The elevator was taking too long.

Gareth stood in the center of it with his jaw locked and his thumb hovering over Yuna’s name on his contact screen and the readout above the doors counting floors with the specific, indifferent patience of a machine that had no investment in how badly he needed to be elsewhere.

B3. B2. B1. 1.

"Pick up."

Voicemail.

"Pick UP."

Voicemail again.

He pulled the phone from his ear and stared at her contact photo — the one she’d set herself, the one where she was laughing at something off-camera with her nose slightly crinkled — and the looking at it produced nothing useful, just the hot, grinding frustration of a young man who had crossed a border at 4 AM and had been calling every twenty minutes since and was getting nothing but her voice on a recorded message telling him she wasn’t available.

Not available.

She was ’here.’

In this hotel.

He had the room number. He had confirmation from the front desk — or rather, he had confirmation from the front desk that a reservation had been made on his girlfriend’s name for Room 412, which was the floor above him, which he was currently ascending toward via an elevator that seemed designed for contemplation rather than transport.

His fist hit the wall.

The elevator didn’t accelerate.

"Damn it."

He hit the wall again.

The doors didn’t open.

He was looking at the floor numbers climb — 3, 4, almost — when his phone buzzed.

Not a call.

A message.

From Yuna’s number.

He opened it.

The video loaded.

He watched it.

Then he watched it again, because the first time his brain had received the visual information and had filed it under ’this cannot be what I am looking at’ and had required the second viewing to confirm that yes, this was exactly what he was looking at.

Hot spring.

The footage was shaky — phone camera, held by someone crouching, the angle low and slightly tilted — catching the edge of a natural stone pool, the steam rising from the surface, the water sloshing with the rhythm of something that was not the water’s own idea.

And above the water.

A woman.

Reverse cowgirl.

Her back to the camera, the lens catching the full, architectural breadth of her from behind — the thick ass rising and dropping in the relentless, rhythmic descent of a woman who had been at this long enough for it to have become its own weather system — the wet clap of her pussy swallowing a cock on every down-stroke and releasing it on every upstroke with the glistening, shameless evidence of exactly what was happening.

Thick.

The ass was thick.

The specific, generous, milk-pale thickness of—

"I want a child."

The voice.

His brain received the voice the way it receives something it has been avoiding — suddenly, completely, without the courtesy of a frame — and the bottom dropped out of his chest.

"My son is not good. He is a disappointment. Give me another one—"

PAAAH!

"AAANGHH~!! YES — DEEPER — FILL ME — IMPREGNATE ME—"

The ass slammed down.

The cock disappeared inside her.

The water sprayed.

And Gareth stood in the elevator on floor four of the Hotel Marseta with both eyes open and his phone in both hands and the video playing on a loop and his brain producing the same single, useless word on repeat:

’No.’

’No.’

’No.’

He had seen that ass.

He had seen it in the garden — the specific, familiar shape of it through the formal gown of a baroness — and he had told himself it was a coincidence, a resemblance, the fog of a bad evening. He had seen it in a video before, the memory of stumbling on something late at night that had made him close the tab immediately, and he had told himself the same.

But the ’voice.’

There was no framework for the voice.

That was his mother’s voice.

That was his mother’s voice saying she was disappointed in her son.

That was his mother’s voice saying ’give me another one.’

"...by the way, why are you recording this?"

A second voice.

Young. Warm. The voice he had been calling for four hours.

"Kyaaah~—don’t insert your finger—it’s too sore—"

Gareth’s phone slipped.

The screen hit the elevator floor corner-first and bounced, landing face-up, and he looked at it from above — at the video still playing, the steam, the ass, the water — and then he went down after it.

Both knees on the elevator floor.

Not a decision.

The decision-making part of him had gone offline. What was left was just the physical body of a young man whose legs had stopped cooperating.

His hands found the phone.

He pressed it to the floor like he was trying to push it through the tile.

"Yuna."

He said it to the floor.

The elevator reached the fourth floor.

The doors opened.

He did not get out.

The second video came in while the doors were still open.

His phone buzzed against the elevator tile.

He looked at it.

He should not have looked at it.

The message preview said: ’look what we made ~~’

He opened it.

Two women.

At the edge of the pool. Both of them bent at the waist over the stone rim, their bodies arranged side by side — one thick, one slender, the full heft of the mature woman beside the tighter, younger curve of the girl — both of them with their hips at the edge, their backs to the camera, the steam rising around them.

One was being fucked.

One was being fingered.

And then it switched — cock to the other one, fingers to the first — and then switched again — and both women were crying, the wet, broken, overwhelmed crying of people who had been doing this for ’hours’, their voices running together in the steam:

"Please—"

"Slow—"

"I can’t—"

"Oh—"

"AAANGHH~!!"

He could see them both clearly enough.

The birthmark on the back of the older woman’s left thigh — the small, irregularly shaped mark that he had asked about when he was six and been told was from before he was born, which had been a sufficient answer for a six-year-old.

The friendship bracelet on the younger woman’s right wrist.

The one he had made for Yuna at summer camp when they were ten.

The one she wore every single day.

"No." His voice was doing something strange — it had taken on a register he had never heard it use, thin and pressurized, like something that was going to break along a fault line he hadn’t known was there. "No. No. No. No—"

The elevator doors had closed.

He was on the floor of a moving elevator.

He scrambled up.

Mashed the button.

The doors opened again on three and he came out at a run and nearly knocked over a cleaning trolley and didn’t stop, just adjusted, the reflexes of someone who had been training since childhood redirecting his momentum without slowing it.

Stairs.

He found the stairs.

The basement.

The sign for the onsen — the Hotel Marseta’s private hot spring facility, the feature that distinguished it from the other properties in the district — was at the bottom of the service stairwell, the elegant brushed-metal lettering of it pointing left toward the frosted glass doors of the facility entrance.

He went through.

A desk attendant looked up.

"Sir, you need to check—"

He was past the desk.

"Sir—"