The Diamond Plug

Yan Mei followed Elder Li out of the hall.

The two escorting guards fell in behind them at once, faces blank, eyes busy. Corridor lanterns painted gold along the chains on Yan Mei's waist and the full bounce of flesh those chains framed. After a few minutes Elder Li stopped before a closed door that smelled faintly of oil, polished metal, and old perfume — the smell of rooms where bodies were prepared rather than received.

He opened it. Yan Mei entered. The guards remained outside to stand watch, already inventing safe stories for why the clan leader's wife had walked into the slave dressing wing with Grand Elder Yan Li and no patriarch in sight.

A junior disciple coming the other way with a stack of manuals saw her, saw Elder Li, saw the direction of the slave wing, and went so pale he nearly dropped the books. Yan Mei did not look at him. Elder Li did not look at him. The guards behind them looked at her ass. The manuals survived. The junior disciple's composure did not.

The taller one said, under his breath, that it had to be an inspection of the slave stores before some banquet. The shorter one said nothing and thought of the garden breeze and the one white buttock and the way Lady Yan Mei's chains had chimed when she climbed the hall steps. Neither of them put their thoughts into a shape that could be reported. Reporting thoughts like theirs was how guards disappeared.

Inside, the walls held what the smell promised.

Slave clothes hung in ranked rows: collars, veils, chain-harnesses, scraps of cloth too small to be honest garments, plugs and clamps and decorative restraints glittering under lamplight like jewelry designed by a cruel god. Some sets were leather black as night-cultivation. Some were gold-chased for display slaves who attended patriarch banquets.

The room smelled of lamp oil, old leather and the sweetish rot of scented soap trying too hard. Dust lay thin on the top rail of each rack and was missing from the hems, where hands had pulled things down again and again. A tag of yellow paper hung from every hook, the writing on it too small to read from the door, and her slippers whispered on the varnished boards when she took a step.

Three oil lamps burned on iron stands, and their flames moved in the draught from the door so that the shadows of the hanging chains slid back and forth across the wall like pendulums. The polished boards were cool enough that Yan Mei felt them through the soles of her feet. Somewhere a drop of water fell at a regular interval into a metal basin, tink, tink, tink, and she found herself counting.

Some were so minimal they were only suggestions of ownership — a ring, a clip, a single chain meant to be worn into a bedroom and nowhere more public. Yan Mei's eyes snagged on a sky-blue and gold set laid ready on the central table and felt her stomach recognize it before her mind did. The center of the room was a clear open space polished smooth by years of knees. Two male slaves waited there.

How many knees, Yan Mei wondered, and whose. How many clan ladies had stood where she stood. How many had crawled. The polish answered without words: enough. The demonic territories did not invent shame; they curated it, hung it on racks, oiled it, and taught Heavenly-realm wives to wear it like jewelry. She took her place between the slaves and felt the polish under her feet like a promise.

The polished floor held no names. It held only the shine of old submission, buffed into the wood by years of palms and kneecaps and the occasional forehead. Yan Mei set her bare feet on that shine and felt it accept her weight as if it had been waiting.

Elder Li's smile said it had been waiting for her specifically. The slaves' cages said the same thing in a cruder language. She was not the first. She might be the most beautiful. Beauty, in this room, was only another kind of readiness.

Yan Mei's eyes moved along the rows the way a woman in a market looks at fruit she is not sure she will buy. Leather, gold, silk scraps. A collar with a bell. A harness that would leave the breasts completely free and bind the arms behind the back.

A set of nipple clamps connected by a fine chain to a clit clamp, which she looked at once and then away from. The sky-blue and gold set on the table was waiting. It had been chosen for her before she entered. Choice, tonight, was a word that belonged to other people.

They were muscular, strong-looking, bodies oiled enough to catch light. They wore nothing except restraining chastity cages locked over their cocks and black masks that erased their faces into anonymous hunger. Steel curved tight around flesh that strained visibly at the sight of Yan Mei.

The taller one's chest rose and fell slowly, and she could see the pulse in his throat above the strap of his mask. Sweat had already started along the dip of the shorter one's spine. Neither of them looked at her directly, but she felt their attention anyway, a quiet heat on her shoulders and breasts like the warmth from a banked fire.

She looked at those cages, at the impossibility of release, and walked to stand between them without being told. This was not unusual in the demonic territories — many royal ladies kept male slaves for pleasure, for bathing, for the vanity of owned muscle. Being dressed by them should have felt ordinary.

Ordinary would have been choosing a male slave for her own bath and dismissing him when she was clean. Ordinary would have been Yan Tian present, laughing, directing. Ordinary would not have included Elder Li's erection already obvious under his robes, or a palm-sized bundle of chain that was supposed to be an entire outfit, or the word slave still echoing from the hall like a struck bell.

Yan Mei stood between the masked men and felt her pussy throb against the last scrap of her old clothes, and ordinary was a country she had left weeks ago without noticing the border.

On either side of her the heat of their bodies reached her bare skin without touching it, a faint dry warmth carrying the smell of oil and sweat and the metal of the cages. Her nipples drew tight behind their silk. She kept her hands at her sides.

It did not feel ordinary.

Elder Li watched her take her place with a bravery that made his mouth water. He smiled.

"Lady Yan Mei, these slaves will help you dress." He turned to the masked men. "Disguise Lady Yan Mei as a slave for the family leader."

They understood. Tools and clothes had already been prepared under Elder Li's earlier instructions; they brought everything to a side table with efficient bows.

Among the items: a neck collar with an attached chain; a veil to cover the face; an eye mask; and, in the middle of the table, a bundle of chain and cloth wrapped tightly enough to fit in a palm. Yan Mei looked at that palm-sized bundle and understood, with a swallow, that it was tonight's entire outfit.

She had worn Xuan Wei's scraps. She had worn gambling-house pearls. She had walked the mansion in three-chain silk that barely covered her nipples. None of those had been this small. None of those had required her asshole to hold them on. The bundle sat on the table like a joke told by a god who hated goddesses. Elder Li watched her face for the moment of understanding and smiled when it arrived.

The slaves still tried, privately, to comprehend why Lady Yan Mei was donning slave attire and why Elder Li stood here instead of the family leader. Comprehension was not their freedom. Reaction was not their freedom. They were slaves. They simply enjoyed the moment their cages could not enjoy for them.

One of them — the taller, with a scar across his left pectoral — had dressed display slaves for patriarch banquets before. He had never dressed the clan leader's wife. The difference sat in his cage like a second lock.

The shorter one had been purchased from a southern market three years ago and had spent those years learning not to hope. Tonight hope was irrelevant. Tonight was a memory he would carry into whatever unmarked grave owned men went to. He oiled his hands again, unnecessarily, because oiling his hands meant looking at her breasts while he did it.

Elder Li leaned against a rack of collars and watched with folded arms, erection already obvious, making no effort to hide it from a woman who had seen and touched it before. "Be thorough," he told the slaves. "The association's guests include City Lord-level eyes. If a single clasp looks cheap, the disguise fails. If she looks like a lady in costume, the disguise fails. She must look born to the chain."

A string of tiny silver bells hung from the rack beside his shoulder and swayed each time he breathed, ringing so faintly that the sound was felt more than heard.

She had taken that cock in her mouth during the drinking games. She had felt it rub along her pussy while Yan Tian watched. She knew its weight and its taste and the sound Elder Li made when he came. Knowing did not make the sight of it tenting his robes now any less vivid.

If anything, knowing made it worse — or better. The slaves saw where her eyes went and saw the erection and understood, in the wordless way owned men understood, that the lady on the floor tonight was not only being dressed. She was being claimed by a room.

Born to the chain. She turned the phrase over while the slaves laid out the sky-blue and gold set with the reverence of priests laying out ritual tools. Born. As if she had never been Lady Yan Mei. As if the Heavenly Realm and the Yan name and the children and the garden barley-sugars had all been a costume she was now taking off.

Elder Li wanted the association's guests to believe that costume had never existed. She stood between two caged men with her juice already shining on her thighs.

Yan Mei's stomach flipped. Born to the chain. The phrase settled beside the thought of the plug.

They positioned themselves on either side of her.

The first began undressing her with careful, exploring hands while the other watched and held the next piece ready. Her current sexy clothes came away chain by chain, silk by silk. Smooth white skin emerged like a revelation the room already knew and still wanted.

Perfectly shaped breasts settled free, pink nipples pointed in the cooler air. When the bottom garments left, her round voluptuous hips and slim waist made the naked geometry of her even more criminal. The slave's muscular hands did not only remove.

They explored — palming warm breast-weight, skimming waist, briefly cupping the heavy curve of an asscheek as if checking fit. Yan Mei's breath shortened. Being stripped by owned men in front of Elder Li was a humiliation with a temperature. Her pussy, already wet from the hall's invitation, grew wetter.

The breast-chains came off with tiny metallic whispers. The side-panels of her hip-cloths peeled away from skin that was already flushed. Cooler air found her nipples and drew them tight. Cooler air found her bare pussy and made her shiver. She was Heavenly Realm; she did not shiver from cold. She shivered from being seen.

Elder Li saw. The slaves saw. The bronze mirror saw. The racks of collars and plugs along the walls seemed to watch like a jury of previous nights. Yan Mei stood in the center of that attention and felt her juice gather at the top of her thighs before anyone had even touched the plug.

One slave's thumb brushed her nipple while removing a breast-chain; the contact was brief and electric. The other slave's palm lingered at the tender join of thigh and ass when the last bottom cloth fell.

The slave's palm was rough from work and warm from oil. It cupped the heavy curve of her asscheek and held for a heartbeat too long, and Yan Mei's breath caught, and Elder Li's cock twitched under his robes where she could see it.

The other slave's thumb rolled once across her nipple as if checking that the gold plate would sit right, and a spark of heat shot straight down to her clit. She stood still.

When she stood completely naked, they began dressing her in the slave attire.

First the bottom — which could hardly be called clothing.

A thin but wide chain with an attractive worked design wrapped her waist. From it hung a small, almost transparent sky-blue cloth that barely covered her groin, long enough only to reach the crotch and suggest modesty without providing it.

At the back, a similarly sized cloth covered only half of each buttock from the side, leaving the center crack and most of the round flesh exposed. The main feature — the true engine of the outfit — was the underwear attached to the waist chain in front: a single chain with a small cloth in the middle and an anal plug at the end.

The free end of that chain was not yet attached to the waist. It had to be connected through her body. The plug had to seat in her ass. Only then would the tiny middle cloth stay pulled into place against her pussy, held by internal pressure and chain tension.

Yan Mei blushed hard enough to feel her ears burn. She had worn revealing clothes for Yan Tian's new appetite. She had been stripped in gambling houses and bent for pearls. Somehow the engineering of this underwear — the requirement that her asshole become a clasp — felt more intimate than any of those public acts. It made her body a fastener. It made her cooperation mechanical and sexual at once.

She had sucked Elder Li while her husband watched. She had taken Xuan Wu in her ass until she could not walk straight. She had worn a tail plug around a drinking table and crawled for dice. None of that had required her to become a fastener. None of that had turned her asshole into the clasp that kept her pussy covered.

The distinction felt important and ridiculous and unbearably hot. She watched the slave coat the black plug with slippery liquid until it shone like a wet jewel, and she spread her stance a fraction without being told, and Elder Li made a small sound of approval that went straight to her clit.

She had been fucked in the ass before — by Xuan Wu, by pearls, by Elder Li's fingers in darker rooms — and she had learned to take it, then to want it, then to ask for it with her body when her mouth would not. This was different. This was not fucking. This was clothing.

The plug was not a cock. It was a button. She was going to spend an entire merchant celebration as a woman whose underwear stayed on because her asshole clenched around a toy, and the thought made her so wet that she was afraid the slaves would see it running down her thigh before they even seated the thing.

The slave did not hesitate. He produced a vial of slippery liquid, coated the black plug, and pressed it to her tight asshole while the second slave steadied her hips from the front. Cold slickness, then pressure. She clenched reflexively; he pushed through the clench with practiced firmness until the plug seated and the diamond-top nestled between her cheeks.

The chain ran forward between her legs; the small cloth nestled against her pussy lips; the front attachment locked to the waist chain. To keep the underwear in place she had to hold the plug with her body. Every step would remind her. Every breath would remind her.

The diamond-top was cool against the warm skin of her crack. The chain between her legs was thin and cold and pressed up against her pussy lips with every tiny shift of weight. The sky-blue front cloth was already darkening.

Elder Li walked around her once, slowly, inspecting the seat of the plug the way a jeweler inspects a stone, and she felt his gaze on her spread cheeks and open crack and felt her anus clench involuntarily around the toy, which only seated it deeper. "Good," he said. "For a first seating. It will not be enough for walking. We will practice."

"Clench," Elder Li said mildly from the side, as if offering tea advice. "Unless you want Jinling's merchants to see the clan leader's slave lose her clothes mid-walk."

She clenched. The slaves stepped back to admire their work. From the front she looked almost dressed, if you called a scrap of sky-blue and a web of gold chains dressed. From the side she looked like a crime. From behind she looked like a gift with the wrapping already torn.

Elder Li made her turn slowly while he inspected every angle, and every turn rubbed the chain through her pussy lips, and every rub made her breath catch. "The diamond shows," he said approvingly. "Good. They should see the diamond. The diamond tells them the underwear is held from inside. Men like knowing that."

She clenched. The plug felt enormous. It was not. It only occupied a place that still remembered pearls and strangers' fingers and made new memory on top of old.

She stood for a moment afterward with her hands loose at her sides, simply feeling. The plug's weight was a constant vulgar fact. The front cloth rubbed her clit whenever she shifted her hips. Cool air kissed the exposed halves of her buttocks and the undersides of her breasts. Elder Li's gaze was a second set of hands.

The slaves' caged cocks strained toward her as if steel might learn mercy through wanting. Yan Mei thought of Yan Tian waiting in the hall with his hunger and his smile. She thought of the merchant association's twenty-year celebration and the unknown games waiting behind invitations. She thought, traitorously, of how wet she was, and whether wetness would show through sky-blue transparency under banquet light.

It would show. She knew it would show. Sky-blue and almost transparent was not a fabric that forgave arousal. Every merchant in the association hall would see the dark patch between her legs and know the patriarch's slave was dripping. The knowledge should have been a horror.

It was a horror. It was also a heat that pooled low in her belly and made the plug feel larger. She pressed her thighs together once, carefully, and the cloth rubbed her clit, and she had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from making a sound.

"Hold still," one slave murmured — the first words either had risked — and reached for the upper chains.

His voice was rough from disuse and desire. The other slave brought the neck chain and the golden plates on a lacquered tray as if presenting tribute. Yan Mei held still. The plug sat heavy in her ass. The sky-blue scrap clung to her dripping pussy.

Cool air raised gooseflesh along her arms and the undersides of her heavy breasts. The two slaves raised the chains toward her. She lifted her chin for the neck chain and felt, traitorously, almost proud.

Proud of what? Of beauty that survived a collar? Of a body that made caged men weep against steel? She did not sort the pride. She only felt it, warm and shameful and bright, while the neck chain settled and the golden plates found her nipples and the middle chain swayed in her cleavage like a pendulum counting down to the crawl.