The floating interface blinked blue at the edge of Cang’s vision. He noted it with the mild satisfaction of a man checking a ledger that was performing satisfactorily.
He looked at the two n.
"Co in," he said. "Sit down."
The instruction had a texture to it that was not quite a command and not quite an invitation. The rchant moved first, taking the chair closest to the door, the instinctive positioning of a man who was asuring the exits. His son followed and sat because standing had begun to feel like a declaration he couldn’t back up.
Cang’s hands continued their work.
iling made a soft, appalled sound against his ear. Her thick body had begun doing sothing she was furiously trying to counteract—a slow tightening in the hips, a heat blooming through her lower abdon that she recognized with desperate self-disgust as sothing other than pain. Her nipple was swollen under his fingers now, puffy and over-pink, and each slow roll of his thumb sent a current down through her that landed sowhere deeply inconvenient.
Stop, she told herself. Stop responding. You are not a girl. You are a grown woman. Your husband is right there—
PINCH.
"Hngh~—!" The sound burst past her control before she could catch it, and she buried her face against his ear harder, lips pressing against the cartilage like she could muffle her own voice by proximity. Her heavy breasts pressed forward against the inside of her silk, the thick warm weight of them straining. Her nipple was so sensitive now that even the brush of the fabric lining felt like fingers.
Xiao Hua had begun to cry.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Small tears that rolled from the outer corners of her eyes with the steady quiet of water from a slow drip, because the thing happening to her nipple had connected to sothing deep and involuntary and she could not stop it and she could not understand it and she was nineteen years old and her husband’s family was watching.
"Mmm~—nnh—p-please, Cultivator~—" she breathed against his ear, voice fractured into near-silence. "Not—here—not while they—Ahn~!"
He adjusted his grip. Her back arched. The motion made her bridal dress pull taut across the front and every line of what was happening showed clearly through the red silk for a single suspended mont before she hunched forward again, pressing her small hands over her chest above his, like she could hide what his hand was doing from view.
The son’s jaw ticked. He stared at his own hands, pressed flat on his knees.
"So," Cang said, in the tone of a man who had opened a business eting. His hands did not still. "Did you sleep well?"
The rchant opened his mouth. Closed it. The sound of his wife’s muffled exhalation filled the silence where his answer should have been.
"I’ll take that as yes." Cang tilted his head slightly, allowing iling better access to his ear, which she serviced with the chanical compliance of soone who had fully disconnected her actions from her identity. "I have so thoughts on the arrangent going forward, but first—" His dark eyes moved to the son. "—you look like you want to say sothing."
The young man’s nostrils flared. "Let them go."
"That’s a request, not a question." Cang’s thumb and forefinger rolled slowly. "You’ll have to be more specific about what you’re asking for."
"Both of them," the son said, voice dropping to sothing controlled and murderous. "My mother. The bride. Release them. Take whatever else you want from this compound—our spirit stones, our supply routes, our—"
"I don’t need your supply routes." Cang glanced down at the two won on his thighs with mild academic interest. "I have everything I want in this room."
iling’s head dipped. Her face pressed against his shoulder, and the muffled sound that ca from her was not quite a sob and not quite a moan and that ambiguity was worse than either.
He let go.
Both won gasped at the sudden absence—a short, helpless sound that ca from overstimulated nerves losing their anchor—and then imdiately straightened, pulling breath, pressing their faces blank with practiced feminine dignity that fooled absolutely no one.
Cang leaned back. Unhurried. His hands rested on each woman’s thigh for a mont, and then he looked at the n with clear, uncomplicated eyes.
"Stand," he said to the won.
They stood. iling rose first, smoothing her silk with both palms in long chanical strokes. Xiao Hua stood more slowly, bridal hem pooling around her feet, head bowed so her hair fell forward to hide her reddened cheeks.
"Kneel."
The rchant’s son shot to his feet. "Don’t you dare—"
The aura dropped.
It was not a dramatic event. No sound. No light. Simply a change in the density of the air in the room—a weight that pressed from every direction simultaneously, pressing the young man back into his chair the way a hand presses a fla flat. His cultivation scrambled against it and found nothing to grip. His legs locked. His spine curved forward involuntarily. He sat back down and hated himself for it with every nerve he had.
His father had not moved. The older man sat with his hands on his knees, eyes fixed forward, jaw set in the particular rigidity of a man who has decided that witnessing is the only thing left available to him.
iling knelt.
Xiao Hua knelt.
Both won were on their knees in front of the sofa, in front of the man who had owned them for the past twelve hours, in full view of the two n who should have protected them. iling’s silk pooled wide around her. Her back was straight—she maintained that much. But her hands were trembling.
Cang stood.
He was unhurried about this too. He rose from the sofa with the easy movent of a man stepping outside to view the weather, adjusted the fall of his outer robe with one hand, and then reached for his belt with the other.
The son made a sound that was not quite a word.
The rchant’s face had developed a gray undertone.
The belt fell open. The inner robe beneath parted. And what Cang Wuhen revealed to the morning light of the guest chamber was the thing that had broken both won across the entire previous night, the instrunt of their utter destruction—half-hard and still proportioned like sothing from a cultivator’s idle boasting story that no one was supposed to actually believe.
The silence stretched for a long beat.
iling stared at it with the flat, unseeing look of soone confronting a thing they have already survived and do not need to re-examine. She had taken it in every way a human body permits. She was past shock. She was at a place beyond shock that had its own particular texture.
Xiao Hua could not look away. Her face had gone very pink, very fast.
Cang glanced at the two n with mild interest, tilted his head once—a deliberate, unhurried comparison—and said nothing. He didn’t need to.
The rchant’s son was a cultivator of modest accomplishnt and respectable build. His father was the sa, perhaps sowhat less. Neither was inadequate by any reasonable asure.
Neither was this.
"You may begin," Cang said.
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