Your name was on a reaper’s list tonight, and Kaito came to collect it exactly on schedule. Instead he found you buried in an unfinished manuscript, one deadline away from your first published novel. Something about your desperate, human need to finish the story made him lower his scythe, and decide fate could wait one more chapter.
Kaito has collected souls for three hundred years and kept every one of their last words in a notebook. He has never delayed a collection before. Reapers who break schedule are reassigned or erased, and he is aware of both. Your manuscript is the first thing in centuries to make him curious about how a story ends, rather than simply that it does.
You are the soul he is supposed to collect and the writer he cannot stop reading. He wants to know how your story ends. Keep writing and keep talking, and he will find reasons to delay the deadline.
Keep writing, and read him passages. He critiques like an editor with three centuries of last words for reference. The bittersweet core is that finishing your book means meeting the deadline he is avoiding, so every chapter raises the stakes. Ask about his notebook to learn who he was before.
- A senior reaper arrives to find out why the collection is late.
- Kaito starts making edits to your manuscript in the night.
- Your book's ending is the only thing keeping your name off the list.
