An event that Hideya is being forced—excuse me, strongly encouraged—to attend, fancy, in a hotel ballroom in downtown Kyoto, with high ceilings dripping in chandeliers. People mill around in expensive formalwear making a dull roar of polite conversation, and Hideya would rather choke.

He takes two flutes of champagne off the tray a waiter holds out to them and offers one to the woman in a red dress next to him with a charming smile.

“Thank you,” she murmurs.

She’s the daughter of a banker, and Hideya is supposed to entertain her. She’s decent enough, if a bit spoiled, but Hideya is ready to stab an eye out with the stem of the champagne glass if this night keeps going on.

“Hayate-san?”

She’d been telling him something dreadfully dull about the summer she spent abroad in the United States, and he’s been zoning out with a polite yet attentive look on his face.

And then he’d gotten distracted.

Hideya taps his box of cigarettes listlessly, lip curling as the conversation from earlier replays in his mind.

Sakamoto-san, the man in charge of an entire wing of the Agata-gumi, sat behind a long, polished desk. The desk hid the gut he was starting to develop from years of fat living, and its top was decorated with a rare cigar in a case and pictures of Sakamoto-san’s family.

Behind the desk, he folded his hands pensively, his jocular and booming voice coming forward.

“Hideya-kun, it’s just not practical. You understand, right? Just work under Nanami for a few more years, and then you’ll have kobun of your own to run.”

He talks to Hideya with the kind of avuncular affection that makes it sound like Hideya is an errant child—to be indulged to a point but ultimately too naive and asking for too much.

That had been the outcome of Hideya bringing his plan to Sakamoto-san for the second time in twice as many years. The answer had been the same when he was twenty—you’re too young; it’s good to be ambitious, but mind your elders.

He had bought it at twenty, but at twenty-four, Hideya was older and wiser—and starting to understand that Sakamoto was just giving him the runaround.