Chapter 71 of 90
The Last Night at Heaven Lust
The next night, Nalan Meng went to Heaven Lust for the last time.
She wore her mask. She wore her black cloak with the hood pulled forward. But she did not go in at the side door, and she did not go to the changing room. She climbed the red lacquer stairs past the second floor and on up to the third, with a million silver notes in a satchel against her hip, and her heart beating hard and steady, like a war drum before the charge.
A guard stood at the door of the private room at the top of the stairs. He looked at her. He went inside and came out again.
"Go in," he said.
The room was luxurious. She had expected that. Red silk on the walls, gold lacquer on the beams, a carpet from the western deserts so thick her feet sank into it. A brazier of sandalwood. Wine on a low table.
And the smell.
It hung in the air under the sandalwood, thick and heavy. She knew what it was. She had not known, a month ago. She knew now. She had tasted it. It was the smell of semen.
Her face went hot under the mask. She walked in anyway.
Shi Dacheng was sitting on the edge of an enormous bed, naked, with his legs spread wide.
His great soft belly hung down over his thighs. And on the carpet between his knees knelt a waitress—one of the second-floor girls, still in her leather, her mask still on—with her head bobbing slowly in his lap. Nalan Meng could hear it. The wet, rhythmic sound of her mouth on his cock.
The girl did not stop when Nalan Meng came in. She did not even look up.
Anger rose in Nalan Meng's throat. She swallowed it.
"Hey," she said. Her voice came out cold and level. The City Lord's voice. "Let's settle our debt."
Shi Dacheng's little eyes flew open.
He stared at her over the kneeling girl's head. For a moment he could not make sense of the words. Settle? Where would she get a million silver? She had no money; he had made very sure of that. The whole of the Nalan family treasury was in hock to half the merchants in the city.
And then he thought: Li Yuguo.
Of course. The masks. A million silver, in silver notes, pushed across his own table only yesterday. He felt a small chill.
"Sit," he said, and waved at a chair. "Sit, sit. Bring it out, then."
She did not sit. She took the satchel from her hip and set it on the low table among the wine cups and opened it. The silver notes lay inside in neat thick stacks.
"One million," she said. "Now invalidate my contract."
He looked at the money for a long moment. Then he sighed, and reached over without getting up—the waitress between his knees shifted with him, still sucking—and pulled open a drawer in the bedside table and drew out a sheet of paper.
She knew it at once. Her own handwriting. Her own blood-mark at the bottom.
"What a loss." He shook his head. "You were so popular with the clients, you know. Table nine was booked every night." He chuckled. "You can still work here, after this. If you like. Anytime."
Then he held the contract over the brazier, and it caught, and curled, and burned.
"There," said Shi Dacheng. "You're free."
She watched it burn to the last corner.
Something loosened in her chest that she had not known was clenched. It went out of her in a long slow breath, and her shoulders came down, and for a moment she thought her knees might give way.
Free.
She looked, one last time, at the girl kneeling between Shi Dacheng's knees. At her bare back, her bare ass, the thread between her cheeks. Her cheeks hollowing as she sucked. Her mask, wet at the chin.
That would have been me, Nalan Meng thought. If I hadn't paid. Kneeling on this carpet. Next week. Next month. Forever.
She turned and walked out.
Shi Dacheng watched her go.
He watched her ass, to be precise. Even under the cloak, it moved like nothing else in Nalan City.
We'll never see that naked again, he thought, with real grief. What a loss. What a terrible loss. But he could not hold her now. Not with the debt paid. Not with Li Yuguo's silver on his table. That boy knows, he thought. He must know. Why else would he give her the money?
He shivered a little, and patted the kneeling girl's head.
Better stay out of this one.
Nalan Meng walked out of Heaven Lust through the front door.
She did not hurry. She walked down the middle of the first-floor hall with her head up and her cloak swinging, between the long tables and the drunk porters and the red-skirted girls, like a woman walking out of a prison with the jailer's keys in her hand. Out into the Street of Lanterns. Into the cool night.
She thought about all the nights she had spent in that building.
The leather. The threads. The tokens on the table. The hands. Table nine. The box.
Just thinking about it made her wet.
She felt it—sudden and hot, between her legs—and stopped dead in the middle of the street, appalled. Then she pulled her hood forward and ran the rest of the way home.
He was waiting for her.
Li Yuguo was standing in the courtyard in the moonlight with his hands in his sleeves when she came in at the side door. He did not say anything. He looked at her, and turned, and walked toward his room.
She followed him.
"Strip," he said, as soon as the door was shut.
She did not hesitate this time. She undid her cloak and her dress and let them fall. She stood naked in the middle of his room, under the lamp, with her hands at her sides, and waited for the next order like an obedient dog.
He went to the chest by the wall and took something out of it. He held it out to her.
"Put this on."
She looked at it. Her face went red.
It was gold. Fine gold chain, delicate as a necklace, and two small golden plates no bigger than coins. The plates were for her nipples. The chain ran from them around her breasts and up over her shoulders. Below, there was a narrow golden band for her waist, and from it another chain that would run down between her legs.
It was exactly like the bar. Exactly like the nights in Heaven Lust. As if he had taken her back there.
She put it on without a word.
The little plates sat on her nipples, cold at first, then warm. The chain drew snug under the curves of her breasts and lifted them. And the last chain slid down between her legs and settled into her pussy—parting her lips, lying along her slit—and up between her cheeks. She felt every link.
She stood there in the lamplight in nothing but gold, with her face scarlet. She looked like a goddess of lust.
"Kneel," he said. "Massage me with your breasts. And suck."
She knelt.
She took his cock between her breasts. It was already hard. She pushed her breasts together around it with her hands and felt it throb in the soft hot valley between them, and the little gold plates slid against his shaft. She began to move. Up and down. Slowly. And every time the head of his cock pushed up out of her cleavage, she bent her head and took it in her mouth.
She had not touched herself in two days. Not since the bar. Not since the garden.
She was so horny she could hardly see.
She sucked him like a madwoman. She squeezed him between her breasts and licked his head and swallowed him and could not stop. Her hips were moving on their own. The chain between her legs slid against her clit with every motion and she whimpered around his cock.
He looked down at her from above, and could not bear it.
The sight was too much. Nalan Meng on her knees in gold chains, her breasts wrapped around his cock, her lips stretched around his head, her eyes half closed and glazed with lust. He did not last long. He came, hard, into her mouth and over her breasts, and she drank it, and moaned.
And then he stepped back. And left her there on her knees, still horny. Still aching. Unanswered.
"From now on," he said, "you won't touch yourself. Not ever. Not unless I say."
She looked up at him. She did not say anything.
He went back to the chest and took out a bundle of silk and dropped it in front of her. Underwear. A whole pile of it. Every piece of it was the same kind: thin, tiny, threaded. Strings that would vanish between her cheeks. Little triangles that would hide almost nothing.
There were no breastbands in the pile at all.
"From tomorrow," he said, "you'll wear only these. And no breastband. Only old women wear breastbands."
It was not entirely untrue.
In the cultivation world, most young women did not bind their breasts. It showed under the robe, the line of it; and the robes looked better, lusher, without. It had been the fashion in the capital for twenty years. He had written it that way himself—it had seemed a nice detail, back when he was a lonely man at a keyboard in a room with one window.
But Nalan Meng was old-fashioned. She had always bound her breasts tight under her armor and her crimson robes,.
"And from now on," he said, "you'll wear something more erotic. I'll choose some robes for you."
He dropped a second bundle in front of her. Robes. Silk. A dozen of them, in a dozen colors, each one so thin she could have read a letter through it.
She stared at them. Why is he doing this? She did not understand. What does he want?
"Yes," she said.
She picked up the bundles and her own clothes and went out.
In her own bed, she was so horny she wanted to scream. Her pussy was throbbing. Her nipples ached where the gold plates had been. Her fingers kept drifting down her belly in the dark.
She did not let them. An order is an order. The hook in her chest was quiet, but she could feel it there, waiting.
She went to sleep angry.
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