Under False Names

An official at a side desk was registering them for the next round under false names, his brush scratching neat demonic script across the paper, the house seal waiting beside an inkstone that smelled of crushed night-flower.

When he had written both women's names, the official asked for the men's, and then asked the question of fairness in a flat, professional voice, as if he were weighing grain rather than orgasms.

"Have either of you come in the five hours before joining the game?"

It was a necessary question. A man who had already emptied himself once started at a disadvantage, or an advantage, depending on how one counted the sensitivity left behind. Yan Tian said "No" in a rough voice. Elder Xuan Wu, who had come in his wife's mouth on the first floor less than an hour earlier, admitted it without shame or hesitation.

"Yes. I have."

The official shook his head once. "Then I'm sorry, but you can't play. You may send another man in your place who hasn't come, or the house will provide one to fill the spot."

Yan Tian grabbed the opening the way a drowning man grabs a rope, and the relief went through him much too fast. "Since that's the case, why don't we simply withdraw?"

The official looked at him over the desk. The look was not angry so much as absolute, the look of a house that had broken stronger men than clan leaders for trying to rewrite its ink. "That's against the rules. The women's names have already been finalised. You can't withdraw."

This place had strict rules, and no one broke them, not clan leaders and not main-sect elders. The reputation of the house was built on the certainty that once a name had been inked, the body attached to it would perform, with mouth and breasts and time and whatever else the stage demanded.

Elder Xuan Wu spoke before the silence could thicken into something uglier. "If that's the reason, then fine. I won't participate." He considered the two men left in their party with lazy calculation. Han Fei had come on the first-floor stage, emptied thoroughly into Xuan Wei's mouth under the lamps, and that left only one candidate. Xuan Wu's voice stayed mild and almost kind. "From my side, Elder Li will take my place."

Elder Li began dreaming before his feet had finished shifting.

Taking Xuan Wu's place against Yan Tian meant that Lady Yan Mei would have to make him come.

He looked at her where she stood at her husband's side. Her mask lay over her eyes and her famous beauty was impossible to hide beneath it. Her pink lips were parted slightly with nerves, and her heavy breasts rose with each tight breath, the thin strips lifting and settling over them. His cock thickened at once against his robes.

He could not imagine how good that mouth would feel wrapped around him. He wanted to watch Yan Tian's face while his wife sucked Elder Li's cock.

It would be revenge for his son Yan Jing, who had lusted after this woman and plotted and poisoned and still never touched her. It would be revenge for the years he had spent watching Yan Tian own the woman every elder in the clan secretly undressed in his dreams.

The thought was so sweet he could almost taste it, and his fingers flexed at his sides as though they could already feel her hair.

Yan Tian went cold with anger. Elder Xuan Wu was the strongest man in the room, and in the brutal arithmetic of demonic power, Yan Mei sucking his cock last night had somehow become acceptable, a matter of political necessity done with the strongest guest on a night that had already happened and could not be unmade.

Elder Li was different. Elder Li was like a brother to him, a brother whose ill intentions Yan Tian had always known about and never been able to cut away cleanly from clan politics, and the thought of his beautiful wife sucking that man's cock made his stomach turn and his own cock twitch in the same sick moment.

It was humiliating and it was unstoppable. Xuan Wu had already given the name, the house had already inked the women, and there was nowhere left to step except onto the stage.

All they could do was wait for their turn. Yan Mei stood with her thighs pressed together and felt the wetness cooling on her skin. Elder Li stood with his cock half-hard and did not bother to hide the tent of it, Xuan Wei hummed softly to herself as loose and ready as a cat in the sun, and Han Fei placed a bet with a grin and then, after a moment's thought, placed a second one on the opposite side, so that he could not possibly lose.

The minutes stretched. On stage, the next match ran close all the way to the end. One woman had both hands wrapped around the shaft in front of her and was pumping it into her open mouth while she sucked the head, her cheeks hollowed and her eyes squeezed shut.

The other had abandoned her mouth entirely and was rubbing the head of her man's cock in slow circles against one stiff nipple and then the other, smearing precum across her areolae until they shone, watching his face the whole time.

The nipple won. The man threw back his head and came hard across her bare breasts in white ropes, the first one striking her throat and the rest painting both nipples, while the woman on the other side was still working desperately with her mouth, her eyes furious at losing by a few seconds.

Winnings changed hands in a bright clatter of coin. Attendants wiped the boards with cloths that came away damp. Then the house announced the next players in a voice that carried to every masked ear in the hall.

While they waited, Xuan Wei drifted to Yan Mei's side and slipped an arm through hers as companionably as if they were waiting for a play to begin at a theatre.

"Don't look so frightened, Sister Yan," she murmured. "It's only a mouth game. You've done this a thousand times."

"Not like this," Yan Mei said through her teeth. "Not in front of..." She could not finish.

"In front of them, or in front of him?" Xuan Wei tilted her head toward Elder Li, who stood a few paces away pretending to study the betting board with a tent in his robes that a blind man could have seen.

"Listen to me, because I want this to be a good match, and I can't win it properly if you don't try. Old men like him have been hard for a long time and have come very little. He'll fight you at first because his pride wants to last. Don't fight his pride. Look up at him. Let him see your face while you take him. Men like that would rather be beaten by a woman's eyes than by her tongue, and when he breaks, he'll break all at once."

Her voice dropped even lower. "And use his balls. Nobody ever thinks of the balls."

Yan Mei stared at her. "Why are you telling me this? You're the one I have to beat."

Xuan Wei laughed softly and squeezed her arm. "Because I'll beat you anyway," she said, without any malice at all, "and I would rather beat you at your best. Besides, my husband would be very disappointed if you lost badly. He's bet on both of us, you know. He always does."

Yan Mei looked across at Elder Xuan Wu, who was placing a stack of gold taels on the betting tray with an attendant, and could not tell whether Xuan Wei was joking. Then the couple on stage cried out, and she looked back just in time to see the end of it.

"Yan Tian. Yan Mei. Xuan Wei. Elder Li."

They walked toward the stage, and the crowd admired the two beauties at once. Murmurs rose and the odds shifted as eyes locked on Yan Mei's big breasts and the damp dark patch between her legs, and on Xuan Wei's shameless sway and the confident set of her mouth.

The men drew a different reaction. One was strong and handsome and in his prime, and the other was an old man whose aura did not seem to match the powerful beauty walking toward him.

People already looked down on Elder Li, because an old man paired against a heaven-defying woman looked like a joke the house had told on purpose. Somebody laughed behind his mask, and somebody else raised a bet against him anyway, smelling an upset and an opportunity.

Elder Li heard the laughter and did not mind it in the least. Let them laugh, he thought. In a few minutes every man in this crowd would be staring at Lady Yan's lips wrapped around his cock and wishing he were the old man.

The two pairs took their places on the marked boards and switched partners under the lamps.

The house attendant stepped to the edge of the stage and lifted a small brass sandglass so that the crowd could see it, and announced the rules once more for the benefit of the newcomers, and then the stake: a full hundred gold taels from each couple, with Elder Xuan Wu's ring paying for both sides as though the sum were the price of a meal.

A low whistle went through the crowd at the size of it, and the betting, which had been brisk before, became frantic. Men shoved coins at the attendants. Somebody shouted that the old man would not last thirty breaths with a mouth like that on him, and somebody else shouted back that the beauty looked as though she had never sucked anything in her life, and both men laughed, and Yan Mei, standing on the boards with her heart slamming, heard every word.

Yan Mei walked toward Elder Li on legs that felt like water. Each step made her heavy breasts bounce, and each bounce dragged Elder Li's eyes down and kept them there.

Xuan Wei went toward Yan Tian with a smile already wet at the edges and her hips rolling as if the stage were a bedroom she owned. In the crowd, Xuan Wu and Han Fei had already placed their bets, coins flashing into the house tray while the odds were muttered around them like prayers.

Xuan Wu looked satisfied before the bell had even rung. Han Fei's hand rested near his own crotch as if the memory of the first floor alone were enough to wake him again.

Elder Li looked down at the woman standing in front of him. The mask hid part of her face, but she was as beautiful as ever, her breasts straining the thin cloth until the upper slopes threatened to spill, her waist narrow above the tiny lower panel, and her thighs gleaming faintly where arousal had dried and been renewed in shining streaks.

She was uncomfortable under his stare and looked down at the boards. He could smell her, sweet oils and clean skin and the faint salt of her earlier wetness, and the thought that he finally had his chance at revenge for his son settled in his chest like warm wine.

The bell rang, bright and sharp and final.

Xuan Wei moved at once. She dropped Yan Tian's trousers with practised hands, and his cock sprang free and struck her across the face, hard and heavy and already leaking a clear bead that smeared along her cheek. She turned her face into it and rubbed her cheek along the shaft like a cat marking a doorframe, breathing in the smell of him, and looked up at him along its length with laughing eyes.

Then she took the shaft in her hand and began sucking without any warning at all. Her lips sealed around the head and her tongue worked the underside in firm flat strokes while her throat opened as though the crowd did not exist, and in one smooth slide she took him halfway and held him there, humming, so that the vibration ran through him to the root.

The wet sounds rose immediately.

Schlp. Schlp.

Yan Tian jerked with the shock of it, a public blowjob under lamps with a hundred masked strangers watching, and heat flooded his face beneath his mask while his hands hovered uselessly near her hair. Even as Xuan Wei's mouth took him deep and her breasts brushed against his thighs, his eyes went across the stage to his wife.

Xuan Wei was magnificent and merciless. She worked Yan Tian with her mouth and her hands together, twisting her fist around the base of his shaft while her lips slid up and down the upper half, her spit running down over her knuckles so that every twist was slick and hot.

Each time she drew back to the tip, she let him go just long enough to slap his wet cock against her own tongue with a loud wet smack that the crowd cheered every time.

Smack.

Then she cupped her heavy breasts in both hands and wrapped them around him. She squeezed his shaft in the hot slippery valley of her cleavage, her spit-slick skin gliding up and down him while her stiff nipples rubbed against his belly, and bent her head to suck the tip that stood out from between them, her tongue lashing the slit in quick flicking strokes.

When his hips jerked, she pressed her breasts tighter, and the head popped up against her lips again and again as he thrust.

Yan Tian's thighs shook. He had felt this mouth before, on the night of the dice, and he had thought then that nothing could be more skilled. He had been wrong. With the crowd roaring and the clock running and his wife kneeling ten paces away in front of Elder Li, every stroke of Xuan Wei's tongue felt like a hand closing around his throat.