Heaven Lust was built on three floors, and every floor had its own rules.
The first floor was for ordinary customers. Nalan Meng had glimpsed it on her way in: a great noisy hall of long tables and benches, packed shoulder to shoulder with porters and caravan guards and small traders drinking cheap wine, the waitresses there in short red skirts and tight bodices that would have been scandalous anywhere else in the kingdom, but which, in this house, counted as modest. The third floor was for a different kind of customer altogether—men who wanted more than touching, who paid for private rooms and locked doors and whatever kinds of play their silver could buy. She had heard the sounds coming down the stairwell from it. She did not let herself think about them.
She had been placed on the second floor.
The floor for special customers.
The servant girl led her up a curving stair of red lacquer, through a beaded curtain that clicked and swayed against her bare shoulders, and out into the light.
It was a long, high-ceilinged hall, warm and dim and golden, lit by hundreds of small lanterns of colored glass that hung from the beams in clusters like ripe fruit. The air was thick with smoke—incense, tobacco, the sweet heavy fumes of some burning resin that made her head feel light—and beneath the smoke, the smells of roasted meat and spilled wine and perfume and men. Low tables stood in rows along both walls and down the middle, each surrounded by silk cushions, each lit by its own little lantern. Music came from somewhere: a pipa and a flute, playing something slow and lazy and sensual.
And everywhere, moving between the tables, were the waitresses.
They wore exactly what she wore. The same scraps of black. The same thread. The same tiny pleated skirts riding high on bare white hips, the same two little triangles stretched over their nipples, the same black masks over their eyes. There were perhaps twenty of them, and every one was beautiful—young, slender, full-breasted, with good curves and smooth skin, chosen as carefully as jewels for a crown. They carried trays of wine. They knelt to pour. They laughed at the customers' jokes in high, sweet, practiced voices.
And the customers—
Nalan Meng's eyes moved across the tables, and her stomach turned over.
She knew these men. Not their names, not all of them, but their kind. Fat officials in silk with jade buttons on their caps. Southern merchants with gold rings. Cultivators from the sects in the hills, in their pale robes, their Qi rolling off them in lazy waves. Rich men's sons. Men she had seen at the city gate, at the magistrate's court, in the market. Men who paid her taxes, and bowed to her in the street, and called her City Lord with their eyes lowered.
They were not lowering their eyes now.
They were staring. Openly, hungrily, shamelessly, at the waitresses' bodies as they passed—at the bouncing breasts, at the half-bare asses, at the threads sunk deep between their cheeks. And some of them were doing more than staring.
At a table near the center, a gray-bearded official in a magistrate's robe had pulled one of the waitresses down onto the cushion beside him and was squeezing her breast through its scrap of black, rolling the hard nipple between his finger and thumb while she smiled stiffly and poured his wine. At another, a young cultivator had his hand up under a waitress's skirt and was kneading her bare ass, his fingers dipping into her cleft, while she stood beside his table with her tray, perfectly still, her painted lips trembling. A fat merchant had a girl sitting on his knee with her thighs spread and his hand moving slowly between them.
Nobody seemed to find any of it strange.
The whole hall was full of it. A thick, heavy, sweating haze of lust that hung in the air with the smoke and pressed against her skin and crept into her lungs every time she breathed.
Nalan Meng stood frozen just inside the beaded curtain.
This, she thought. This is what I've agreed to.
"You. New girl."
A woman in a long dark robe had come up beside her—tall, thin, middle-aged, hard-faced, with a ring of keys at her belt. The hall manager. She held out a small bound diary and a brush.
"Take orders," the woman said briskly. "Write them in here. Take them to the cook in the kitchen, through there." She pointed to a door at the far end of the hall. "Bring the food back to the table. Smile. Don't argue. That's all." Her eyes moved over Nalan Meng's body, swift and assessing, the way a horse trader's eyes move over a mare. Something flickered in them—surprise, perhaps, or something like envy. "Hmph. You'll do well," she said. "Go."
Nalan Meng took the diary.
She stood there in the warm golden light, in her two scraps of black and her thread, practically naked in front of a hall full of men from her own city—and not one of them knew who she was.
That was the strangest part. She had been braced for it all night. Braced for the shout, the pointing finger, the gasp of the city lord! And it did not come. Eyes slid over her. Eyes lingered on her. Eyes devoured her breasts and her ass and the thread between her thighs. But when they came to her masked face, they slid away, uninterested, unrecognizing. To them, she was only one more body in black.
It was a comfort. A strange, cold, shameful comfort.
And it was a deeper embarrassment than anything she had ever felt in her life.
Because nobody in this hall—not one of these officials, not one of these merchants, not one of these sect cultivators who had bowed to her at the city gate—could have imagined it. That the lord of Nalan City, the prince's daughter, the most beautiful woman in the city, whom all of them admired and some of them feared, was standing right here in front of them. In this. Almost nude.
She swallowed, and walked out into the hall.
She chose a table where no other waitress was taking orders, against the far wall.
And as she walked, she learned the first lesson of the outfit.
Her body moved. It had always moved—she had never thought about it—but she had never walked in a skirt that ended at the bottom of her ass before, or a top that held nothing. Now, with every step, her breasts swayed and bounced inside their tiny black triangles, heavy and full, and she could feel them do it—could feel them lift and drop and jiggle against her ribs. And her ass, behind her, moved too. With every stride, the round bare halves of her cheeks bounced up and down beneath the pleated hem, and the motion lifted the skirt, flicking it higher, and let it fall, and lifted it again. She could feel the warm air of the hall on the bare skin of her ass. She could feel the thread rubbing.
The looks of it were unbearably erotic. She could tell from the faces she passed. Every head turned.
She reached the table with her face burning.
Two men sat at it. One was enormously fat—a merchant, by his clothes, with a round pink face so like a pig's that for one heart-stopping instant she thought it was Shi Dacheng, until she saw the mole on his chin and the gray in his topknot. Beside him sat a small, thin man with a plain, forgettable face and a clerk's ink-stained fingers.
The pig-faced merchant looked up at her.
And his jaw fell open.
He stared. He stared at her breasts, at her waist, at her legs, at the pleated scrap of skirt riding on her hips, and his little eyes went round and glazed. It was obviously the first time in his life he had seen a body like hers. Then, slowly, a perverted smile spread across his fat lips.
"Waitress," he said. "Take our order." His voice was thick. "Two plates of beef. And beer for the table."
That was all. He stopped speaking and simply looked.
Nalan Meng wrote the order in the diary with a hand that shook only a little. Then she turned and walked away toward the kitchen as quickly as she could without running, her ass bouncing beneath the little skirt with every step, and as she went, the breath went out of her in a long, shaky rush.
Nothing happened. He had only looked. Nothing happened.
She was so relieved she almost wept.
Behind her, the two men watched her go.
"Hey," the fat merchant breathed, leaning toward his small companion without taking his eyes off her. "Hey—did you see that? Did you see those big tits on that waitress?" He licked his lips. "And that ass. That juicy, round ass. Bouncing like that. Gods." He groaned. "I wish I had a VIP token for this bar. I'd mess with those big tits all night. She's got the most beautiful figure I've ever seen in my life."
"Yeah." The small man was craning his neck to follow her through the crowd. "I've never seen her here before. She must have only joined in the last few days." He shook his head slowly. "Damn, that juicy ass of hers. Any man would go crazy for it. I'm telling you, once those rich VIPs upstairs get a look at her, they're going to have a very nice time playing with her."
They both laughed.
The kitchen was hot and loud and full of steam, and nobody there looked at her twice. She gave the order to a sweating cook and waited by the door, her arms crossed over her chest, until two plates of sliced beef in brown sauce and a jug of beer were slapped down on a tray in front of her.
She carried it back across the hall.
Now her hands were full. She could not cover herself. And the tray made it worse—she had to hold it out in front of her at the level of her ribs, and her breasts rested on the edge of it, pushed up and together by her arms, swelling out over the scraps of black. With every step they bounced. Hard. They shook up and down like two full skins of water, jiggling and swaying, and she could feel the tiny triangles shifting over her nipples, rubbing, threatening to slip. Her nipples had stiffened in the warm smoky air until they ached—two hard little points straining against the slick black cloth.
She was blushing so hard that she could feel the heat of it under the mask, all the way down her throat to the tops of her breasts.
But she could not stop. Every waitress in the hall was dressed like this. Every waitress was walking like this. And her face was hidden. Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Nobody knows. She repeated it to herself like a mantra, with every step, and it made her a little less nervous. Only a little.
She reached the table and bent to set down the plates.
Both men stared at her breasts.
They did not even pretend not to. They stared shamelessly, from barely an arm's length away, as she leaned forward over the table and her breasts swung down beneath her, hanging heavy and full, almost entirely bare, with only those two small slick black triangles clinging to the tips. The pig-faced merchant's eyes were fixed on them as if he were trying to see through the fabric. His tongue touched his lower lip.
She set down the jug of beer, straightened, and turned to go.
Splash.
She heard it behind her: the sound of water hitting wood. She looked back.
A cup of water had gone over. It was spreading across the whole length of the table in a wide, glittering sheet, running between the plates, dripping off the edges onto the cushions. The pig-faced merchant was holding up his hands in an elaborate show of dismay.
"Oh dear," he said. "Oh dear, oh dear. How clumsy of me." His little eyes were shining. "Waitress. You'll have to clean that up."
He had done it on purpose. She knew it at once. She knew it from the way he was smiling.
Anger flared up in her—hot and bright, the anger of the Luo Sha Nv—and her fist clenched on the edge of the empty tray. Her Qi stirred in her dantian, and the gray ring on her finger turned cold and drank it down, and it went quiet again.
Rule Two. A waitress must perform her work properly at all times, even if a customer's behavior is rude.
She took a cloth from a nearby stand and began to clean.
The table was long—wide enough for six men to sit around it—and it was mounted against the wall, so that it could only be reached from one side. The two men sat at the near end. To clean the middle and the far end, she would have to walk past them. There was only one way through: a narrow gap between the edge of the table and the back of the fat merchant's cushion.
She cleaned the near corner first, standing beside the small man, wiping slowly.
Then she looked at the middle of the table.
To reach it, she would have to bend over.
And she knew—she knew with a sick, sinking certainty—exactly what would happen when she did. She had seen herself in the mirror. She knew how short the skirt was. She knew what the thread covered, and what it did not. If she bent forward, even a little, the skirt would ride up over her ass, and the thread would pull tight, and everything—everything—behind her would be exposed. Her asshole. Her pussy. All of it, laid bare, to whoever stood behind her.
And the only place to stand was in front of the fat merchant's face.
She could not avoid it. There was no other way. The water was spreading. The merchant was waiting.
She stepped through the narrow gap.
She had to turn sideways to fit, and then she was past him, standing in the space between his cushion and the table—and her back was to him. Her ass was to him. Her bare, round, half-naked ass, in its scrap of skirt, was hanging right there at the level of his face, barely a hand's breadth from his nose. She could feel him behind her. Feel the heat of his breath on the backs of her thighs.
She felt utterly shameless. Utterly exposed. Like a slave on an auction block.
And somewhere deep, deep inside her, beneath the shame, so far down that she did not even notice it—something had begun to beat. A low, slow, heavy pulse. A heat.
She lifted the cloth.
And she bent over.
The skirt rode up.
She felt it go: the pleated hem lifting off the curves of her ass and sliding up, up, until it lay across the small of her back and covered nothing at all. Her whole ass was bare. Both cheeks, round and full and white as milk, thrust back toward the fat merchant's face as she leaned forward over the table. And as she bent, they spread.
The thread pulled tight.
It sank deeper into her cleft, drawn taut as a bowstring, and she felt it press against her asshole—felt it slide right across the center of that small, tight, pink pucker—and then her cheeks parted around it, and it was the only thing there. One thin black string, running straight down the middle of her pink asshole, hiding nothing, framing it, the tight little ring of muscle completely exposed on either side of it to the warm smoky air of the bar.
And below it—
Below it, between her parted thighs, the thread ran down and forward and sank into her pussy.
It had worked its way between her lips as she walked. Now, bent over, it was buried there, sunk deep into the crack of her pussy so that the soft, plump outer lips swelled out on either side of it, bare, pink, faintly furred with fine black hair at the edges. The thread was pressing right up into her slit. Into the inner folds. Against the small, hidden, swollen bud at the top of them.