“Cough… cough… I’m fine… really… don’t worry, Aina…”
After hearing his girlfriend Aina Saiten’s voice—choked with sobs and warped by panic—Kaoru Hoshitani forced himself out of the foggy weakness that engulfed him and pried open his heavy eyelids.
The light before his eyes, along with his girlfriend’s blurred, anxious face, slowly came into focus.
He struggled to tug at the corners of his mouth, trying to squeeze out a reassuring smile.
But the smile was as fragile as a candle flickering in the wind.
The curve of his lips twitched slightly from exhaustion and pain, looking strained, even tinged with a bleak sadness.
In truth, Kaoru Hoshitani looked utterly miserable.
From his neck to his collarbones, chest, waist, abdomen, and limbs, his body was covered in marks of varying depth and shape—
Dark red love bites branded his skin like seals; bluish-purple finger-shaped bruises were clearly visible.
Most shocking were several distinct bite marks—so deep they nearly broke the skin—neatly stamped on his shoulder and the inside of his thighs, unmistakably proclaiming the aggressor’s unquestionable sense of possession.
Yet despite their frightening appearance, most of these marks were, in fact, only superficial injuries.
Aside from a few bite marks where the skin was thinnest and risked slight bleeding, the rest had not truly broken the surface.
They were merely bruises and localized swelling caused by ruptured capillaries beneath the skin.
They looked horrifying, but they had not damaged bone or muscle.
What truly crushed him was not the surface pain, but the exhaustion that seeped into his marrow and permeated every cell of his body.
From the moment he had been taken away by Rika Kawasaki in the early morning, to the second confrontation in the bathroom at night—nearly a full day and half a night, more than ten hours—his fragile body had been subjected to relentless, excessive, and brutal treatment.
Whether it was Rika Kawasaki’s merciless taking, driven by raw dominance and physical suppression, or later Aina Saiten’s equally unrestrained actions—fueled by emotional collapse and possessiveness, lacking tenderness and bordering on punishment—both had placed an immense burden on his body and mind.
His muscles felt as if they had been repeatedly stretched, kneaded, and struck; his joints throbbed with a dull ache.
His waist and legs, in particular, were so sore and weak they were almost numb.
Mentally, he had endured an extreme arc—from humiliation, despair, and breakdown, to forced composure and lies before his lover, and finally that atonement-like offering and endurance…
This chain of violent emotional upheavals had already drained his spirit completely.
Now, he felt as if his entire skeleton were about to fall apart. His consciousness was heavy and muddled, like cotton soaked in water.
His only desire was to close his eyes immediately and sink into a dreamless sleep where everything could be forgotten.
When Aina Saiten saw that Akane could still open his eyes and respond to her in that familiar voice—weak, yet still gentle—the heart that had nearly leapt out of her throat finally settled back down.
Her initial terror and panic were replaced by a complex mix of heartache, guilt, and lingering fear.
She took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm down, and carefully lifted Kaoru Hoshitani’s limp body from the bed—
He was lighter than she had imagined, and far softer and weaker, as if he might shatter at the slightest touch.
She moved as gently as possible, avoiding the marks that looked especially painful, and carried him back into the bathroom.
This time, the bathroom lights were on.
Under the clear illumination, the marks on his body looked even more glaring and grotesque, carrying a devastating beauty—the beauty of something that had been thoroughly ravaged.
Aina’s heart clenched painfully.
She turned on the warm water, adjusted it to a suitable temperature, soaked a soft towel, and began wiping away the sticky mixture of sweat, tears, and other filth from both of their bodies—slowly, gently, bit by bit.
Her movements were full of care. Whenever her fingertips brushed across his fever-warm skin, he would tremble faintly, unconsciously.
After cleaning him up, Aina wrapped him carefully in a large, soft bath towel, carried him back to the bedroom, and laid him down by the bed.
She fetched a hairdryer, set it to the lowest warm setting, and gently combed through his wet black hair with her fingers until every strand was dry and fluffy.
Throughout the process, Kaoru kept his eyes closed. His long lashes cast quiet shadows on his pale skin, his breathing growing steady and slow, as though he might fall asleep at any moment.
Next, Aina took out the household first-aid kit.
She opened it, revealing neatly arranged medications.
She retrieved a brown bottle of iodine solution and a small pack of sterile cotton swabs, unscrewed the cap, dipped a swab into the iodine, and began disinfecting his wounds with focused gentleness.
She started with the most obvious bite marks—the ones at risk of broken skin—carefully circling the edges with the swab, avoiding direct pressure on the center to prevent pain.
The cool sensation of the iodine made Kaoru frown slightly in his half-asleep state, but he did not wake.
Aina worked patiently, one spot after another. For the fine scratches left by fingernails, she lightly swept over them as well, providing basic disinfection.
As for the large, dark patches of love bites and bruises, she could only look on helplessly.
These subcutaneous bruises and congestion could only fade with time. No medicine could make them disappear immediately.
She did her best not to touch them.
Just as Aina was carefully checking with the cotton swab to make sure she hadn’t missed any small wounds—
Her movements suddenly froze.
Her gaze locked onto the pale skin on the right side of Kaoru’s lower abdomen, near his hipbone.
There, on the smooth, delicate skin, were several clear bite marks—darker in color than the others.
Their shape and force were distinctly different from the marks she remembered leaving.
She closed her eyes and searched her memory again, her fingers unconsciously brushing against her own lips, trying to summon tactile recollections.
But no matter how she searched, she could not find a clear memory of leaning down to bite his calf.
It was as though that part of her memory was a blank zone.
A faint, almost imperceptible sense of unease rose in her heart like a bubble drifting up from deep water—and quietly burst.
But that unease was quickly suppressed by a stronger, more reasonable explanation.
“Sigh…”
She let out a soft sigh filled with self-reproach and annoyance, murmuring to herself,
“I must have lost control earlier… my movements were too chaotic. I can’t even remember what I did…”
She attributed it to being driven by intense love, possessiveness, and some unnameable anxiety at the time—pushing her behavior beyond her usual restraint, causing her memory to blur and fragment.
“I can’t treat Akane like that again…”
Looking at her boyfriend’s faintly furrowed brow even in sleep, her heart filled with tenderness and remorse.
What she didn’t know was that this momentary doubt had brushed against the edge of a cruel truth—only to be pushed away by blind trust and a convenient self-explanation.
The bite marks on her beloved boyfriend’s calves, and in fact nearly two-thirds of the marks covering his body—
The deepest bruises, the clearest bite marks, and many of the traces she herself vaguely felt “didn’t seem like something I left”—
Their true creator was not her, his girlfriend, but someone else entirely.
Just hours earlier, in a distant villa bedroom, a tall, powerfully built woman with pale golden hair and sun-kissed skin had hoisted Kaoru Hoshitani’s legs onto her strong shoulders with absolute dominance and aggression.
Amid relentless, inescapable thrusts, she had bent down with a teasing, possessive smile and planted those punitive, marking kisses on his trembling calves—the very marks Aina had now discovered.
Those traces, mingled with Aina’s own marks of affection, together formed the cruelly beautiful and humiliating “map” now covering Kaoru’s body—silently testifying to the unseen plunder of that day.
After Aina finished applying the iodine and tidied the chaotic bedroom—scattered clothes, rumpled sheets, overturned lamp—replacing everything with fresh, clean bedding, Kaoru Hoshitani lay on the soft bed, already sunk into deep sleep from complete physical and mental exhaustion.
His breathing was even and long, his chest rising and falling gently. Thick lashes cast quiet fan-shaped shadows beneath his eyes, like a delicate, fragile doll.
Only the faint crease between his brows—still not fully smoothed even in sleep—hinted at the deep, indelible pain and shadow these experiences had etched into his heart, untouched by rest.
Aina turned off the bedside lamp that cast a warm yellow glow, plunging the room into a soft darkness suitable for sleep. She climbed into bed quietly and lay on her side facing Kaoru.
By the faint city light that never fully faded outside the window, she could just make out his peaceful sleeping face.
Though recalling her own roughness toward Akane filled her with guilt and heartache, she could not completely deny that the immense pressure she had been carrying—work, the future, and a vague, persistent unease, along with emotions she herself hadn’t clearly recognized—seemed to have been released and vented in a twisted way through that near-uncontrolled intimacy.
That sense of total possession—tinged even with punishment—had temporarily filled a hollow place in her heart created by real-life stress and latent anxiety.
And as she gazed at the face before her—still breathtakingly beautiful even in the darkness—and felt those unmistakable “marks” on him that belonged to her, a complex pleasure arose uncontrollably within her: intense love, deep possessiveness, and a shadowed sense of satisfaction intertwined.
She had indeed gained a powerful sense of “conquest” and fulfilled desire for possession.
The thought made her cheeks warm, yet also brought a sense of unprecedented closeness.
She leaned forward and, as lightly as a feather brushing past, placed a kiss full of love and apology on Kaoru’s cool lips.
Her lips felt the slight roughness of a small cut there, and her heart ached again.
“Good night, Akane,”
she whispered, her voice barely dissolving into the night.
“I love you…”
Worried that holding him might press on his wounds and cause pain, she merely reached out and gently, lovingly held the exposed fingers of his hand outside the blanket, feeling the steady pulse beneath his cool skin.
Maintaining that posture, she closed her eyes.
Fatigue soon overtook her. With the post-encounter relaxation and tangled emotions, she too gradually fell asleep.
The night grew deeper. All was silent.
Only the hands of the wall clock slid soundlessly across another mark.
At the same time, in the corner of the bedroom, the old phone that Aina had casually stuffed back into the depths of the wardrobe suddenly lit up in the absolute darkness.
A cold blue glow illuminated the cramped space inside the closet. On the screen, a line of ominous, countdown-like text appeared clearly:
Time remaining until your boyfriend Kaoru Hoshitani is cuckolded.
———
Seventy-four days.