Theo carefully organized the memories he’d recovered so far.
It was awkward to say out loud, but apparently he had been quite an impressive person. Getting back the memories up through age twenty made him finally feel it. He had entered the Imperial Academy at fifteen and graduated at the top of his class in only three years, and immediately after was picked for the vanguard of the great demon-subjugation force. For the two years that followed, he moved from battlefield to battlefield and racked up large and small feats. And in the year he turned twenty, he received a decoration and a fief directly from the emperor and was granted the title of baron.
All of it felt like a life that didn’t suit the current him at all.
If I want to know about Rihen, I have to show Rihen who I am, too. That’s only fair. I don’t want a one-sided relationship.
Theo took a scarf out of a box. It was of a fine make, soft and firm to the touch. He’d bought it with the coins he’d saved from working at the tavern, one at a time. Once he remembered that he had a fief, he had the thought that someday he might be able to give Rihen better gifts, bought with the earnings from there. A very vague thought, and for that reason more urgent.
“Rihen. It’s a gift. I got my first pay, so I bought it.”
Theo wrapped the scarf around Rihen’s neck himself. As his hands touched him, Rihen’s face lit up.
“You didn’t have to. You could have kept it for yourself.”
He smiled and smoothed the scarf.
“Thank you. It’s warm.”
With just that one line, some of the tension in Theo’s shoulders eased.
“And, I’ll tell you about the memories I’ve recovered so far.”
Theo let out everything about who he had been, hiding nothing. Rihen didn’t cut in. He listened all the way to the end. Nodding now and then, sometimes lightly furrowing his brow.
When it was all told, Rihen said quietly,
“Thank you for telling me. And for trusting me with it.”
As always, Rihen ruffled Theo’s hair. And just as he was about to rise from his chair, Theo stood with him and caught Rihen’s wrist. With a strength that surprised even Theo.
“Now it’s your turn, Rihen. Tell me your secret.”
“My secret?”
Rihen blinked and looked at Theo.
“Is this the question game you were talking about before?”
Rihen put on a carefully harmless smile. A smile prepared to lower the other person’s guard. But this time it didn’t work.
Theo tightened the hand gripping Rihen’s shoulder. He was struggling to control his grip. The thought that Rihen might break at this brushed his mind, but he couldn’t let go. The voice that came out of him was so low and grim it startled even him.
“Rihen. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
Rihen’s expression turned rigid.
“F-Find out what?”
The moment he saw that reaction, certainty spread inside Theo’s chest. So he really was hiding something.
“You’ve been doing shameful things every night behind my back. Things you couldn’t let me notice.”
Rihen said nothing at all, frozen in place. To Theo, that silence didn’t feel like denial, but like admission. Through the wrist he was holding so Rihen couldn’t escape, he could feel Rihen’s heartbeat. Fast and erratic.
After a while, Rihen lifted his head with a sigh.
“I’m sorry. But there’s a reason for all of this...”
Before he had finished, Theo let out a bitter smile.
“Of course there’s a reason. Raising someone like me properly, someone who’d lost his memories and his abilities, must have taken a lot of money.”
Rihen’s eyes widened.
“But even so, selling your body every night is-”
“What are you talking about? Selling my body? Why would I do that?”
Rihen’s face carried both bewilderment and unfairness at once. That reaction was so honest that Theo faltered for a moment. But he couldn’t back down now. He’d already seen it.
“Are you still denying it? I clearly saw Rihen walk into a brothel last night.”
That scene was still vivid. The figure vanishing into the darkness, the heavy musk scent, the imaginings that hadn’t left his head since.
The blood drained from Rihen’s face.
“I didn’t go there to sell my body. I went because I had something else to do.”
It sounded like a ridiculous excuse. Theo shook his head.
“You were wearing different clothes going in and coming out. And you reeked of that strong perfume they say the working boys use.”
Every time he recalled all of those details, Theo’s insides burned black.
A heavy, sticky silence settled in the room. It was so still that even breathing was audible. Rihen was quiet for a long while. The expression, so ready with a smile, was wiped from his face. Around the point where the silence became too taut to endure any longer, Rihen laughed weakly.
“So you found out...”
He hung his head like a criminal. His voice sank, lonely.
“I knew it was something I shouldn’t be doing. That’s why I meant to hide it to the very end. I’m sorry. For being this kind of guardian...”
Theo instinctively took one more step toward Rihen. Golden eyes bored into him.
“I’ll buy.”
“What?”
When Rihen lifted his head, Theo’s expression had already reached its conclusion.
“Tonight, I’m saying I’ll buy Rihen.”
He knew how cruel it was, how twisted, and still he couldn’t stop. Theo brought his lips right up to Rihen’s ear and whispered, biting the words off.
“If it’s a body you sell to just anyone for money, then you can sell it to me for one day, can’t you? As for the money... I’ll come up with enough that Rihen won’t feel shortchanged.”
In the worldbuilding of this game, buying sex with money is illegal. Yet under the surface, brothels are still going strong. As always, law and reality lead separate lives.
So to put it plainly... if Theo pays money and has sex with me, that’s a bad thing. And in this world, bad things come back in the form of a reward called points. Right. I’ve already done soul offerings. What’s left for me to be squeamish about? Selling my body is nothing.
The important thing was that I mustn’t show any refusal here. The moment I hinted that even a little bit of me disliked being with Theo, the points would go along with it. Theo was a good person, so he’d never do anything I truly didn’t want.
To take this opportunity and gather evil points, I had to squeeze my eyes shut and put on a face of iron. Theo might think of me as easy. But if it was the price of saving the world, I could bear that misunderstanding.
I shrugged and said, crooked,
“How much are you going to give me? Fief or decoration, you don’t have any money right now.”
Theo seemed thrown by the excessively bold attitude. He shot up from his seat, went to a corner of the room, and came back holding the treasured sword I’d given him.
“Take this back, at least. This sword is incredibly valuable, isn’t it?”
He held Lapierre out carefully and continued,
“And later, once I’m fully grown and go back to my own fief... whatever’s there, whatever you want, Rihen, I’ll give all of it to you.”
Seeing Theo try to give me the sword, my expression hardened.
“Don’t even joke about selling that sword. It’s for you. You can’t hand it off to someone else, ever.”
“Th-Then what should I give you...”
For someone who’d confidently declared he’d buy me, he looked utterly at a loss. That flushed young face gave off a whiff of green boyhood. Right, I should probably scrap the plan of taking money from Theo. What was I going to do with a kid’s pocket money?
Thinking it over calmly, there was no need to formalize things with money. The very fact of a hero and a demon mingling their bodies was, by this world’s standards, already a sufficiently corrupt choice. Even if Theo didn’t know my true identity.
Shane’s father, too, had shared an intimacy without knowing his mother was a demon, and hadn’t he received a cruel punishment as the price for it? So Theo’s act, in itself, was more than enough to earn evil points.
“Never mind. What would I do with your money anyway?”
I spoke a little more slowly than usual. Even as my lips moved, my head was working busily. How to phrase this so it would sound natural, in what tone Theo wouldn’t hesitate to hold me. I mentally deleted and rewrote practiced-sounding lines several times.
At last, a fairly convincing one came to me. It was the kind of content I couldn’t possibly bring myself to say sober, but for now what mattered was gathering evil points.
“...To celebrate you being all grown up, I’ll take your virginity for free.”
At that, Theo’s eyes went very wide.
I took hold of Theo and dragged him to the bed and laid him down. Judging by the motion alone, I might have looked as though I had no hesitation, but inside I was tight with nerves. Naturally. This was my first time being with a man. But I couldn’t let it show. Because I... I had gone and half-forced myself into the concept of an experienced whore. Damn it...
I put on an at-ease smile and reached for my clothes as if stepping onto a familiar stage. Not in a hurry, slowly, spending time on each meaningless motion as if performing a striptease. Just so that, on the outside at least, it wouldn’t look like I was trembling.
I leaned down and brought my lips close to Theo’s ear. When I blew a playful hff into it, Theo’s shoulders twitched. The innocence of the reaction was cute.
“You want to hold me, right?”
I whispered, mixing in a languid breath. Theo didn’t hesitate and nodded right away. That response was so honest that I was the one who sucked in a breath first.
I slowly rubbed my lips beside his ear, along his jawline. The tiny sound of lips touching and parting spread quietly through the room. I kept my hips against Theo’s groin and moved my pelvis lightly. Even the trivial rustle of fabric against fabric came through clearly. Under the cloth I could feel a solid weight. I stiffened.
Crazy, why is it this big?
Cold sweat streamed down me. However much this was for saving the world, taking something of that monstrous size into my body was out of the question. My head was already pounding. What am I supposed to do next? Is that even going to fit? How would a hardened whore act in this situation? One thought pulled another after it, on and on.
But wait, did I really have to keep pretending to be experienced with the back, too?
Rather than struggling with clumsy lies and creating a bigger problem, it seemed better to blend half truth with half lie. I sold my body, but I never used the back, that sort of thing. If it was his first time, Theo would probably go easy.
“Listen, Theo. Actually...”
I let out a long breath and confessed honestly.
“I’ve... I’ve never used the back before.”
