I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 760: Sakura Taken as Hostage

Nathan moved across the rooftops without slowing down, one body draped over each shoulder, his footing certain even on the narrow edges where a less careful man would have hesitated. Below him the festival continued without interruption, noise and light spilling through every street, the crowd too wrapped up in itself to look up.

He hadn’t planned this. That was the honest truth of it. He had come to the festival with no intention of taking anyone, had simply been moving through it like a shadow the way he usually did, when the timing fell into place so cleanly that ignoring it would have felt like stupidity. Genzo’s disappearance had changed the shape of everything. The old man was likely gone, and if that was true then the ground beneath their plan had shifted considerably. Nathan wasn’t sentimental about it, but he wasn’t indifferent either. Genzo had taught him things worth remembering, had invested time in him when there was no obvious reason to, and that created a debt Nathan acknowledged even if he didn’t dwell on it.

Beyond that, there was the practical reality. A daughter of Norihiro’s blood, handed to him by coincidence in an unguarded alley, was exactly the kind of leverage a person didn’t walk away from.

He wrapped both girls in thick dark cloth before descending back to street level, bundled tight enough that they looked like nothing more than awkward rolls of fabric being hauled by a man in a hurry. Nobody looked twice. People at festivals rarely did.

The inn was close. He carried them up to the room he shared with Hanzo, lowered them both carefully onto the floor, and bound their wrists with enough give to be bearable but enough hold to matter. Then he sat back against the wall and waited, arms folded, entirely at ease with what he had done.

It was almost funny, in a way he didn’t bother laughing at. Sakura was lying unconscious a few feet from the room where her half brother slept, kidnapped by a man who was sharing quarters with someone who had every reason to want her father ruined. The geometry of it was almost elegant. Nathan had been in stranger situations and walked out of all of them, so he wasn’t concerned. For now this was the only option available to him, and he had never been the type to lose sleep over necessary decisions.

He sat with the quiet and waited.

The door opened eventually, and it was Hanzo.

He read the answer on her face before she said a word. That particular kind of stillness people carried when they had been hoping for something and come back empty.

“I figured,” Nathan said. “He didn’t come back.”

Hanzo shook her head. Her jaw was tight.

“Something happened to him. This isn’t like him, he would never just disappear without word. Something went wrong.” She pressed her fists against her sides, and Nathan could see the effort it took her to keep her voice level. “He must have been caught.”

Neither of them said the obvious part. If Genzo had been taken while trying to pull information out of Norihiro’s people, the likelihood of him still being alive was not something worth building hope around.

“So.” Nathan watched her steadily. “What do you want to do? Do you put everything aside and go looking for him, knowing what that risks? Or do you keep moving forward regardless of what happened to him?”

Hanzo opened her mouth, and then her eyes moved past him and stopped.

The color shifted in her face entirely.

“What,” she said slowly, “are you doing.”

Both girls were still unconscious on the floor, wrists bound, breathing quietly. Sakura’s pink hair had spilled out from under the dark cloth, vivid and unmistakable against the wooden boards.

“Hostages,” Nathan said simply. “The pink haired one especially. That is Sakura. Norihiro’s daughter.”

Hanzo stared at him.

Then she stared at Sakura.

The hair was exactly as described. The quality of her clothes even bundled and hidden spoke clearly enough, and everything about the way she carried herself even unconscious had that particular quality that nobility couldn’t quite shake loose no matter how plainly they dressed. Hanzo had no reason to doubt him, and she could see with her own eyes that he was right.

“How did you even manage this?” she asked.

“Lucky timing.” He said it the way other people might say good weather. “But we have her now. That means we have something to hold over him.”

“You want to use her against Norihiro.”

“If it comes to that, yes.”

Hanzo looked at the girl on the floor for a long moment, something complicated moving behind her eyes.

Nathan didn’t soften it for her. Sakura was by all accounts not her father’s crimes, and he understood that clearly enough. But understanding someone’s innocence and releasing them were two entirely different calculations when the man who wanted to use her as a weapon was capable of what Norihiro was capable of. Sometimes good people got caught in the machinery of what their families built. That wasn’t cruelty. It was just the way things fell.

A small sound broke the quiet of the room, barely more than a breath catching wrong.

Sakura’s eyes opened slowly, the ceiling above her unfamiliar, the light all wrong. For a moment she simply lay there, the fog of unconsciousness still thick in her head, wondering distantly what had happened and why the floor was so hard beneath her.

Beside her, Akiko stirred with a low uncomfortable sound, shifting against the boards, and then they were both blinking, both pulling themselves back into awareness at the same time. The confusion lasted only a few seconds. Then clarity arrived, sharp and unwelcome, and they both looked around the room.

Their eyes landed on Nathan.

Sakura felt the recognition move through her like cold water.

That face. That dark hair and those dark, unhurried eyes. She would not have forgotten them under any circumstances, but she especially hadn’t forgotten them after everything that followed their brief time together. He had ridden with them to Sadamasa’s territory, had beaten Prince Yasumasa bloody and walked away from it without a scratch or a consequence, Sadamasa apparently too unsettled to push the matter further. She had thought about him afterward more than once, if only because people didn’t simply do things like that and disappear quietly. And then the stories had started reaching her. Daimyo Yorimasa, dead. Morosuke of Minato, dead. His name spreading through noble circles in the South not as a rumor but as a warning, someone to be found and killed on sight.

She had been shocked when she heard it.

She hadn’t imagined she would be sitting bound on his floor.

“R…Ryo-sama,” she said, the name coming out before she had quite decided to say it.

Then she noticed her wrists.

“W…what…”

“Hime!” Akiko was already moving, pushing herself upright and planting herself in front of Sakura in one motion, her eyes fixed on Nathan with a look that was equal parts fury and fear. She was grateful to him, buried somewhere beneath all of it she was genuinely grateful for what he had done to Yasumasa, but gratitude had its limits and those limits had been reached somewhere between the alley and having her hands tied on a stranger’s floor.

“Why did you kidnap us, Ryo-sama?” Sakura asked. Her voice came out quieter than she intended, more uncertain than afraid. Strangely, even now, the fear she probably should have felt wasn’t quite reaching her the way it ought to.

Behind Nathan, a young woman was watching with obvious surprise.

“She knows you?” Hanzo asked.

“We met by chance on the road to Minato,” Nathan replied, with the ease of someone recounting something only mildly interesting. “Shared a carriage for a stretch.”

Hanzo looked between them and said nothing further.

“What are you planning to do with Sakura-sama?” Akiko asked, and the fear she was trying to keep out of her voice only half succeeded.

“Nothing to either of you, as long as you stay calm and make easy hostages.”

“Hostages?” Sakura’s brow pulled together softly.

“Your father is a considerable problem,” Nathan said.

Sakura looked down at her bound hands and said nothing. Of course. Of course it came back to her father. It always did, one way or another. She was beginning to think there was no part of her life that his ambitions hadn’t already reached into and reshaped without her permission.

“I’ll assume you already know he’s building toward war with the North,” Nathan said.

Sakura nodded, small and tired.

“That still doesn’t explain taking the Hime!” Akiko’s composure cracked open fully, her voice rising sharp in the small room. “She has nothing to do with any of this! And do you honestly believe Norihiro-sama will agree to stop everything simply because you demand it? He doesn’t bend for anyone!”

“We’ll find out,” Nathan said, unbothered.

He looked at Sakura rather than Akiko when he continued, as though he wanted her specifically to hear it clearly.

“I have no interest in hurting either of you. That’s the truth. But your father is a man who is marching toward a war that will cost thousands of lives, and he’s doing it out of ego and nothing more. So whatever it takes to put something in his way, I’ll use it.”

The words landed plainly, without cruelty and without apology.

Sakura kept her eyes on her hands.

Then, softly, she said, “I am sorry.”

Nathan looked at her.

Her pink eyes were glassy, tears sitting at the edges without falling, and her hands were still in her lap where the rope held them together. She wasn’t apologizing out of fear. It wasn’t the kind of sorry that came from someone trying to soften a captor. It was something older and heavier than that, the apology of someone who had been carrying guilt for things they had no hand in building.

Nathan held her gaze for a moment and said nothing.

He found himself thinking, not for the first time in his life, that bloodlines made very little sense. Norihiro was what he was, and somehow he had produced this. A girl who wept over a war she hadn’t started and apologized for a father she couldn’t control. It reminded him of Caesar and his daughter Julia. He supposed the mothers had something to do with it.

He turned around then.

“I’m leaving them with you,” he said to Hanzo, his voice dropping back into its practical register. “Don’t let anyone see them. Keep it quiet.”

“Wait.” Hanzo’s hand caught his arm before he reached the door. “Where are you going?”

Nathan glanced back at her over his shoulder.

“Meet Norihiro.”

He said and pulled the door open, and was gone.