Year of the Boar, Fourth Month, Day 29.

I was well and truly stoned by the time Lord Shigeru barged into my rooms for the last time... and as well I was - something had angered him. Again, without bothering with the most perfunctory courtesies, he grabbed me by the hair and demanded to know to whom I had been telling tales... Through the glaze of the opium, I gazed back at him, impassive, barely feeling his tightening grip on my hair, wondering what he meant. My lack of response seemed to make him angrier and he shook me, raising his voice and demanding to know how his wife had come to hear about our "arrangement". I laughed faintly at the idea that *I* had been telling anyone about what happens between us - my eyelids growing heavier as the weed dragged me further and further into its grip of sublime disassociation... The Lord of Fallen Sakura lost his temper completely; shouting at me, shaking me, pulling my hair and eventually he took his fists to me, yet still I remained limp and unresponsive which served only to increase his fury. Somewhere in the depths of my dreamy calmness I cried out as I felt something in my face snap, a dull pain, anaesthetised by the weed. From a place far far away, I heard him shouting about needing to teach me a lesson and as he pushed me over a wooden chest and began to use me, I felt myself slipping further and further away.
It seems as though the gods were smiling on me, in their own special, twisted way that night. I do not remember much of it, but my maid tells me that Lord Shigeru made so much noise that several of the guards came running to my rooms and caught him in the act, so to speak. She tells me that the Lord of Fallen Sakura let it be known that I had seduced him... that I had thrown myself on him and begged him to hurt me... but that seeing my bleeding face and lack of coherence, they did not believe him and that he has been disgraced. The court physician kept me drugged for a long time; Lord Shigeru broke my jaw, gave me a black eye, cracked a rib and left bruises all over me and there was .... damage to .... other parts of me... I did not want to talk, I did not want to think, I did not even want to eat. I am better now... in a manner of speaking - at least my body has healed... And though I have not left my rooms in weeks, I think... I may dare to believe that I am safe for the first time in as long as I can remember.