, knowing it couldn't possibly be from Misa in that short amount of time.

After Yamori's visit to the bar he hadn't shown his face afterwards. He hadn't called to remind her of his offer. He hadn't pressured her for a decision in the last two weeks. Nao had taken his absence for granted and let the inappropriateness of their last encounter slide to the back of her mind. Until Misa had dredged it up with her valid questions and Matsuru had hammered home how much of a selfish prick he truly was.

Doubting that she could put off any chat or encounter for much longer, Nao tapped to view the message.

Follow Naki.

Nao felt a wrinkle form between her eyebrows. Was Naki watching her again?

"What took ya so long to come out?"

Nao started, her eyes darting around her for the source of the voice only to find the alley utterly deserted.

"…Naki?"

Something fell from the rooftop of the neighboring building, landing with a dull thud into a low crouch at the far end of the alley. The lingering stain of Nishikawa's blood momentarily tricked her into believing the body had splattered upon the ground. Nao watched mutely as the dark lump straightened into the form of a man. She waited as the man walked over to her, stepping into the small circle of light emitting from the lamp beside the bar's alley door and transforming into a familiar face from a horrible night.

"Your job was over a long time ago!" he groused; his lip curled in agitation of her perceived lateness.

Nao stared at him a while longer before slowly snapping her phone shut. "I was getting my check, Naki-san," she replied.

He clicked his tongue. "Just call me 'Naki'," he corrected her. "What're ya getting checked for?" he asked.

Nao raised a brow at him, wondering how serious he was being. When his expression didn't change, she reworded her previous statement. "I was getting my paycheck," she clarified.

Naki's mouth twisted in irritation. "So, why'd it take so long?"

Nao frowned. It was neither his business how long it had taken, or what she had been doing. Not to mention that if he had a problem with waiting for her to finish up, he shouldn't have come in the first place. She dreaded what she would ask him next.

"What does Yamori-san want, Naki-s—Naki." Each word made her feel more and more exhausted. The lack of formality felt wrong in her mouth, like she had too many teeth. She pulled her purse in front of her, undoing the latch to place her phone inside. Out of the corner of her eye she saw his hand fidget next to his leg. Sneaking a glance, she caught his thumb rub the top of his middle finger.

"Big Bro wants to see you," he told her simply.

"So why didn't he come himself?"

Snap!

Nao flinched at the small sound, her eyes fixed on the middle finger now pressed to the palm of his hand, tight beneath his unforgiving thumb. "'Cause he wants to see you in Thirteen," Naki replied.

Nao silently debated not going with him—her own version of saying 'fuck you' to Yamori—but she'd probably end up getting forced to go anyway. Any outcome she could possibly come up with all pointed in the same direction anyway: Not getting much sleep and having to meet Yamori. Nao's lip curled in a facsimile of a snarl. Even when he wasn't here, Yamori still got his way.

Snapping her purse closed, Nao turned towards the street entrance. "Let's hurry. We should be able to make the next train," she said, motioning over her shoulder for Naki to follow. Nao wanted to leave the alley as soon as possible before any of her coworkers came out. Seeing her meet with a strange man in an alley wasn't the sort of thing Nao wanted spread about the bar. It would be even worse if Misa happened to see. Nao didn't like lying to her friend, and she especially didn't like piling other lies on top of them. Keeping her private life separate from her social life was the only way to keep things from getting complicated.

Naki followed along after her, his hands shoved into the pockets of a short black overcoat. Nao copied him, lamenting not stopping at a convenience store hours earlier to pick up pocket warmers. Her pace was hurried, her shoulders hunched against the wind as she led the way to the train station. Naki kept pace with her easily, his expression near bored the few times Nao looked back at him.

"Can't we just walk there?" Naki whined when the station came into view.

"I'm not walking to the Thirteenth Ward in the dark," Nao explained, "Plus, this is faster."

Walking back though…

There were few trains running anymore at this hour, and even fewer ran to the Thirteenth Ward. The "next" train was, in fact, the last train. There would be no others running back to the Third Ward until morning and even if there was, Nao doubted that Yamori—for all his love of screwing with her—would haul her all the way into a ghoul-infested Ward for a five-minute conversation. She'd be lucky if she could find a taxi yet tonight.

Nao bought the tickets for the last train, handing the money begrudgingly over to the ticket dispenser. The station was quiet with very few people standing on the platform. Nao and Naki had little time to wait before the overhead speakers announced the incoming train, instructing the few people there to stay behind the line. She stayed as far from the line as Naki would allow, his impatience bleeding through the hand wrapped around her wrist. He wanted to get as close as possible. Nao conceded a few steps to make the grip on her arm less obvious. Naki probably thought she was itching to make a run for it given how skittish she was being. As if she'd take that sort of chance against a ghoul. As if the few attempts she had taken thus far hadn't ended with laughable results.

And yet…

If I jump off before the doors close, Naki won't be able to chase after me, Nao planned. Bright lights lit up the rails, painting a trail for the train to follow as it sped past before slowing down. But he'll probably come to my apartment and make me walk all the way there. Nao let Naki drag her into an empty car. The silence between them as they rode to the Thirteenth was dense and uncomfortable. She'd hugged her purse the whole ride there, staring out the windows while Naki glanced at advertisements lining the car. Occasionally he'd ask her what a certain word meant. How another word was said and mispronouncing it immediately after.

Nao took it all in stride until the train swept into the Thirteenth Ward station. Rather than pull her up by her wrist, Naki migrated to the doors before they had opened, swaying with the train's momentum. Nao followed after him. Out of the train. Out of the station. Onto streets less traveled after midnight and ones not frequented by visitors playing around at gambling dens and titty bars.

If Nao had to describe it, she'd say she was going into the sketchy situations that parents warned their teenage daughters away from. Could she even remember her own parents warning her? They must have, at least once. About not following strangers and bad men. Not going into places she was unfamiliar with. Being all alone, with no one knowing where she was or who she was meeting. Nao thought about the stories she'd hear, the people who had told them, that all started with: 'she went alone to meet a man…' and ended with bad things happening. Death and rape, drugs and assault. Nightmares come alive that left people changed either physically or mentally.

To her, Naki was a stranger. She'd only ever met him once and while he had saved her, the experience had been less than ideal, casting a shadow over his good deed. Yamori was, without a doubt, a bad man. Nao was following a stranger to meet a bad man. If her mother knew, she'd never hear the end of it, but the woman would be a hypocrite. As Naki led her, Nao thought about what Misa had said about Yamori's offer. After her father died, Nao had told very few in her circle of friends the circumstances he had left them in. Only Misa knew that loan-sharking yakuza were involved. No one knew the extent they'd gone to make ends meet—what her mother had done to keep the interest reasonable. It was frightening how close Misa had been without even venturing a guess. All she had to do was replace a couple names.

"Big Bro's up there," Naki said, stopping so abruptly that Nao nearly ran into him. Nao looked up at the building he pointed to. It was too dark to see much of the street they were on, much less the buildings that occupied it in the hazy orange light of the streetlamps. But the building Naki had brought her to was more visible than Nao would have liked. It had probably been abandoned for the last twenty years, but the building itself looked like it had been falling into disrepair for thirty. Twelve stories of crumbling stone rose before her, its prior profession as a hotel evident only by the faded lettering from a sign above its door. Every window covering the front of the building was either boarded up or shattered. Graffiti edged the bottom like a lace cuff; profanity, tags, and illegible imagery the only decoration the building had seen in recent years.

Nao swallowed, wondering if while the hotel had been abandoned by its owners, it had not been by its occupants.

"Are ya gonna get up there or not?" Naki asked, raising a brow at her reluctancy as she stayed planted beside him.

Nao worried her bottom lip. She shouldn't go in. Everything about this place stank of warning. A neon sign like the ones several blocks away screaming at her that this was a bad situation. But it was a warning Nao had no choice but to ignore.

"Which floor?"

|13|

Nao could scarcely feel the tip of her nose as she buried her face deeper within her coat collar, partially shielding her face as she peeked over the edge. The glow from her phone lit up the stairwell, illuminating the small space for seconds at a time before the screen went dark. Nao shoved it back into her purse, not wanting to see the moment the timer hit thirty. Burying her hands beneath her armpits, Nao paced uselessly in an effort to keep her blood moving and maintain a façade of warmth.

More than twenty minutes ago Nao had opened the roof access door and found the rooftop completely empty. When Yamori had failed to show up after the first five minutes, Nao had opted to wait in the shelter of the stairwell. Without the added abuse from the wind, the cold was just a solid thing leeching at her from the stone walls.

Sometime before then she had trekked up the twelve flights of stairs in this derelict hotel. By the fifth floor she had lost her stamina and taken a breather. On the ninth she had tip-toed past a woman lying on the stairs, her black hair limp and tangled. A rubber tie cut off the circulation through her bicep. Her sunken eyes were tightly shut, ignorant of the person edging past her as soft moans and high-pitched whimpers left her mouth. Twenty minutes later and still the noises continued, floating up to her in the dark, both irritating and simultaneously making her envious. The phantasy lover in that woman's veins caused more pleasure than Matsuru had the last time they'd had sex.

Nao stopped pacing after a half-dozen turns, swaying with dizziness. Pacing in a stairwell landing was as ineffective as it was small. She glanced at the heavy metal door. Time continued to stretch on and on and yet Yamori failed to show his face. If he was going to be late, he could have just called. If this was some joke to see what he could make her do, he was losing his touch. All-in-all, Nao was getting fed up with whatever game this was.

Just another power play, Nao grumbled inwardly, A stupid joke between him and Naki.

But what if it wasn't? What if Naki had brought her too early, or Yamori was just running late?

Maybe I'll see him walking in.

On impulse, Nao pushed open the door. Cold air blasted her face, rushing into the stairwell to fill the gaps around her. Her hair buffeted, obscuring her eyes, and trying to crawl inside her mouth. Nao brushed it away, combing back the loose strands. The wind nipped at her nylon-covered legs, chilling her blood, and stealing body heat.

It left her numb.

It made her feel alert.

Keeping her arms crossed over her chest, Nao walked to the ledge. The edge of the building had a lip of brickwork maybe six inches tall—though in some places the brick had either been weathered away or fallen. Nao got as close as she dared, carefully peering over the crumbling stone to the sidewalk below. It was easier to see from above than it had been down below. No one was on the street in either direction she looked, and even the one person she thought would be there was no longer present. Naki had probably left the moment she'd stepped through the door—his orders fulfilled, and his presence no longer required.

Leaving her completely and utterly alone in the most dangerous Ward in Tokyo.

Fuck.

Nao eased back from the ledge, her jaw clenching in agitation and a myriad of other smaller emotions. She needed to keep calm and think rationally. She needed to remind herself of the kind of person Yamori is.

Violent. Manipulative. Possessive.

He'd never leave her alone in a Ward known for its high population of ghouls. Yamori would never let his prey be stolen by someone else. She turned her eyes to the overcast sky above, trying to take solace in that singular fact. It was a depressing fact, but a fact nonetheless and it calmed her down—if only infinitesimally.

A hint of metal washed over her tongue. She'd bitten the inside of her cheek too hard. Nao ran the tip of her tongue over the small cut, messaging away the sting of pain. Maybe she was just deluding herself. Maybe he'd just wanted to see what she would do. She lowered her eyes to the Ward spread out before her.

The building wasn't very tall, but it towered just enough to make an impression. For all its horror stories, for all the blood that soaked its back-alleys, the Ward was filled with light. Neon blues and purples and reds highlighting the outlines of skyscrapers and marking each individual window upon the black cutouts of buildings. It was a beautiful veneer. A glamourous cover. A pristine suit on a serial killer.

It looked too pretty to be anything but dangerous.

"Where are you?" she murmured shifting her weight from one foot to the other. By now it had to be after one. She might as well skip the effort of finding a taxi and just look for a cheap hotel.

Krrch

Nao's ears pricked at the scrape of stone, a shiver wiggling its way up the back of her skull. Steel wrapped around her waist before she could look for the source. Another beam of steel snaked over her arms, pinning them to her sides as she started to thrash against the body behind her. Panic filled her body in a white-hot rush when she was lifted off her feet. Heels striking against her assailant's knees, Nao wriggled violently in his grasp. Unencumbered by her violent movements, Yamori stepped up onto the ledge.

All the fight went out of Nao when she looked down and saw empty space against her feet. The sidewalk down below looked impossibly far away. Fear replaced her panic. The hands she had been using to push away Yamori's arms turned into claws. The skin of Yamori's wrist tore under her nails, securing his arm around her waist. Warm breath washed over her neck. "You weren't getting any ideas, were you, Nao-chan?" he asked, "If this is how you want to die, I'll help you out."

Nao couldn't answer, her mind too busy picturing a bright red spot on the pavement down below. Slowly, she turned her face away from the imaginary imagery. "Please put me back on the roof," she stated, her words clear and carefully chosen. Yamori was slow to acquiesce to her, taking his sweet time as he stepped backward off the ledge. He walked backwards a few steps, Nao's shoes hovering over the ground until he set her down a safe distance away. As soon as Yamori's hold on her loosened, Nao collapsed, her legs like jelly as her fear-induced stoicism vanished, leaving her body shaking. Nao's breaths came out in short, rapid pants, white as a cloud in the cold air. Her back reclined against Yamori's legs, craving solidity—her hand curled around his shoe.

"You're not leaving this world unless it's by my hand," Yamori told her harshly, nearly growling his displeasure. Nao tilted her head back against his thigh, staring up at him as he glared down.

"…It'd be more instant than anything you have planned for me," she replied. Nao hadn't been thinking about jumping, but why alleviate his suspicions that suicide was preferable to murder? "What took you so long to get here?"

His face broke, splintering from the frown. His smile stretched wide, gleaming sickeningly in the light from the Ward and causing a wave of gooseflesh to race over her arms. "I got a little…distracted."

Nao didn't care to know by what. Anything that made her want to put ten feet of space between herself and Yamori was better left unsaid. She kept her lips pursed tight to refrain from asking any follow-ups. Yamori's peaked excitement simmered down in the presence of her disturbed countenance, reverting to the usual blithe amusement he seemed to take out of life in general. "How long are you going to sit there shaking?" He gave her hand a nudge, reminding her of the death grip she had on him. She ripped her hand away from his shoe and quickly got to her feet, her legs still rubber-like and unreliable as she worked to stabilize herself.

His laugh was a low, rough sound, vibrating from his chest across the empty space and right through her bones. Yamori stepped around her, beside her. Her head still light with adrenaline, Nao looked over at him. Over his white clothes he wore a short black overcoat, not dissimilar from Naki's. A pinprick of irrational irritation speared her that he looked to be warmer than she was in her snow coat. Biting back a comment on his lack of weather-appropriate clothing—not that he seemed to need it—Nao asked, "Why am I here?" She knew why.

He didn't look at her, his eyes trained on the skyline like hers had been before he'd shown up and ruined the moment. "Have you made a decision?"

Her mouth bent into a grimace. "The time to ask me that would have been when you were dangling me off a building," she remarked, her eyes still on him. "I might have said yes."

"Maybe," he replied, "So what's your answer?" Yamori glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. The iris looked more of a vibrant red than it usually did, the accidental result of either the reflecting city lights or his arousal. She didn't dare let her eyes dart down to the front of his pants where the semi-hard shape of him rested. The wriggling of her ass against his cock exciting him as much as her fear did. Nao thanked God that the cold could disguise the redness of her face. She could still practically feel the curve of it pressed against her.

"If I say 'yes', you'll think that I'm only doing it to seduce you into letting me live," Nao said. Her arms crossed over her chest, her stance both protective and a way to ward off the cold. She should look into buying thicker stockings. "And if I say 'no', you'll just assume I can't separate love from sex."

His mouth curled in a sneer. "Don't tell me you actually love him." His voice was half-disdain and half-unbelievable humor. As if the thought of loving Matsuru was ridiculous. Considering Yamori had been able to smell the women Matsuru had hooked up with on her, he wasn't far off.

"I liked him," Nao stated defensively, "which was more than enough for me. And I trusted him—" Even though I shouldn't have. "—Which is more than I can say for you."

Yamori's mouth pressed into a firm line. "I don't trust you," Nao went on, her voice getting progressively softer and less antagonistic, "Not in that way. I trust that I'll be able to leave this Ward alive without having other ghouls tear me apart, but that's the extent. I don't trust you enough to be that vulnerable."

He clicked his tongue in annoyance but didn't say anything to refute it. "So, it's a no then." He looked away from her, back towards the sky-rises.

Nao raised a brow at his disappointment. "Why do you want to sleep with me?" she asked on impulse, "Not to sell myself short, but don't you have other options?"

"Aren't you already selling yourself short, fucking around with a guy like that." Yamori's tone was conversational, even if his words were insulting.

"…That's my own decision." He probably wouldn't believe her if she said that she'd broken up with Matsuru. Beyond that, what she did in her love life was no business of his. "Answer the question or I'm leaving." When he kept silent, Nao counted to thirty in her head before turning to leave. Yamori's arm shot out, grabbing her left bicep in a hold that was neither gentle nor hard. Nao glanced down at it before looking at his face expectantly.

"I owe you for what you did for me."

It wasn't something she expected to hear. It wasn't a reason anyone would accept. Nao's eyebrows turned down in anger, her mouth a scowl as she seethed, "I'm not so pathetic that I need someone to owe me something to get laid." She tried to shake off his hand to no avail. "It doesn't make me happy that that's the only reason you'd do so."

Yamori turned his face to her then. His eyes hard as he sneered derisively, "Would you rather I fall to my knees and profess my love for you?" Nao narrowed her eyes at him. His grip tightened the slightest bit. "Or that I find you so attractive that I want to see you squirming naked below me? What did lover boy say to make you spread your legs, Nao-chan?"

Yamori wasn't actually curious. He was just trying to get a rise out of her. Nao cut her anger down, smoothing it until it became contempt. "He saw me as a woman." His lip twitched, but in either direction Nao couldn't tell. Keeping her tone even, Nao countered, "You asked me if I saw you as a man. I do. But what do you see me as? Prey? A female of my species? Or a woman?"

He smirked, his demeaner dismissive of her query. "To me, everyone is prey."

It was a short and simple sentence, meant to put an end to this topic. So, Nao let him end it, and started a new one. After a short moment to let his answer sink in, Nao said—nearly offhandedly— "…My boss told me you're a cannibal. Someone like you who sees nothing but prey? You'd cannibalize your own mother."

Yamori's anger was instantaneous. There was no melting of his features; his smile did not sag, and his eyes did not dim from their amusement. It was as if Nao had flipped a switch from mirthful to enraged. Nao could have blinked and missed the movement it took for his lips to draw back into a vicious snarl. His eyes widened, flashing to black and red, as his nostrils flared. Yamori's hold on her arm tightened painfully. He drew her to him, yanking on her shoulder jarringly as he turned his body to face her fully. Yamori held Nao against him by her upper arm, his face close to hers as he threatened her.

"Don't you DARE talk about my mother!"

Nao stared up at him in stunned silence. Her scorn forgotten as adrenaline burned her body and chilled her blood. Her face scrunched in a mixture of fear, surprise, and concern, her forehead wrinkling as her brows drew together. Had she touched a sore spot?

As fast as his anger was to boil, after a seething minute Yamori began to cool. His snarl shrunk and disappeared, twisting into a bitter grimace. The air around them lost its electric charge, lowering the chance for a spark to ignite another bout of rage. His shoulders loosened their tension, his body following suit slowly after and gently shifting away the image of massiveness he had so very quickly built up. Nao watched as he lost his rage very slowly, though his anger remained in the hand he still had around her arm. His eyes were the last to dissipate, the black receding from around the iris while he clicked his tongue and released her arm with a light shove, like he was tossing her away.

Nao stumbled back a step but held her ground, continuing to stare at Yamori as he turned his body away from her. A dull throbbing started in her arm as blood rushed back to her outer extremities. Her old injury pulsed in time with her heart, reawakening familiar aches and pains in dull flashes. Nao didn't pay it much mind—she was used to this much—and continued to stare at Yamori, her gaze fixed on the back of his head.

Yamori didn't yell at her often—she tried to give him no cause to—so when he suddenly had this outburst, Nao could not help but be the slightest bit curious. She had caused offense, that much was clear. And his mother seemed to be important to him given his steadfast defense of her. Nao decided to start with an apology as an icebreaker. "I'm sorry," she apologized, hesitant and soft in case he still retained some flames of rage.

He made no inclination or some other gesture that he had either heard or acknowledged her. Nao decided to probe the boundaries with a light question.

"…Did you lose her?"

His fingers twitched. Nao's eyes darted to them.

"Were you young?" she continued, watching him carefully. Yamori kept silent. His hands curled into fists by his sides.

Chewing on the inside of her cheek, Nao stepped closer to him, all the while aware of how close the ledge was. She reached out an unsteady hand to touch his elbow. "Yakumo." No honorific. Over-familiar. A name he no longer went by in favor of his aliases. Yamori turned his face just enough to glare down at her with one bright red eye. He shifted away the slightest bit, so she was no longer touching him. Her fingertips a scant centimeter away from his overcoat.

Nao pulled her hand back, letting it drop to her side. Yamori didn't give unless he was receiving. Nao pulled her eyes from his, reflecting him as they stood side-by-side watching the neon glow of the Ward. "When I was eighteen…my dad stepped in front of a train," she began slowly.

He was in the city begging her mother's older brother for a loan.

"He died five minutes before I got there."

If she hadn't stopped with Misa and Sacha to check out a new poster for a popular male idol group, Nao would have seen her father standing too close to the track.

"I lied to the police and told them he had slipped and fallen."

It was raining. The station wasn't well covered, so it had been plausible for her father to have slipped while walking towards the track. So many people had been around, but no one had noticed anything until the blood had splashed onto the platform.

Nao clenched her jaw, turning her eyes away from the bright lights stinging them. "I didn't do it to preserve his pride or his memory," she confessed.

What pride did he have anyway? To kill himself because he couldn't afford to keep up his business? To get the chance to leave all his worries with his wife and daughter? Did her father even know the type of people he had gone to the first time for money? Didn't he assume what people like that would do to two women? To his high school daughter? Or did he suspect they would turn her self-sacrificing mother into their own personal whore when they couldn't scrape together the full payment and decided ignorance in death was better.

Her poor mother still thought his death was an accident. Her friends suspected but had the decency not to say anything. Nao had only confided in Misa that her father had committed suicide, but she'd never told her why she'd lied. She'd never told anyone why she had been so adamant that her father's death be ruled an accident.

"I lied because his life insurance policy didn't cover suicide, and we needed the money to pay off the loans."

Maybe Yamori was right when he'd said she missed the money more than the men who had died. She could give herself the benefit of the doubt that he didn't know what her father's death had done to them. That the last year of her high school life, when she should have been playing with her friends and enjoying herself, had been spent working every hour she could spare. That she'd spent too many nights of those first four years until she'd moved to the Twenty-Third Ward listening to the grunts and groans of those men who came to collect the money. The squeaking of her parents' mattress as their bed was defiled, and the sobs of her mother after they'd taken what they wanted and left—clear as a bell though the thin wall separating their bedrooms—stuck in her head so many years later.

But she'd traded his death for money not even a day after he'd died. She had cannibalized her own father and spat out his bones.

Nao was so lost to her cruel reminiscing that she missed the softened gaze Yamori had on her sorrowful face. 'Soft' was a difficult word to attribute to someone as callous and brutal as Yamori. So, it was better to say that he had become 'less'. His stare had turned 'less' hostile. He had become 'less' antagonistic towards her after her confession. Had the events leading up to her reveal been more light-hearted, Yamori might have mocked her with this information. That he had been right in his teasing that she valued money more than people.

But their conversation to that point had not been light-hearted, so it did not warrant a light-hearted response. In the hard gaze Nao had, Yamori could see the broken edges of her story. The shards that cut her most that she refused to bring to light. Before she died, Yamori was determined to drag those shards out just to watch her bleed.

But the mood wasn't right. It set his teeth on edge.

His only interest that night was mocking her, but now the moment was ruined. Regardless of the way she'd answered, Yamori would have taunted her relentlessly. If she'd said no, he could have twisted her words and turned her into a mixture of enraged and embarrassed. If she'd said yes, he could have stripped her down and still denied her the one thing she wanted from her lover boy. But now the night had soured, and Yamori was no longer having fun at her expense.

Still. While he was already in this mood, he might as well share in this rare moment of grief.

"…She was weak."

Nao kept her eyes locked on the skyline, though Yamori could tell he had her undivided attention in the slight pricking of her ear and subtle shift on her tense face. "When you're weak, you are trampled. You are overrun. You are violated, and you are afflicted." How many times had Yamori heard that son of a bitch Interrogator say those words as he'd sliced and hammered and stabbed and sawed his flesh away? How many times had Yamori said it as he deluded himself into believing he was the one torturing the Interrogator?

Snap!

Nao looked down at Yamori's bent index finger before looking up at his face. He stared back at her with a blank expression unbefitting of what he'd said. Yamori was unusually expressive, even when he hid behind an amused smile. Nao had expected a deeper frown, or a slight sadness in his eyes, but all he gave her was a face clear of emotion and a melancholic air. She wondered if she could take the feeling he gave off as a sign of his grief. His expressionless face gave her the impression that his mother had died a very long time ago.

Nao let the topic end there rather than push her luck. After his outburst, she felt like she was standing on thin ice. This honesty, this…sorrow shared between them was tenuous and unlikely to last long. Nao didn't question him further or make any comment on what he'd told her.

She silently turned her eyes away to search through her purse for her phone.

They hadn't talked long—or at least that's how it felt—but the time had continued to whittle away, inching closer and closer to two in the morning. Inwardly Nao sighed. She could call for a taxi, but what would be the point? The time it would take to get back to the Third Ward would be wasted, and Nao didn't feel up to taking that journey. She'd rather put the money towards finding a place to sleep.

"Yamori," Nao said, "Is there a place near here I can sleep tonight? As cheap as possible would be preferred."

Just like that his mood lifted and his smile came back. Small. Mischievous. Hinting at a prank he was about to pull. Nao hated it. She preferred it. She liked it better when he did predictable things.

"Yeah. There's a few places," he replied. Yamori turned away from the ledge, crooking his finger as he beckoned her to follow. It wasn't the same as the dark feeling she usually got when something bad was about to happen, but a squirming feeling started in her chest hinted at something. Less like a heavy hand pressed against her breastbone, and more of a small pinch at the center of her chest. She rubbed at it with a worried expression marring her face as she followed Yamori off the roof and out of the building. Back onto the streets of the Thirteenth Ward.