Everything was visible.
Every shameful part of her—every part that a woman should hide, that she had kept hidden her whole life, that not one man in the world had ever seen—was on display. Her pink asshole. Her pussy lips. The string sunk in between them. All of it, a few centimeters from a stranger's face. So close that she knew—she knew—he could smell her.
She reached forward across the table and began to wipe up the water.
Slowly.
She had to go slowly. The table was wide. The water had spread everywhere. She had to stretch her arms out across it, which pushed her ass back even farther, and lean, and wipe, and lean again. And every movement rocked her hips. Every movement shifted the thread. It rubbed against her asshole as she reached. It slid along the wet seam of her pussy as she leaned. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Wet.
She realized it with a jolt of pure horror. The thread was wet. It was sliding against her folds slick and smooth, and the heat between her legs had become a slow, heavy, throbbing ache, and her pussy was—was getting wet, while she bent over a table in front of a stranger, cleaning up spilled water with her asshole on display.
No. No, no, no. That's sweat. That's the heat. That's—
She wiped faster.
Behind her, the pig-faced merchant had stopped breathing.
He would never know. He would go to his grave without knowing it. That the pink, tight, perfect asshole a few centimeters from his nose belonged to the lord of Nalan City. That the plump, glistening pussy lips swelling out around that black string were the pussy lips of the most beautiful woman in the city. The woman whose body every official in Nalan City lusted after, every cultivator dreamed of, every man who saw her ride past on her blood-bay horse went home and imagined in the dark. Parts that no man had ever seen. That no man had ever even glimpsed.
He was seeing them right now.
He leaned in.
He could not help it. His fat face crept forward, closer, closer, until his nose was almost brushing the soft white skin of her inner thigh—and he breathed in. Deeply. Slowly. And the scent of her filled his head: warm skin and sweat, and under it something sweeter, muskier, like the petals of crushed roses, rising from between her legs. He breathed it in again. And again. He could not stop. He was sniffing her asshole and her pussy like a dog at a bitch in heat, his eyes rolling back, his breath coming in short, hot, shallow puffs that she could feel—oh, gods, she could feel them—against the bare skin of her ass and the backs of her thighs and the wet thread between her legs.
His cock was so hard that it hurt. It was straining against the front of his trousers, trying to force its way out, a throbbing, swollen bar of flesh, and if not for the iron law of Heaven Lust—intercourse is strictly forbidden on the second floor—he would have grabbed her by her narrow waist with both hands and dragged her back onto his lap and fucked her right there on the cushions, in front of the whole hall.
But the law was the law. Heaven Lust's owner did not forgive those who broke it.
He had to content himself with looking. And smelling. And remembering.
He would remember it for the rest of his life.
Nalan Meng finished cleaning.
She straightened up so fast that she nearly lost her balance, and the skirt fell back over her ass, and she squeezed past the fat merchant's cushion and fled—not running, she could not run, but walking so fast that her breasts bounced wildly in their scraps of black—across the hall to the counter, where she stood with her back against the wall and the tray clutched to her chest and her heart slamming against her ribs.
Her face was on fire. Her thighs were trembling. Between them, the thread was still wet, still rubbing, still pressed up into her, and the slow, heavy throb had not gone away.
She did not look at the table again.
At the table, the pig-faced merchant and his small companion looked at each other. Their faces were flushed, their eyes glazed. Then, slowly, they both began to smile—wide, foolish, happy smiles, like men who had just been handed a treasure.
"Did you see?" the small man whispered.
"I saw," said the merchant. "Gods. I saw."
They ate their beef. They drank their beer. And when they had finished, the merchant raised his hand and called across the hall for the bill.
Nalan Meng went back.
She had to. Every step toward that table was harder than any step she had ever taken toward an enemy line. And the closer she came, the more clearly she remembered the third rule—a customer may place a tip on any part of a waitress's body—and the hotter her face burned. She did not know whether they would tip her. She did not know whether she wanted them to.
She set the bill down on the table.
The merchant counted out the money from a silk pouch and laid it on the tray. She picked it up and turned to go.
"Wait." His fat hand caught her wrist. "Don't you want a tip?"
She stopped.
He drew out a note from his pouch—a crisp paper silver note, fifty taels, more than most families in the south slums saw in a year—and held it up between two fingers so that she could see it. He smiled. Then, slowly, deliberately, he lifted his hand toward her breasts.
She did not move. She could not move.
His fingers slid into the deep valley between them.
They were hot and damp and soft. They pushed into the cleft between her breasts, slowly, parting the full white flesh, and she felt the paper note slide in after them, crisp and cool against her skin. He did not let go of it right away. He pushed it deeper, and his knuckles brushed the soft inner curves of her breasts on either side, and he let his fingers linger there, pressing, feeling—slowly sliding his hand up and down in the warm valley, savoring the softness, the weight, the heat of her skin. His thumb drifted outward. It brushed the swell of her right breast. It slid across the edge of the tiny black triangle, and grazed, for one instant, the hard little point of her nipple beneath it.
Nalan Meng shuddered.
It went through her whole body like a current—a thrill, sharp and helpless—from the tip of her breast straight down to the throbbing place between her legs. Her breath caught in her throat. Her nipple, under his thumb, went even harder.
It's part of the service, she told herself. Her teeth were clenched so tight her jaw ached. It's part of the service. It's part of the service. Endure it.
She endured it.
At last he drew his hand back, leaving the note tucked deep between her breasts, its edge sticking up out of her cleavage like a flag. He leaned back on his cushion with a long, satisfied sigh.
"I had a great time here," he said, and rose, still smiling, and he and his small companion went off toward the stairs.
Nalan Meng stood by the empty table for a long moment.
The note between her breasts was warm now from her skin. She could still feel the ghost of his fingers there. Her nipple was still tingling where his thumb had grazed it.
She pulled the note out with shaking fingers, and turned, and walked back to the counter.
Shi Dacheng was waiting for her there.
She did not know how long he had been watching. He was leaning against the end of the counter in his loose wine-red robe, a cup of wine in his hand, and his small eyes were fixed on her—on her body in its scraps of black—with a shameless, hungry intensity that made her want to cover herself with her hands. She did. She crossed her arms over her breasts and stood very straight.
She could see the bulge at the front of his robe. He was hard. His cock was pushing out the wine-red brocade below his belly, obviously, enormously, as if it were ready to fuck her right there against the counter. He did not try to hide it.
But he controlled himself.
"Come with me," he said.
She followed him. She had no choice. He was the only man in the building who knew who she was, and his eyes on her were worse than all the others put together, and she followed him with her face burning through a door at the end of the counter into a small private room beside the hall—a richly furnished little chamber with a couch and a table and a single lantern of red glass.
He closed the door. He turned to her.
"So," he said. "How was your first experience of serving as a waitress in a bar?"
Nalan Meng stood in the red lantern light with her arms crossed tight over her breasts.
"It was shameful," she said. Her voice was shaking. "A shameful experience. I can't believe you made me wear this." Her chin came up. "To a city lord!"
Shi Dacheng's eyebrows rose.
"What's with that attitude?" he said mildly. "You took a loan. If you take a loan, you have to pay it back somehow, don't you?" He took a sip of wine. "And let me tell you, City Lord, nobody in this entire city would pay you as much as I'm paying you. One thousand taels of silver. For one night of serving in my bar." He spread his hands. "Isn't that luxurious? And if your performance is good—" his eyes slid down her body— "I'll raise it."
A thousand taels.
Nalan Meng's breath caught.
It was not a small amount of money. It was an enormous amount of money. A thousand taels a night was more than the whole garrison earned in a month. Nobody in Nalan City could offer a price like that. With a thousand taels a night, the debt that had seemed like a mountain this morning was suddenly only a very long road.
And yet—to walk that road, she would have to come back here. Every night. And wear this. And bend over tables. And let men put their hands between her breasts.
It was too much. It was far too much.
But she had no right to say anything. Not until she paid him back.
"Now," said Shi Dacheng softly, "come here every night and work. And as long as you keep coming, I won't ask you to repay the loan all at once. We'll just… take it one night at a time."
He came toward her.
She stiffened. He walked around her slowly, the way the guard on the steps had—and she felt, rather than saw, his fat pink hand rise behind her and settle on her ass.
On her bare ass. On the round white flesh hanging out below the hem of that tiny skirt.
His fingers spread wide over the curve of her right cheek. And then he squeezed. Slowly. All five fingers, sinking deep into the soft flesh, digging in until she felt his nails—the whole of his greedy hand closing on her ass as if he were testing the ripeness of a peach. His palm was hot and damp with sweat. Her flesh swelled up between his fat fingers.
Nalan Meng went rigid with shock.
But she did not pull away. She had to endure it. She stood there with her arms locked over her breasts and her eyes fixed on the red lantern and his hand gripping her bare ass, and she endured it.
He held on for a moment longer. Squeezed once more, harder. Then, abruptly, he let go and stepped back.
Not too much, he thought. Not yet. If he pushed her too far on the first night, she might change her mind. Run to her father. Throw the whole million in his face. Slowly. Slowly. A proud horse must be broken slowly.
"Well," he said, and smiled, and opened the door. "That's enough for today. You can go home now." He bowed, mockingly. "Come back tomorrow night, City Lord."
She did not remember changing. She found herself in the little perfumed room, tearing off the scraps of black, pulling the ring off her finger and feeling her Qi come roaring back into her like a flood—then her own plain undergarments, the black cotton dress, the gray cloak with its deep hood. She stuffed the fifty-tael note into the cloak's inner pocket without looking at it. She left the mask on until she was out the back door and three streets away, in the darkness, and only then tore it off and pressed her bare face into her hands.
She walked home through the dark city.
Li Yuguo saw her come back.
He had not slept. He had been sitting cross-legged on the floor of the guest room at the back of the house, cultivating, but his mind kept slipping away from his meridians. He had known. Of course he had known. He had looked into Shi Dacheng's secret with his own eyes. He had stood in the market and handed that fat pig four boxes of outfits and smiled.
So when he heard the faint creak of the garden gate behind the east wing, sometime past the third watch, he rose and went to the window and looked out.
A cloaked figure was slipping across the moonlit garden. Tall. Slender. Walking fast, with the hood pulled low and the shoulders hunched in a way he had never once seen Nalan Meng's shoulders hunch. She reached the door of the east wing, and paused there for a moment, one hand on the frame, her head bowed—and then she went in, and the door closed.
Anger went through him, hot and sudden.
Mine. The husband in him snarled it. She's mine. That fat pig—
And at the same moment, a soft chime rang in his ears, and a small gold window bloomed in the corner of his vision.
> [ Cuckold Points +400 ]
>
> Current Cuckold Points: 400
> Cuckold Bar: 4%
>
> (Convertible: 4 days of life span)
Li Yuguo stood at the window and stared at it.
Four hundred points. Four days of life. For one night. For whatever she had done in that bar—whatever had been done to her—while he sat here on his floor and waited.
He had seen Shi Dacheng that very morning, waddling out of the mansion gate, humming to himself. He had known then. He had known exactly what this night would bring. And he had let it come. Because he needed the points. Because sixty-some days was not enough, and four more days was four more days.
His fists were clenched so tight that his nails cut into his palms. His cock, treacherous as always, was half-hard against his thigh.
He did not know which of those two things he hated more.
On the other side of the house, Nalan Meng sat on the edge of her big bed in the dark with her cloak still on.
She was thinking of her husband. Of his soft white face. Of the stack of silver he had laid on the stone table, and the floor he had swept, and the way his back had not slouched quite the way it used to as he crossed the courtyard. She was thinking that she had let strangers touch her tonight—her breasts, her ass—when she had never once let him, and the guilt sat in her chest like a stone.
And under the guilt, so deep that she could almost pretend it was not there, there was something else.
She was thinking of tomorrow night. Of what costume might be waiting in that wooden box. Of whether the next one would cover even less. Of what would happen if a man came to her table with a red jade token in his purse—a VIP—and reached for her.
Her thighs pressed together in the dark.
Between them, there was still a faint, warm, shameful wetness that had not dried.