Itsuwari no ito - Threads of Deception

Kyoto, 1866. Two years before the shogunate falls. Suzune Akaishi is the daughter of a disgraced retainer, mending other people's clothes to keep her mother fed. When a marriage proposal arrives from the Kuroyanagi house, a domain family with money, standing, and a son of marrying age, she knows better than to call it luck. She accepts anyway, because a spymaster's price is the only offer on the table, and because the house she is being sent to belongs to the men who ruined her father. Tōga Kuroyanagi has spent his whole life performing the role his father built for him, a loyal, unfeeling heir with no opinions his father hasn't already had first. He knows exactly who Suzune is and why she has come, because his father told him, and told him to let her get close enough to be caught. What neither of them is told is that the marriage was never meant to catch a spy. It was built to manufacture a confession, one that will hand a dying political order the execution it needs. By the time Suzune and Tōga stop lying to each other, the truth they finally share is no longer theirs to keep. This is not a story where love conquers the machine built to use it. It is a story about what the machine does with love once it has it.