Chapter 69 of 90
Waiting for His Wife
Li Yuguo sat in his room in the dark and waited for his wife.
He had lit one lamp, and turned it low. The flowers outside his window breathed their faint sweet poison into the night. The million silver notes from Shi Dacheng sat on the desk in a fat sheaf under an inkstone, and he kept looking at them, and then looking away, and then looking at them again.
He had not planned this part. That was the truth. He had planned the masks, and the bar, and the whisper. He had not planned what came after the whisper. He had walked home through the dark streets with his cock still wet and his heart going like a drum and her frozen face in his mind's eye, and only when he was halfway across the courtyard had it occurred to him that she was going to come, and he was going to have to say something.
So what do I do with her?
He turned it over.
He could be kind. Tell her he knew, and that he did not care, and that she should go to bed. She would never trust him again, but she would never trust him again anyway.
Or.
He thought of Shi Dacheng. Of the fat fingers sunk in those two girls' breasts on the sofa. Of a locked drawer full of contracts, and Nalan Meng's name on one of them. Every night she went back to that bar, she was one more night in that pig's hands. One more customer. One more VIP token. And the debt only ever seemed to grow.
Better me, he thought, than him.
It was not a noble thought. He did not pretend that it was. But there were a hundred men in that bar who would have done far worse to her than he meant to, and none of them would ever have let her go.
Blackmail her. Take control of her. Before that pig decides to do it properly.
Or wait.
He was still turning it over when he heard her steps on the covered walk.
She knocked once. Very softly.
He shook his head, as if to clear it, and said: "Come in."
The door opened, and Nalan Meng slipped inside, and shut it behind her at once.
She did not want anyone to see. He could tell from the way she pressed her back against it, the way her eyes went to the window and the shutters before they came to him. She was wearing her black cloak, the hood thrown back. Her face was pale. Her hair had come half loose from its pins on the walk home. She looked at him, and her chin came up—a little, from habit, the last scrap of the City Lord—and then it trembled, and she could not hold it there.
He had been ready for this. He had decided on the walk home. He made his face hard.
"So," he said. "You enjoy it, do you? Being played with by strangers in a bar? Showing off your naked body? Letting them do whatever they want to you?"
He put anger into his voice. He was surprised how easily it came.
The words hit her like a slap.
She opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She tried again, and again nothing. Every word she might have said—it isn't what you think, I had no choice, the debt, the city—died in her throat under the weight of what she felt, looking at him. Guilt. Pure and heavy and suffocating. Toward him. Toward this soft-faced, useless man she had sneered at for three years. She could not look at him and could not look away.
"Look at that slutty body of yours." He came around the desk. "Wearing those almost-naked outfits in the bar. Shameless. Should I tell everyone? Should I tell the whole of Nalan City that my wife is a horny slut working as a waitress?"
He walked up to her.
She did not move. She stood with her back against the door, and he stood in front of her, close, and put his hand under her chin and lifted her face so that she had to look at him.
"You enjoy that kind of thing, hm?" His voice was low. "Well. I thought you were pure. Since you never even let me touch you."
His other hand came up and closed over her breast through the cloak.
He squeezed it. Slowly. She felt it give under his palm, through the black wool and the thin dress beneath. Her breath caught.
"So why don't I play along with you," he said, "like a pervert?"
"What—" She had found one word, at least. "What do you mean?"
He let go of her chin. He walked around behind her, unhurriedly, and she felt him there at her back, close, and then his breath against her ear.
"If you want to keep your filthy little secret," he said, "then from now on, you'll be my slave." A pause. "I'll even pay your debt at the bar."
She stood very still.
He knows about the debt. How? How could he know? She had told no one. Not a soul. Shi Dacheng's contract was locked in Shi Dacheng's drawer.
And then the other thing landed, slower and colder. He could have helped me. He knows, and he could have just helped me. And instead he's blackmailing me.
What else could I expect, she thought bitterly, from a man like this?
"What are you thinking about for so long?" He was still at her back. "Isn't it better to serve your body to your own husband than to strangers in a bar?" A pause, dry and cruel. "Or have you started to like it there?"
She thought about it.
She made herself think about it, the way she would have thought about a battle map. Coldly. Quit the bar. Never go back. Never put on that leather again. Never sit on another stranger's lap. Never again kneel under a table in a box. Against that: serve him. This idiot. This prodigal. This King of Soft Rice who had never in his life had the nerve to do anything.
What can he even do to me? She almost laughed. I bet he doesn't have the courage to do anything at all.
"Are you telling the truth?" She turned to face him. "Where would you get that kind of money? Do you even know how much the debt is? One million silver." She lifted her chin. "Do you have one million silver? Hm?"
He smiled.
"What are you talking about? I have more than enough." He nodded at the desk, at the fat sheaf of notes under the inkstone. "Didn't you know? Those outfits you wear in the bar—every one of them—I sold them. I've made a great deal of money, you know."
The blood went out of her face. Then it came back, all at once, scarlet.
He sold them. The leather. The threads. The tiny triangles. Every scrap she had ever tied on in that changing room had passed through his hands first.
She was furious. She was mortified. She did not know which was worse.
"Pervert," she said.
He took a sheet of paper from the desk and held it out to her.
"Read it," he said. "And then sign it. With your soul brand."
She took it.
It was not ordinary paper. She knew that the moment it touched her fingers—it was heavy and faintly warm and it hummed against her skin, very low, like a plucked zither string held quiet under a palm. A soul contract. She had seen them once or twice, in her father's treasury. They cost a fortune and they could not be broken.
She read it.
Party B shall pay the debt of Party A in full.
In return:
1. Party A (the Slave) shall obey every command of Party B (the Master), without violation.
2. Violation of this contract shall do heavy damage to the Slave's soul, as the Master wishes.
That was all. Two lines. Simple conditions, like every contract.
She hesitated.
She read it again. Every command. It was a terrible word. Every.
And then she thought of the bar. Of the box. Of the steward's ledger and Shi Dacheng's locked drawer and the debt that never seemed to shrink no matter how many nights she worked. Of the next VIP token, and the next, and the one after that.
Anything is better, she thought, than being a waitress in that bar.
She bit her finger until it bled, and pressed it to the paper, and let her Qi flow down into it. She felt the brand catch—a small, sharp, burning tug, deep inside her chest, as if a hook had gone into her and set.
"You'd better keep your promise," she said, and held it out to him.
He took it from her. He smiled, and it went into nothing between his fingers—into his storage, wherever it was he kept things—and was gone.
Then he picked up the sheaf of silver notes from under the inkstone and put it in her hands.
"Take this," he said. "Settle your debt."
She stared down at the notes. One million silver. Real. Heavy in her hands. She had not believed, until that moment, that he actually had it.
She closed her fingers around it, and turned to go.
"Where are you going?"
She stopped with her hand on the door.
"Did I tell you to go?"
She stood there. She could feel it—the hook in her chest. Not pulling. Not yet. Just there. Waiting. She knew without trying that if she opened the door, it would pull.
She turned around.
"Strip," said Li Yuguo.
She had known this would come.
She had known it the moment she put her blood on the paper. She was not a child. Every command. She had known exactly what that meant, and signed it anyway. Still, hearing it—hearing it in his voice, flat and calm, in his own room, with the lamp turned low—made her face go hot to the roots of her hair.
She set the silver down on the desk.
She undid the clasp of her cloak, and let it fall. Then the black dress under it. She drew it up over her head and dropped it on the cloak, and stood there in nothing but what she had worn home from the bar.
She had not had time to change. She had walked out of the changing room in a daze and pulled her dress on over the leather without thinking.
So she was still wearing it. The two little triangles on their threads. The strip of leather and the thread between her legs.
She hesitated. He did not say anything. He only watched her.
She reached up behind her back and untied the threads of the top, and the little triangles fell away from her breasts. Then she hooked her thumbs into the cord at her waist and slid the bottom down, and the thread pulled out from between her cheeks with a small slick drag that made her bite her lip, and she stepped out of it.
She stood naked in front of her husband.
Not in a bar. Not in a mask. In his room. With her own face.
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