Chapter 15: Interest

The whole next day, I couldn’t think about anything else.

Not the yin swirling in my belly. Not Instructor Cha’s lesson coming up. Not even the fact that I woke up with Ayla’s foot in my mouth and Yeon-hee’s elbow in my ribs.

Just that note.

Bring nothing. Wear less.

Yeon-hee left at sunrise to open her clinic room, kissing both of us on the forehead like a mom sending kids to school. Ayla slept until noon, then made me sit cross-legged on her carpet for two hours while she practiced her sword forms around me "so you learn something." I meditated. I refined. I watched her spin around in that white dress and tried very hard not to get distracted.

I failed.

She noticed.

She hit me with the flat of her sword.

"Focus," she said. "Tonight you have bookkeeper. You need strength."

"You know about that?"

"Everybody on this floor know about that." She grinned. "The note smells like her pipe. Very strong. You should open window."

Great.

The night bell rang. I put on my cleanest robe. Just the robe. Nothing under it.

Wear less.

I went down to the second floor.

The west end of the second floor was quiet. Away from the stairs, away from the academy girls giggling in their rooms, away from everyone. One door at the very end. A small brass plate on it, polished so bright I could see my own nervous face.

HONG.

I knocked.

"It’s open."

I slid the door.

Her room was the cleanest room I’d ever seen in my life. In either life. Shelves floor to ceiling, every one of them packed with ledgers, every ledger lined up with its spine exactly even with the next one. A desk with an ink stone, three brushes, all pointing the same direction. A little brass incense burner sending up a thin line of smoke that smelled like her pipe.

One bed. Made so tight you could bounce a coin off it.

And Seo-rin, sitting on the edge of that bed.

Hair down. The first time I’d seen it down. Long and black, all the way to her waist. No jade pin. No silk robe. Just a thin red underrobe, the kind you wear to sleep, tied loose at the waist. Her legs were crossed. One bare foot was swinging a little.

And in her lap, the abacus.

[Target Detected.]

"You’re on time," she said.

"You said you hate late payments."

"I do." Clack. She looked me up and down. "And you wore less."

"You said to."

"Mm." Clack. "Obedient. That’s worth something."

[Desire +10.]

I stood there in the middle of her perfect room, feeling like a stain on it.

"So," I said. "Third condition."

"Third condition."

She looked down at the abacus in her lap. For a long time. Her fingers rested on the beads but she didn’t move them.

"Do you know what I do all day, Baek Mu-jin?"

"Count things."

"I count things." She nodded slowly. "I count the guild’s silver. I count this inn’s rice. I count who owes who, who’s sleeping with who, who said what to who at the well. I count it in the morning. I count it at night. I count it in my sleep. I’ve counted since I was nine years old and my father put this—" she lifted the abacus "—in my hands and told me a woman who can’t count gets cheated."

She looked up at me.

"I have never, not once in my life, stopped counting."

Oh.

"Yesterday morning," she said, quieter, "I stood in that doorway, watching you and the merchant’s wife. And for a moment — just one moment, right at the end — I forgot to flick the bead."

She held the abacus out to me.

"That’s my third condition," she said. "Take it. Put it somewhere I can’t reach. And make me forget to count."

[Desire +25.]

I took it.

It was heavier than it looked. Dark wood, worn smooth on the edges from twenty-some years of her fingers.

I looked around her perfect room. Every shelf full. Every spine lined up.

Then I walked over to the window, slid it open, and hung the abacus on the outside latch, dangling over the courtyard two floors down.

She made a sound. A small, strangled sound.

"That’s—"

"Somewhere you can’t reach," I said.

"If it falls—"

"Then you’ll have to buy a new one." I walked back to the bed. "Stop counting, Seo-rin."

She stared at me.

Then she laughed. Not her little dry noise. A real laugh, surprised out of her, the way Yeon-hee laughs.

I pushed her back on that tight bed, and for the first time since I met her, she didn’t have anything to say.

I’m keeping most of that night for myself.

But here’s what I’ll tell you.

She tried to count at first. She actually did. I could see her lips moving. Numbers. She’d count my breaths, or the seconds, or I don’t even know what.

So I made it harder for her to keep track.

Then harder.

Somewhere around the time she grabbed the headboard and pulled one of her own perfectly lined-up ledgers off the shelf and didn’t even notice it hit the floor, her lips stopped moving.

Somewhere after that, she said my name. Not "Baek Mu-jin." Just "Mu-jin." Like she’d forgotten the rest of it.

And somewhere after THAT—

[Target: Hong Seo-rin.]

[Desire — MAXIMUM.]

[Harmony established: Hong Seo-rin.]

Her yin hit my dantian like a handful of cold coins. Small. Hard. Precise. Every piece clicking into place exactly where it should go, lining up neat with the others, like beads on a wire.

Of course.

Fourth one.

The soup in my belly was getting crowded.

Afterward, her bed wasn’t tight anymore.

Three ledgers were on the floor. Her incense burner was tipped over. Her red underrobe was hanging off the corner of a shelf.

She was lying on my chest with her hair everywhere, breathing slow. Staring at the ceiling.

"How long was that?" she asked.

"I don’t know."

She went quiet. Then she started to laugh again. Softly.

"I don’t know either," she said. "I don’t know how long that was." She pressed her face into my chest. "I don’t know. I don’t know. Gods, that feels good to say."

I stroked her hair. She let me.

For a long time, we just lay there.

Then, without lifting her head, she reached over to her nightstand. Pulled open the little drawer. Took out a thin ledger, bound in plain gray. Handed it to me.

"Debt paid," she said. "Now. Business."

I opened it.

Every page was me.

Baek Mu-jin. Third son. Expelled. 11 silver.

Madam Seol (Gu). Dam Yeon-hee. Ayla. Gwak Ji-yeon.

Under each name: dates, times, who saw what, who might talk.

The last page was new. The ink was barely dry.

Elder Gu has sent Madam Seol to her family’s country estate. Indefinitely.

Elder Gu was seen this afternoon at the Black Boar gambling house by the east docks. He paid the Boar’s men twenty silver.

Purpose: "teach the Baek boy a lesson he can’t walk off."

I stopped breathing.

"The Black Boar," I said. "That’s—"

"Dock thugs. Second-rate at best, most of them Third. Five or six of them. They break legs for money." Seo-rin finally lifted her head and looked at me. No smile. "They don’t know where you live yet. The washerwoman says they’ve been asking around the docks."

I stared at the page.

I didn’t want to fight anyone. I didn’t want to be a hero. I didn’t want revenge or justice or any of that martial-novel bullshit.

I wanted to stay at this inn. I wanted to eat Yeon-hee’s dumplings and drink Ayla’s wine and get thrown on my back by Instructor Cha and make Seo-rin forget how to count.

And for that, I needed my legs.

"How long do I have?"

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she reached over, very calmly, slid her window open, and took her abacus back off the latch.

Clack.

"Let’s find out," she said.