Until now, not even my husband has touched me properly. The thought rose up in her unbidden, absurd and humiliating. Years of marriage, and Li Yuguo had never once laid a hand on her body—she had never allowed it—and now two strange, drunk, gap-toothed guards were standing on the steps of a brothel and staring at her breasts as if they already owned them.
She did not say yes.
But she did not say no. She stood there, frozen, her fist clenched, her face burning under the mask, her lips pressed together so hard they hurt—and said nothing at all, because she could not think of a single thing to say that would not make it worse.
The guards looked at each other.
They had been doing this job for a long time. They knew what silence meant.
The one on the left stepped down to her level. He moved around beside her, slowly, the way you move around a skittish horse. She felt him come close behind her. She could smell the wine on his breath, and the sour sweat of his leather armor. She did not turn.
And then his hand came down on her ass.
It was a big hand. Rough, callused, hot. It settled over the curve of her right cheek through the thin black cotton and simply took hold—spread its thick fingers wide and closed them, sinking into her flesh, squeezing.
Nalan Meng's breath stopped.
No one had ever touched her there. No one. Not in her whole life. And now a stranger's hand was gripping it, kneading it, his fingers digging into the soft full flesh through the cloth and pressing and releasing and pressing again, slowly, the way a baker kneads dough. She could feel every one of them. She could feel the heat of his palm soaking through the cotton into her skin. She could feel her own flesh give under his grip—yielding, swelling up between his fingers, springing back when he loosened them.
"Wow," the guard breathed behind her. His voice had gone thick. "I've never felt an ass like this. Never in my life."
He squeezed harder. His fingers slid lower, cupping the heavy underside of her cheek, lifting it, letting it fall. It bounced. She felt it bounce—felt the whole round globe jiggle against his palm—and heard him let out a low, wondering groan.
"So round," he muttered. "So bouncy. Like a ball. Feel this, Old Fan, feel—"
He could not stop his hand. It roamed over her, greedy, shameless—across to the left cheek, squeezing that one too, then back, then down into the warm crease where her ass met her thigh, his thick fingers pressing into the cotton there, so close to the cleft between her cheeks that she felt the cloth pull and shift. Her thighs clamped together. Her whole body had gone rigid as a bowstring.
Her face was on fire beneath the mask. It burned so hot that she thought the mask must surely melt off it. The shame was enormous—a wave of it, crashing over her, filling her mouth and nose like water. A stranger. A total stranger. On the street. And I'm letting him—I'm standing here and letting him—
And under the shame, so faint she did not even notice it, something low in her belly gave a single slow, hot pulse.
"Hello, miss."
The voice came from the doorway.
The guard's hand snatched back from her ass as if it had been burned. Both men straightened up at once, spears snapping upright, faces wiped blank.
A thin young man in the gray robe of a house servant stood in the open door. He did not look at the guards. He did not look at her body. He did not say a single word about what he had just seen. He simply bowed.
"I'm here to take you to the owner," he said. "Please follow me."
Nalan Meng followed him.
She followed so fast that she almost ran—up the last step, through the door, into the blaze of light and noise and heat and perfume—with her cloak clutched tight around her and her ass still tingling where the guard's hand had been, and she did not look back.
The servant led her through a maze of red-lacquered corridors and up a short flight of stairs, past half-open doors through which came music and laughter and other sounds she refused to hear, into a large, high-ceilinged hall at the back of the house.
It was richly furnished. Thick carpets. Silk hangings. Lamps of colored glass. And at its far end, on a broad couch heaped with cushions, sat Shi Dacheng.
He had changed his robe for a looser one of wine-red brocade, open at the throat to show a vast pink expanse of chest. A cup of wine stood at his elbow. When she came in, he did not get up.
"Welcome," he said, and smiled, "City Lord Meng."
Nalan Meng could not speak. Her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. She stood in the middle of the carpet with her cloak clutched around her and her face burning under the mask, and the embarrassment was so complete that she could not even find her anger.
He watched her for a moment, savoring it.
"Well," he said finally, "now that you're here, why don't you start working right away? Tonight." He waved a hand toward a curtained doorway at the side of the hall. "Go to the changing room. Read the rules. Work as a waitress and start paying off your debt." He picked up his cup. "The sooner you start, the sooner you finish. Isn't that right?"
Tonight.
Her face went even redder.
She had come prepared. She had told herself, all the long day, that she would accept it. That it was her duty. That she had signed the contract and she would honor it, like a soldier honoring an order. But she had imagined—she had hoped—that tonight would only be talk. Terms. Arrangements. That she would have a few more days to steel herself.
She had not expected to begin tonight.
But she had decided. She had decided to accept this situation, whatever it was. A general does not retreat because the battlefield is not the one she wanted.
She turned without a word and walked toward the curtained door.
Shi Dacheng watched her go. He watched her walk—the long legs moving under the cloak, the sway of her hips, the round ass that had haunted his dreams since the first day he saw her ride past his bar on that blood-bay horse—and his mouth went dry, and his cock stirred heavily against his fat thigh beneath the wine-red brocade.
He wanted her. He wanted her right now, on this couch, with her mask on and her legs spread.
But he held himself back.
Not yet. He sipped his wine and smiled into it. A proud horse could not be ridden on the first day. It had to be broken first. Trained. Step by step. Brought slowly to the bit until it no longer remembered how to fight. And this horse was the proudest in the kingdom.
He had a thousand nights. He could wait.
The changing room was small and warm and smelled of powder and perfume and women's sweat. A long mirror of polished bronze took up one wall. Hooks along the other held cloaks and robes and ordinary clothes—the clothes of other women, she realized, who had come in here as themselves and gone out as something else.
A servant girl was waiting. She was perhaps seventeen, pretty, painted, with knowing eyes. She held out a flat wooden box with a folded letter resting on its lid.
"Please wear this costume, miss," she said. "And read the letter of conditions. All the rules are inside." She bobbed a curtsy and slipped out, drawing the curtain closed behind her.
Nalan Meng was alone.
She set the letter aside. She lifted the lid of the box.
And for a long moment, she simply stared.
It was black. That much she understood. Beyond that, she could not, at first, make sense of what she was looking at, because there seemed to be almost nothing there. A few scraps of glossy black fabric, smaller than her palm. A tangle of thin black strings. A strip of something that might have been a skirt, if a skirt were the width of a hand.
She lifted the first piece out. It dangled from her fingers.
Two tiny triangles of black cloth, each barely larger than a plum, joined by a thread and hung from more threads meant to tie behind the neck and around the back. That was all. That was the whole top. The fabric was thin and slick and shining—nothing like any silk or cotton she had ever touched in the Haotian Kingdom—and it stretched between her fingers like skin.
Foreign outfits, the maids had whispered. Cloth so thin it's like wearing nothing.
She had thought they were exaggerating.
She lifted the next piece. A skirt—or something that called itself a skirt—of the same glossy black, pleated, so short that when she held it up against her hips in the mirror its hem barely reached the tops of her thighs.
And the last piece—
She held it up and her whole face burned.
It was a thread. A black thread. A tiny triangle of black lace in the front, no larger than two fingers, and from it, a single thin string that ran down and between and up—and that was the back. That was the entire back.
The heat in her face spread down her throat and into her chest.
She had no choice. She knew she had no choice. She stood there with the scraps of black in her hands for a long time, and then, slowly, with fingers that would not stop trembling, she began to undress.
The cloak. The black cotton dress. Her own plain undergarments. She folded each one carefully and hung them on a hook beside the clothes of the other women, and then she stood naked in front of the bronze mirror in the warm, perfumed air, and looked at herself.
She had never been ashamed of her body. It was a weapon. She had honed it like a blade—the long hard legs, the flat taut belly, the strong straight shoulders—and she had never thought of it as anything else. She did not think of it as beautiful. She did not think of it as desirable. It simply was.
She stepped into the thread first.
It slid up her thighs. The tiny lace triangle settled over her mound, so small that it barely covered the soft swell of it, the fine black hairs at its edges curling out on either side. And behind—she reached back, fumbling, and settled the string into place, and felt it slide up between her cheeks and sink into the cleft of her ass, deep, deeper, until it was lodged there like a line drawn in ink. She shifted her weight, and it moved against her. Against her asshole. A thin, slick, constant pressure, right there, against that tight hidden pucker that no one had ever seen, and then lower, running forward between her legs, pressing up into the soft folds of her pussy and settling into the seam of her lips.
She sucked in a breath.
It was like wearing nothing. Worse than nothing. Nothing would not have rubbed.
The skirt next. It settled on her hips, and in the mirror she saw that it did not cover her ass at all—not properly. The pleated black hem fell to just below the widest curve of her cheeks, and the bottom half of each one hung out beneath it, round and white and bare, the soft crease where her ass met her thighs fully exposed. When she turned to look over her shoulder, the hem lifted, and she could see the black thread vanishing up into her cleft. If she bent even a little—even a little—
She did not finish the thought.
The top was last.
She tied the threads behind her neck and around her back with clumsy fingers, and the two tiny black triangles settled over her breasts, and she looked in the mirror and felt her knees go weak.
They covered her nipples. That was all they covered. Her breasts were enormous beneath them—full and round and heavy and high, white as snow, swelling out on every side of those two small black scraps like dough rising out of a too-small bowl—and the shining black fabric was stretched so thin and so tight over the tips that it hid nothing at all. Her nipples pushed up against it in two hard, pointed little bumps, perfectly outlined, the shape of the stiff peaks and even the faint crinkled texture of the areolae around them showing through the slick black like a pressing in wax. The full shape of her breasts was clearly visible. Every curve. The deep shadowed valley between them. The soft heavy undersides.
She stared at the woman in the mirror.
The mask made her face a stranger's. But the body beneath it was her own—and in this outfit, it did not look like a weapon anymore. It looked like something out of a temple painting. A lust goddess come down from heaven to drive men mad. Every perfect curve of her was on display. Every line of her was drawn out and framed and offered up. Her waist looked impossibly narrow between the swell of her breasts and the flare of her hips. Her legs looked endless. Her ass, half-bare under that tiny skirt, looked round and soft and ripe enough to bite.
She crossed her arms over her chest and pressed her hands flat against her breasts, trying to hide them.
It did not help. Her breasts swelled out around her forearms on either side.
Just the thought of walking out of this room—out into that hall, into that light, in front of strangers, in front of men from her own city—made her whole body hot and tight and uncomfortable. Her nipples ached against the black fabric. The thread between her legs rubbed every time she breathed.
She snatched up the letter of conditions, if only to have something to look at that was not herself.
The paper was heavy and cream-colored, the characters brushed in a neat, businesslike hand.
> RULES FOR WAITRESSES OF HEAVEN LUST
>
> 1. A waitress may not use her cultivation within the bar.
>
> 2. A waitress must perform her work properly at all times, even if a customer's behavior is rude.
>
> 3. A customer may place a tip on any part of a waitress's body.
>
> 4. VIP customers may exercise the following special privileges:
>
> VIP 1: May touch the breasts of any waitress.
>
> VIP 2: May touch the breasts and ass of any waitress.
>
> VIP 3: May request a waitress to sit down with him.
>
> VIP 4: May touch the private area and asshole of any waitress.
> (Special authority: has the right to take his dick out of his clothes.)
>
> Intercourse is strictly forbidden on the second floor. Touching only, with additional privileges for VIPs as listed.
Nalan Meng read it twice.
Her breath went out of her in a long, shaky rush.
No intercourse. No sex. That was the line. That was the wall. Whatever else happened in this place, whatever they did to her, no man would be allowed to—
The relief was so strong that her knees nearly gave out.
And then she read the list again, and the relief curdled.
Touch the breasts. Touch the ass. Touch the private area. Touch the asshole. Strangers. Customers. Drunk merchants with gold rings on their fingers and VIP tokens in their purses, putting their hands on her body. Inside this scrap of black. Under it. And VIP 4—the right to take his dick out—
She pressed the letter against her chest and closed her eyes.
Not even my husband, she thought. Not even Yuguo. Years of marriage, and she had never let him touch her. Not once. Not her breasts, not her ass, not anything. She had kept her body locked away from him like a treasury—and now she was going to walk out of this room and let strangers do what she had never let her own husband do.
She felt bad for him. She felt it suddenly, sharply, like a needle in her chest. That soft, useless, sulking man, rubbing his face against her bedpost every night. He would never know. He could never know.
But she was at a place now where she could not step back.
There was one more thing in the box. She had not noticed it, tucked into a fold of black silk at the bottom: a ring. A plain band of dull gray metal, cold to the touch, engraved on the inside with a tight spiral of tiny characters. A suppression formation. She knew what it was the moment she touched it; she could feel it drinking at the edges of her Qi like a leech.
Rule One. A waitress may not use her cultivation within the bar.
She slipped it onto her finger.
It was like being plunged into cold water. The great coiled power in her dantian—the strength she had carried with her every moment of her life since she was a child, the Qi that made her the Luo Sha Nv—went quiet and heavy and distant, muffled, as if someone had thrown a thick blanket over a fire. Her limbs felt suddenly ordinary. Her senses dulled. For the first time in her life, she felt weak.
Just a woman. Just a body.
In a scrap of black.
Nalan Meng stood in front of the mirror for one more long moment. Then she lowered her arms from her breasts, very slowly, and let them hang at her sides. She straightened her spine—the way she straightened it before a battle—and lifted her chin, and turned toward the curtain.
She drew it aside, and stepped out into the light, to begin her first night at Heaven Lust.