Chapter 65 of 90
The King of Thieves on the Roof
On the same night that Yun Xianchen first walked out onto the second floor of Heaven Lust, the King of Thieves was sitting on the roof of the City Lord's Mansion.
He sat there most nights now. Ever since Ling Snake Mountain. Li Yutang had sent killers once; he would send them again. And Li Yuguo—his elder brother, the man who had saved his life and his wife's—slept in a guest room at the back of the house with a window full of flowers and a log of wood in his bed. So Guan Yunfan sat among the roof tiles in his dark cloak with his one eye half-closed, and listened to the night, and kept watch.
It was a little past the second watch when a door opened below him.
Not the consort's. The other wing. The County Lord's.
A shadow slipped out of Nalan Meng's rooms.
A woman. Cloaked, hooded, moving fast and low along the covered walk with her head down. She went past the well, past the moon gate, and out by the side door that the kitchen servants used—the one with the broken latch that nobody ever reported.
Guan Yunfan frowned.
He went down off the roof without a sound. It was what he was. A lifetime of practice had gone into those feet; the tiles did not even creak. He took the long way around over the garden wall and dropped into the lane behind the mansion a breath ahead of her, and pressed himself into a doorway, and let her walk past him.
She was a strong cultivator. A Martial Soul, high in the realm. But he was the King of Thieves. Her senses passed over him like water over a stone.
He looked at her face as she went by.
And his single eye went very still.
Sister-in-law.
It was Nalan Meng. There was no question. She had not put on any mask yet; her hood had fallen back a little in her haste, and the moonlight lay full on that face—the cold, perfect, arrogant face of the Ninth County Lord. He had seen it every day for weeks across the breakfast table, frowning at his elder brother.
What is my sister-in-law doing outside the mansion in the middle of the night?
As he watched, she reached into her cloak and drew out a mask, and tied it on.
He felt the formation in it ripple as it settled across her face. A clever thing. The face under it went blurred and ordinary, the kind of face the eye slid off without catching. Anyone else in the city would have lost her right there.
But he had watched her put it on. And a mask could only fool an eye that did not already know what it was looking at.
He followed her.
She went east, through the dark streets, quickly and without looking back. Down the Street of Lanterns. Past the shuttered silk shops. And straight in at the side door of a big red building with three floors and paper lanterns swaying under every eave.
Heaven Lust.
Guan Yunfan stopped in the shadow across the street and stared at it.
What is she doing here*? At this hour?*
He could not just walk up and ask her. He watched through the lattice of the front windows as a cloaked figure crossed the first-floor hall and went up the red lacquer stairs. The second floor.
He knew what the second floor was. Everyone in Nalan City knew what the second floor was.
No, he told himself. She might be meeting someone. An informant. A spy. Some city business that can't be done by daylight. It was the kind of thing Nalan Meng would do; she trusted no one and did everything herself. And if it's dangerous—I should be there. In case something happens.
He put his hand into his coat, and felt the token there.
He had nearly forgotten it. A gift from Shi Dacheng, weeks ago, pressed on him over a cup of wine with a great deal of bowing—for the King of Thieves, a small mark of respect. A token of white jade, carved with four lotus flowers.
VIP 4.
He had never meant to use it. He had a wife. A sick wife, in a quiet house by the river, who had loved him through everything.
He went in.
The second floor of Heaven Lust stopped him dead at the top of the stairs.
He had heard about it. Hearing was not the same. The long golden hall under the red lanterns. The smoke. The music. And everywhere, the waitresses—young, beautiful, masked, and so nearly naked that for a moment his eye did not understand what it was seeing. Scraps of leather. Threads. Bare breasts bouncing between the tables. Bare asses rolling past with every step. Men's hands everywhere on them.
And he knew, with a lurch, whose work it was.
Elder Brother's. The outfits. Every scrap of leather and every thread in this room. He had stood beside Li Yuguo in the market when the boxes went over to Shi Dacheng's men.
He found an empty table in a corner. Table nine. He sat down with his back to the wall and his eye moving over the hall.
He could not see her anywhere.
She came up here, he thought. I saw her. Where did she go?
In the changing room at the back, Nalan Meng was dressing.
Tonight's outfit was leather again, but different. Two small triangles for the top, as always, cut to cover her nipples and nothing more—but each one held up by three fine threads, one at the top and one at each side, so that they sat on her breasts like little black sails on a web of rigging. Gloves of the same leather, fingerless, up to her elbows. And for the bottom, a narrow strip of leather over her pussy and then a thread, and only a thread, up between her cheeks to her waist.
No skirt.
They had stopped giving her skirts a few nights ago. Without a word, without a reason; one night the little pleated skirt was simply not in the box, and it had never come back. Now there were only the threads.
And tonight, for the first time, stockings. Sheer black silk that came up to the tops of her thighs and stopped there, so that a band of bare white skin showed between the stocking-tops and the curves of her ass.
She looked at herself in the bronze mirror.
It was worse than naked. The stockings made it worse. They framed her. They drew a line around everything bare. Her ass was entirely exposed now—not when she bent, not when the skirt flew up, but all the time. Every step. Every man in the hall would be able to see her naked buttocks whenever he liked.
But she had been here many nights now. And she had gotten—she did not like the word, but there was no other—used to it.
She tied on her mask and went out.
"Table nine," said the steward, and handed her the little order book. "New customer."
She walked across the hall. The men turned to watch her as she passed, the way they always did. Their eyes on her bare ass. On her bouncing breasts. She held her chin up behind the mask and walked.
And at table nine, she stopped.
Guan Yunfan.
She knew him at once. The dark cloak, the broad shoulders, the eyepatch. Her husband's sworn brother. The man who sat on her roof at night guarding her husband. Who ate at her table.
Something went through her like a spark. A thrill—sharp and hot and shameful. And under it, a hot flush of humiliation. I have to serve my husband's man. Like this.
She had thought he was different. She had thought he loved his wife and did not come to places like this.
But she could not refuse a customer. And she had her mask on. It had fooled Li Yutang, his eyes inches from her face. It would fool the King of Thieves.
She made her voice light and sweet, and a little lower than her own.
"What would you like to eat?"
He looked up.
The voice had made him look—something in it, familiar under the sweetness. He looked up and saw the waitress standing in front of his table.
He saw her breasts first. He could not help it; they were right at his eye level. Enormous, full, perfectly round, held up by nothing, swelling out around two tiny black triangles on their rigging of thread. Then her belly. Then the narrow strip of leather between her thighs, and the bare white skin above the stockings.
His cock went hard so fast it ached.
Then he looked up at her face.
And he saw the mask. The same mask. The same faint ripple of the formation over it. And under it, for an eye that knew where to look—the mouth, the chin, the line of the jaw.
Sister-in-law.
His mind would not take it in.
Nalan Meng. The Ninth County Lord. The cold, proud, untouchable woman who would not let her own husband hold her hand. Standing in front of him on the second floor of Heaven Lust with her breasts bare and her ass bare and a thread between her legs. Taking his order. As if she did this every night.
She does do this every night, he thought numbly. Doesn't she.
He had admired her. He was honest enough to admit it, in the privacy of his own head. He had admired her curves for weeks—at breakfast, in the courtyard, in the practice yard when she sparred. He had felt guilty about it and done it anyway, the way a man does. He had never once imagined he would see them bare.
He swallowed. He controlled his face.
"The roast duck," he said. "And wine."
She turned and walked away toward the kitchen.
He watched her go.
He could not have done anything else. Her ass was right there, moving away from him through the smoky golden light—bare, round, high, white as milk above the black stocking-tops, each cheek rolling up and down with every step. The thread sat buried deep in the cleft between them. He had never in his dreams imagined he would see Nalan Meng's ass like this.
And he had a VIP 4 token in his coat.
He thought about it.
He thought about his elder brother. About Li Yuguo, sitting on the floor of that guest room right now, cultivating, alone. His brother had never even touched her. Everyone knew it. Three years married, and they had never shared a room. For Guan Yunfan to do this—shameful things, with his own sister-in-law—while his brother had never so much as held her hand—
His stomach turned over.
And his cock throbbed.
If I don't, he thought, someone else will. Some fat merchant. Some sect brat. Some stranger. They would put their hands all over her tonight anyway; that was what this floor was for. So why not me?
It was a terrible argument. He knew it was a terrible argument.
His cock won it anyway.
She came back with the duck and the wine.
He was nervous. He—the King of Thieves, who had walked into the vaults of the capital and out again—was nervous. His hand was sweating. She bent to set the dishes down, and her breasts swung forward with the movement, and as she straightened up he put the white jade token on the table.
Four lotus flowers.
"Sit," he said. "On my lap."
Nalan Meng's breath caught.
VIP 4. She had read the rules a hundred times. She knew what it meant. Her breasts, her ass—and her pussy. His mouth. His hands. His cock against her body. Everything except the one thing.
The King of Thieves. Her husband's sworn brother. With a VIP 4.
A flush of shame went through her so strong that her knees went weak. And underneath it, she felt something else. Down between her legs, under the narrow strip of leather. A small, hot, slick clench.
She had no choice.
She turned around, and sat down on his lap.
There was nothing between them. The thread had already sunk deep into the cleft of her ass, so it was her bare buttocks that came down on his thighs—both cheeks, soft and warm and naked, settling onto him through the thin cloth of his trousers.
He felt them land. The weight of them. The heat. The way they spread a little under her weight and settled against him.
His cock was standing up hard in his trousers. It pressed into the small of her back.
His nose filled with her scent. Flowers. Something sweet and cool, like plum blossom in snow. The same scent that drifted across the breakfast table every morning. He breathed it in and his head swam.
She knows it's me, he thought. She must know it's me. And she sat down anyway. Bare-assed, on my lap. He did not know whether he was horrified or—something else. What a shameless woman.
She sat very still on his lap.
She could feel it against her back. His cock. Hard and thick and hot through his trousers, pressed into the small of her back like a bar of iron left in the sun. She knew exactly what it was. She had felt enough of them by now.
Her face was burning behind the mask.
He could not stop himself.
He put both hands on her breasts.
He took them from behind, one in each hand, and squeezed—all ten fingers at once, sinking into them—and they gave. So soft that they flowed around his fingers. They swelled up between them and changed shape under his palms and then settled back, heavy and warm. He had never felt anything like it. He kneaded them slowly, wonderingly, feeling the weight of them, the softness, letting the whole of his palm feel her.
Then he slid his fingers under the little leather triangles.
His fingertips touched her bare nipples. He pinched them.
Nalan Meng jolted on his lap. A small sharp breath went out of her. But she held still. She endured it.
He played with them like a man possessed.
He rolled her nipples between his fingers until they were hard as cherry stones. He tugged at them. And then he hooked his fingers into the threads and pulled the little triangles down, off her nipples, and let them hang—so that her breasts were completely bare.
He looked down over her shoulder at them.
Nalan Meng's naked breasts. He had looked at them every day under her robe, under her armor, under the crimson silk. And now there was nothing. Just two big, round, white breasts, heavy and perfect, the nipples a soft rosy pink, stiff and shining. He took them in his hands again and squeezed and could not get enough.
How, he thought, can this woman be so proud and cold by day—and so slutty and filthy by night?
And his poor brother. His poor elder brother. Who did not even know that his wife was wearing the outfits he had sold, and serving strangers in them.
He was getting more excited by the second. He let go of one breast and slid his hand down. Around her hip. Onto her ass.
He had seen it a few days ago. Not like this—in the practice yard, under her training skirt, when she had leapt for the Crane Ascends and the wind had caught the cloth. A glimpse. Just a glimpse. He had told himself to forget it. He had not forgotten it.
Now he could squeeze it as much as he liked.
He did. He kneaded her bare ass, felt the firm weight of it, the cream-soft skin, the round curve of it filling his palm. And it was not enough.
He put his hand on her back and pushed.
She went forward over the table.
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