The Bounty Hunter Claims Her Prize
In which a bounty hunter finds that the woman she's captured is willing to trade obedience for a chance at release.
The bounty hunter shoved her prisoner through the doorway of the farmhouse, to get out of the rain, but also to see what she had in this criminal they called "Lady Snowblood." There was a nice pile of mon waiting at the end of this bounty, but the prisoner had made the bounty hunter earn half of it already in all the effort it had taken to subdue her—especially once the rope came out and began winding around her arms and chest and wrists.
The bounty hunter grabbed her captive by the back of her neck and muscled her forward to the tatami-covered platform that surrounded the farmhouse's irori. It was cold and damp here, the irori's coals long dead, and the captured woman shivered in her thin, flaxen kosode. Too bad.
On the platform, the bounty hunter pushed her down roughly. "Kneel."