Free Web NovelHe looked at her. His eyes were still red. Still wet at the corners, though he would have died before calling it crying.
"You," he said. His voice was hoarse — wrong in his chest, too tight, squeezed through something that was fury and humiliation and want and grief all pressed together into a shape that didn't have a clean name.
He crossed to the bed.
She pressed back against the wall — not entirely in rejection, but in the instinctive calibration of a woman determining the situation's actual nature.
"Young Master—"
"Shut up," he said. Then, immediately: "No. Don't shut up. I just—" He stopped. His jaw worked. He pressed his mouth closed again. Another thin bloom of blood from the split lip. He wiped it with his wrist. Looked at the red smear on his skin. Looked at her.
He threw the mirror that had been sitting on the narrow supply shelf beside the cot — the small copper one that the storage staff used to check their appearances before entering the main corridors. It hit the floor under the cot with a crack that split the frame, the reflection breaking into two angled pieces that showed the ceiling.
The maid flinched.
He sat on the edge of the cot. Not on her. Beside her. His elbows on his knees. His cock still out — absurd, insistent, ignoring the rest of the situation with complete indifference. His head dropped forward.
"I watched," he said. Very quietly. "I watched him — with all three of them — and I couldn't—" His teeth pressed together. "I couldn't do anything."
She was very still.
"She was—" He stopped. Started again. "The Princess was — she was—"
He couldn't say what the Princess was.
She had been Yuxi. He had known her face for three years. He had brought her spirit herbs and cultivation texts and a jade pendant. He had woken early to train in the courtyard outside her window. He had composed three letters in his head that he had never written down. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
She had been face-pressed into her mother's thighs with her hands wrapped around a stranger's hips and her nipple chain swinging and the expression of a woman for whom none of the three years of his careful attention had left a single mark.
"Let me empty it," he said. The words came out broken and honest and somewhat terrible. He looked at her. "I just need — let me—"
She looked at him for a long moment.
His face. The torn lip. The red eyes. The sword still at his hip that he'd never drawn and couldn't draw because the man it was meant for would have disintegrated him with a wave.
She looked at his cock. Back at his face.
She reached up and began unpinning her hair.
He watched her. Something in his chest that had been clenched so hard for the past ten minutes loosened fractionally — not healed, not resolved, just loosened, the way a fist loosens when something gives it something to hold.
"Young Master," she said, quietly, as her hair came down around her shoulders in a plain, unpretentious fall, "if you're going to be rough — which I think you're going to be —" She met his eyes. "— at least look at me while you do it. Not at whatever you were looking at out there."
His throat worked.
"I'll try," he said.
She pulled her service dress off her shoulder.
He was not gentle. He had not promised gentle, and she had not asked for it — she had asked for his eyes, and she got those. His hands found her wide hips with a grip that was too tight, desperate, the grip of a man holding onto something real in a world that had just revealed itself to be considerably larger and more overwhelming than his three years of careful cultivation had prepared him for.
She made a sound when he pushed in — a sharp, genuine sound that had nothing performed in it.
He made a sound too. Lower. Helpless.
His forehead dropped to her shoulder. His hips moved.
Outside the storage room, the corridor was empty. The residential wing was several turns away, its sounds absorbed by the ship's thick walls. The Silver Phoenix moved through morning clouds at six thousand feet, carrying forty-three cultivators eastward toward a competition zone that three of them had already been claimed by and the remaining forty had no idea about yet.
Wei Liang moved against the maid in the supply cot and stared at her face the way she'd asked him to.
She stared back.
She was real. She was here. She had a face and a name he didn't know yet and a body that pressed warm and present against him and eyes that were watching him with the complete attention of someone who had decided to be where she was.
He buried his face in her neck and exhaled for the first time since the porthole window.
Phack. Phack.
His. Quieter. Human-paced. Without the crushing certainty of a man who has never needed to try.
Just a young cultivator in a supply room, emptying something he didn't know how to carry.
The maid's hand came up and pressed against the back of his neck.
"Mmhh... Yeah... Ahnn...."
He didn't pull away.
"Shit shit... Why I feel—!?!"
Wei Liang's eyes went wide.
Not from pleasure. Not from any sensation that had a clean name.
Something was 'pulling.'
Not his body — his 'qi.' The cultivated energy in his meridians, the carefully compressed reserves he'd built over seven years of morning training and evening meditation, the thing that made him a cultivator rather than an ordinary man — it was moving. Against his will. Against the direction of anything he was doing.
Flowing outward.
Through his skin. Into her.
"What—" He tried to pull back. His hips moved but the rest of him didn't. His hands on her wide hips found purchase and found nothing at the same time — like grabbing a current. "What is happening — what is this—"
The woman beneath him smiled.
It was not the smile she'd been wearing. That smile had been warm and functional and slightly resigned — the expression of a woman who had agreed to something and was managing it. This smile was different in the way that a blade is different from the thing it was hidden in.
"Don't move," she said. Her voice was different too — smoother, lower, carrying a resonance that hadn't been there thirty seconds ago. Her legs, which had been lying flat, came up and locked around his hips with a strength that had nothing to do with a cleaning woman's body.
He screamed.
The sound that came out of Wei Liang was not a cultivator's battle cry. It was the sound of a person realizing, in real time, that the situation they are in is categorically not survivable — the raw, stripped sound of someone whose body understands something their mind is still catching up to.
"LET GO — WHAT ARE YOU — STOP — MY QI IS—"
"Shhh," she said. Her eyes had changed. The irises had shifted — dark rings expanding, the pupils elongating, something behind them that was not a human expression looking out through a human face.
Her fingers came up and pressed against his chest.
He felt them like brands. "Young men in their worst state," she said, almost conversationally, "are the easiest meals. All that emotion. All that energy with nowhere to go." Her head tilted. "You practically served yourself."
