Quinlan was happy to hear she was broken enough to comply.
A free-willed confession in front of so many witnesses landed very differently than a puppet repeating her master's script, and every court on the continent would hear about what the Fujimori elder said today not because Quinlan ordered his slave to speak but because she chose to reveal it herself.
"What was Ayame's crime?"
Chizuru looked at him, and something that used to be hatred surfaced behind those dead eyes for a moment before settling back into the grey.
"You," she said. "You are her crime. You are fate's cruel prank on everything my clan spent generations building toward."
"Flattering, but that's not an answer. She hadn't met me when she was enslaved."
"..." Chizuru's gaze fell to the relic scraping across the stone, and the hatred thinned into loss.
"That blade predates the Fujimori name," she said, her voice carrying across the hushed arena despite its exhaustion.
