Kitagawa Keiko will always be the most beautiful woman Gakuto has ever known.

Such a diminutive thing, she was, with narrow shoulders, small hands, and a delicate frame which appeared susceptible to falling apart from even the faintest breeze. She looked to be so fragile, so vulnerable and powerless, that it stupefied everyone she encountered whenever they saw her for who she truly was behind her thin limbs, innocent eyes painted by the sky above, and the gentle lilt of her voice.

“Do not worry, Kimura-sama. I assure you, your death will be mercifully quick.”

Gakuto remembers, most clearly, how lovely she had looked on that day. Dark hair tied back into the traditional style of a noble woman, dressed in the heavy layers of her pearl kimono, and wielding a jade dagger in her hand, she was nothing less than an alluring vision of death.

She gracefully paced before the tied figure of a man Gakuto had recognized as one of his father’s close companions – a traitor, they later realized, for he had attempted to steal a portion of the Takarai family’s wealth for his own. He had not gotten far before he had been caught by the watchful eye of the house’s matriarch, deceitful in her subdued appearance yet a snake amongst the overconfident men who served (and, in this case, betrayed) her husband.

“Watch closely,” she had told Gakuto as she lowered herself to kneel behind the writhing form of the lord. His cries for forgiveness fell deaf on her ears, the tears blotting the fabric shielding his eyes from view proving just how weak of a man he was. Slowly, and with the dangerous ease of a woman too accustomed to such violence, she lifted her weapon to the expanse of the lord’s neck.

Her voice – her lovely, melodious voice – which would oftentimes sing Gakuto to sleep now whispered the promise of death to her victim of the night. She pressed her dagger into the lord’s flesh, her chimed laughter echoing throughout the stone underbellies of the Tora no Shiro. Her hand, the one which had remained unoccupied until now, rose in Gakuto’s direction, and his eyes flickered up to meet those which so closely resembled his own.

“Come,” she beckoned softly, and Gakuto instantly obliged, lacing his fingers with hers. She pulled him closer, until he was right beside her, standing over the kneeling man – still pleading for his life – she would soon slaughter in cold blood. “Take off his blindfold.”

Without any of the hesitancy he was trained to never feel, Gakuto reached forward and pulled the lord’s blindfold loose. It fell onto the man’s lap, the silvery material a sharp contrast to his dirtied clothes. And Gakuto looked to Keiko, returning her kind smile and basking under the tightening of her hand around his.

“Good,” she whispered, and then pressed her weapon deeper into the lord’s neck. A stream of blood began to flow from the quivering skin, and in response, the man yelped in fear. “I want you to look at him, Kimura-sama. I want the eyes of the heir to the Tora no Shiro, the house you dared to cross, to be the very last thing you ever see in your miserable life.”

“Please, ojou-sama – please, I have been a fool. I am a loyal servant to Tora-dono,” he beseeched, and his eyes landed frantically on Gakuto. “It was a mere mistake, young lord, of which will never happen again, I swear! Please, for my children, for my children’s children, have mer –”

The man was silenced as Keiko sliced her dagger across his neck. A torrent of blood splattered onto Gakuto’s face, coating his skin in a sheen of red and soiling the bright hues of his robes. He watched, soundlessly, as the lord’s life quickly vanished from his bulging eyes. Mouth outstretched in a silent wail, the corpse of the lord slouched heavily before collapsing onto its side, and all that remained upright were the bodies of a still-pristine Keiko and a sopping Gakuto, decorated in crimson filth.

Any resentment at being dirtied was soon forgotten, however, at the sweet tinkle of Keiko’s giggles. Gakuto found his rigid body melting at the sound, before he too joined in on her amusement. The two of them laughed with one another, Keiko pulling Gakuto into her arms while the blood of the lord pooled beneath them. Keiko pecked her lips against Gakuto’s cheek, and when she sat back to gaze lovingly at his face, all Gakuto could see was the sticky red which now smeared her smile and the twisted corruption which set the blues of her eyes aflame.

“My little gem,” she purred, those narrow shoulders quacking under her mirth, those small hands cupping his cheeks in their palms, that delicate frame flawlessly veiling the monster inside from view. She had long since pocketed her dagger, the trusty weapon which had been gifted to her by his father on their wedding day, and now her hands pet the roundness of his face, ran through his blood-sodden hair, before settling on his waist. “My Gakuto-chan, my darling son.”

“Okaa-san,” Gakuto called with a small tilt of his mouth. He wrapped his arms around her, squeezing with all of the might in his adolescent body. “My beautiful okaa-san.”

Kitagawa Keiko had always been considered the devil of the Tora no Shiro, but Gakuto could only view her as a fallen angel.

She was the fearsome, beastly, clever fuel – ethereal in every way – which gave the equally terrifying Takarai Hideto his flame of power and influence. They were a formidable pair, one that had been arranged by their parents long before they had been born. However, they accepted it with pride. For no one could match the Tiger of Japan as perfectly as the Viper he was wed to. Two strong individuals – in wit, in courage, in strategy, in sheer dominance – partnered together to form a union unrivaled by any throughout the entire country. They relied greatly on one another; where one fell short, the other compensated to an alarming degree. They were assets to one another, after all. They were each other’s strengths.

A shame, truly. For they were one another's weaknesses, as well.

There existed no one who could harm Takarai Hideto or Kitagawa Keiko. No one other than themselves. And this had truly been exemplified when a foreign band of shamans passed through the town beneath the hill which the Tora no Shiro rested upon. When his father, a stoic man with an immovable heart not even his mother could enliven, crossed paths with a doe-eyed creature by the name of Jung Yoomi.

And after that day, every