The Prisoner's Smile

Ren's world slowly returned, not like a light, but like a sharp pain in his leg. Ren was waking up from the anesthesia Seraphine had given him. His head was spinning and his mouth was dry, with an unpleasant metallic taste.

He opened his eyes heavily. He wasn't in his luxurious room, but in an old, neglected room, probably a former storage room in the basement of the mansion that hadn't been used in decades. The room had no windows, and the only door was made of heavy metal, locked from the outside. The pain returned to his thigh, where his father had brutally beaten him with the rod. It throbbed with every beat of his heart, reminding him that this was not a nightmare.

But far from worrying or panicking about the situation, Ren calmly sat down on the old cot. His analytical mind, which had been trained for business and music, immediately began to work, ignoring the pain, searching for a way out. He looked at the hinges. He looked at the ventilation. His mind reacted. This is all Seraphine's doing, he thought. " She manipulated my father. It's her revenge for defending Mio at the parade. "

At that moment, in the darkness of his cell, something unusual happened. For the first time in his life in such a critical situation, we saw Ren smile. It was not a smile of happiness, but of cold satisfaction. It seemed as if he had been expecting this. If they had to lock me up... if they had to resort to such extremes... it means they're afraid of me, Ren thought, lying on his bed staring at the dirty ceiling. It means that what I did at the parade mattered. Mio won. Although he was isolated from all the chaos going on outside, that certainty gave him peace.

However, outside the room, the Japanese world was burning.

Across the internet, a photo had been anonymously leaked, going viral in a matter of minutes. It was a grainy image, taken from a distance. Anyone with a keen eye would recognize it: it was the same photo that the Kaguya family had kept in their secret archives for months, the one they had saved as their ultimate weapon and never used out of respect for Mio. The photo showed Ren Shinomiya in a dirty alley, but the image had been edited and cropped. They had erased the surroundings so that only he was visible, dressed in his commoner clothes (cheap sweatshirt, worn jeans), staring at an invisible point with a longing expression.

The headline was devastating for the family's image: 

“THE PRINCE OF SHIBUYA OR A VAGABOND? THE DOUBLE LIFE OF REN SHINOMIYA.”

That photo had been leaked minutes after Ren was sedated. In the main office, Ryōma Shinomiya stared at his tablet screen with eyes full of rage. Seeing the source of the image, his paranoid logic connected the wrong dots. “That photo...” Ryōma whispered. “That photo was taken by their spies. It's blackmail material for the Minamoto!”

Ryōma flew into a rage. He thought it was Kaguya's doing. He believed that, after beating him in the fashion show, Kaguya had decided to publicly humiliate him by leaking photos of his son dressed like a beggar to damage the prestige of the Shinomiya brand. “ That damn woman! ” he shouted angrily. “ It wasn't enough for her to win the catwalk! Now she wants to mock my surname! ”

Ryōma grabbed an expensive Ming Dynasty vase that adorned his desk and threw it forcefully onto the floor. With a loud crash, the porcelain shattered into a thousand pieces, startling the servants waiting outside.

Ryōma, breathing heavily with rage, grabbed the phone from his desk. If Kaguya Minamoto wanted to play dirty by leaking personal photos, he wouldn't be outdone. He wouldn't leak photos of clothes. He would destroy lives. “ I want you to leak the rumor.” Ryōma ordered his press secretary, his voice trembling with hatred. "You know which one. Say that the pink-haired model is Ren's secret lover. That she's a prostitute who climbed to the top through deception and adultery. Destroy her before dawn! "

He slammed down the phone. The Cold War had ended, giving way to a much more destructive war, unaware that his son, down in the basement, was smiling, thinking he had saved the girl he loved, unaware that his father had just stabbed him in the back.