Footsteps sounded in the corridor.
The laughter died in his throat.
The footsteps were soft and measured, unhurried. They were light enough to be a woman's, and they whispered over polished wood with the faint rustle of silk following each one. They were coming closer.
Shit.
Yan Chi threw himself flat on the mattress, yanked the silk covers up to his chest and tried to arrange his face into something that might pass for a sickly young master waking from a long sleep. The glowing panels stayed hovering in front of him. He blinked hard and they didn't vanish. He glanced around wildly, but they followed his gaze, faint and patient. Can anyone else see this? The memories offered nothing. No cultivator Yan Chi had ever known had talked about floating windows of light.
There was a light knock, then the whisper of the door sliding open on its runners.
Yan Mei stepped into the room.
For a moment Yan Chi forgot how to breathe.
The memories had prepared him for a mother: cool hands on a fevered forehead, a gentle voice humming through the dark when thunder rolled over the mountains, the smell of jasmine on a sleeve that wiped his tears. They hadn't prepared Yan Fan's eyes for the woman herself, standing in the lamplight with one hand still resting on the door frame and her head tilted a little toward the bed, as if she were afraid of what she might find there.
She wore red.
It was a deep crimson robe, the color of fresh blood and ripe pomegranate, dyed so richly that the lamplight seemed to sink into the silk and come back out as warmth spilling across her skin. The fabric was thinner than anything a woman in his old world would have worn outside a bedroom, so fine that it moved like poured water when she breathed, and it clung to her. There was no other word for it. It clung to a full, mature figure as if the cloth had fallen in love with her body and refused to let go of a single curve, sliding over her shoulders, cinching at a waist that a loose sash barely held, and flaring out again over hips wide enough to make the sash look like an afterthought. Where the silk stretched tightest across her belly he could see the faint shadow of her navel through it.
His eyes went to her breasts first, and they stayed there.
They were big, heavy and ripe, a grown woman's breasts that had never needed a bindcloth to look magnificent, and they filled the front of the robe so completely that the crimson silk strained across them in two taut curves, the weave pulled so thin at the peaks that the lamplight glowed through it. When she took her first step into the room, they moved. It wasn't a girl's quick bounce. It was a slow, heavy, rolling sway, the full weight of each breast lifting and settling inside the silk a heartbeat behind the rest of her, as if they kept their own unhurried time, and he swore he could hear it, a faint whisper of silk dragged over skin.
The front of the robe opened in a deep V that plunged nearly to the sash. Between the inner slopes of her breasts lay a long shadowed valley of pale skin, so deep that the lamplight gave up halfway down, and the eye fell into it the way a stone falls into a well. The swell of each breast pressed against the edges of the opening, round and creamy and faintly flushed from the warmth of the corridor, rising and falling with her breath so that the neckline seemed to breathe with her, widening and narrowing and widening again.
Her nipples showed through the silk.
Two stiff points pressed against the thin crimson, as clear as fingertips pushed into wet paper, whether from the cool air of the corridors or something else entirely. Around each of them the silk puckered into a faint ring where the broader circle of her areola lifted the cloth, a shade darker than the red around it. When she turned to slide the door shut behind her, the robe tightened across her chest and the two little peaks dragged against the fabric, and he could track them across the room as easily as two lamps in the dark, standing out against the red as if they wanted to be found.
The hem flowed down to her ankles, but the sides had been cut high. The slits started at the floor and climbed, and kept climbing, past her knees and up the long outer line of her thighs, almost to the bones of her hips. As she crossed the room the silk parted and closed with each stride and gave him flashes of bare leg: smooth white thighs, full and rounded, the thighs of a woman who had never had to harden her body into a soldier's lean edges. On the third step the slit swung wide enough that he glimpsed the pale inner curve of her thigh, high up near the crease, where the skin looked warmest and most hidden, along with a faint pink line where a fold of silk had pressed into her flesh while she sat somewhere. Then the cloth fell closed again, and the glimpse burned behind his eyes like a lamp flame after it has been blown out.
Long black hair spilled loose down her back, glossy as wet ink, held only by a single jade pin above one ear. Her face was a gentle oval with full lips painted the same red as the robe, a delicate nose and large dark eyes under elegant brows, a beauty so calm and warm that the room seemed brighter around it. She didn't look old enough to have a nineteen-year-old son. She didn't look old enough to have a daughter older than that, a disciple of the main sect. If someone had told Yan Fan she was some peerless dual-cultivation master in her thirties, a woman who kept her youth with secret arts and rare pills, he'd have believed them without a second's hesitation.
Maturity clung to her like perfume. It lived in the line of her waist and the lazy roll of her hips, in the faint crease where her arm pressed against the side of her breast, in the way her body neither hid nor apologized for a single inch of itself.
Fuck.
Yan Fan's voice whispered it inside the borrowed skull, raw and helpless.
That's my mother now.
And I want to stare at her tits until my eyes burn.
Guilt flickered somewhere in him, Yan Chi's guilt, a child's reflex. It was shouted down almost at once by a dead man who had spent his whole life looking at women through glass and had never, not once, been close enough to smell one.
She crossed to the bed and sat on its edge beside him.
The mattress dipped under her weight and tilted him a fraction toward her. Her hip settled a few inches from his own, the red silk pulled tight across the curve of it, and the side slit fell open over her thigh and simply stayed open, a long pale wedge of bare leg resting on his covers, close enough that he could have laid his hand on it without stretching. He could see the fine down on her skin catch the lamplight and the faint blue thread of a vein running down toward her knee.
Her scent reached him before her voice did. Jasmine came first, warm and sweet, then a darker undertone like honey left out in the sun, layered over the clean smell of skin and the scented oil that noblewomen in this world rubbed into their throats and wrists and the hollows behind their knees. Beneath all of it, so faint he wasn't sure he hadn't imagined it, there was something warmer and saltier, the private smell of a woman's body after a long walk through heated corridors in silk. It wasn't a mother's smell when he breathed it in from this close. It was a woman's.
"Chi'er."
Her voice was low and a little husky, threaded with worry. She reached out and laid the backs of her fingers against his forehead, then turned her hand and cupped his cheek, checking for fever. Her fingers were cool and smooth, and when she leaned in to do it the robe gaped and the valley between her breasts opened in front of his face like a door.
"How do you feel? Does your body still hurt?"
He swallowed. From here he could see the faint blue trace of a vein beneath the pale slope of one breast, a tiny beauty mark sitting just above the edge of the silk on the left, and the gleam of oil in the deep crease where the two curves pressed together. His eyes wanted to fall in and stay there. He forced them up to her face.
"I'm okay, Mother." The word felt strange in his mouth and also completely natural, as if Yan Chi's tongue had said it ten thousand times and simply carried on. "Really. I feel… better. Better than I have in a long time."
She searched his face. Her dark eyes moved over him slowly, looking for the lie. Yan Chi had lied to her before, he remembered, pretending a beating had been a fall and pretending a poisoning was something he'd eaten. Whatever she found this time seemed to satisfy her. Her shoulders loosened, and a breath went out of her that sounded like it had been held for days.
"Heaven be thanked," she murmured. "You slept so long. The physicians said…" She stopped and pressed her painted lips together. "It doesn't matter what they said."
Then she leaned in and pulled him into her arms.
His face sank into her breasts.
It happened all at once, without warning, and the world narrowed to silk and warmth and the sweet heavy smell of her. Her arms closed around his shoulders and drew him up off the pillow, and his face went forward into the front of her robe and kept going, because there was nothing firm there to stop it, only flesh that gave and gave and closed around him.
Her breasts swallowed his face on both sides. They were so full and so yielding that they seemed to have no bottom, molding themselves around his cheeks and nose and jaw as she pulled him closer, the weight of each one settling against him like warm water poured into a mould. Deeper in, where her breasts met her ribs, he felt a springy resistance under all that give, and then she tightened her arms and even that pressed flat around him.
The red silk was thin as breath. Through it he felt everything: the heat of her skin coming through the cloth in a steady wave, the faint dampness gathered in the crease beneath her breasts, the tiny ridge where the edge of the neckline crossed his cheek and gave way to bare flesh. Half his face was pressed to silk and half to naked skin, and the difference between the two was so sharp that his whole awareness split along that line.
When she shifted her hold to cradle the back of his head, the movement dragged one stiff nipple across his cheekbone.
It was a small hard point under the silk, rough against his skin, there and gone. Then she rocked him slightly, the way a mother rocks a frightened child, and it came back, scraping slowly across the top of his cheek toward his temple, and this time he felt the whole raised circle of her areola under the fabric, faintly pebbled, before her breast rolled with the motion and the nipple slid away again.
He nearly made a sound. He caught it in his throat just in time and held it there with his jaw locked.
She pulled him deeper. His nose slid down into the valley between her breasts, into warm, faintly damp skin where her scent was strongest, and the full walls of her closed over the sides of his face until he could see nothing but a sliver of red silk and pale flesh. He breathed in without meaning to and got everything at once, jasmine and honey and warm salt, the oil on her skin and the clean sweat beneath it, so thick it coated the back of his throat. The press of her cleavage muffled sound and thought until the whole room shrank to the narrow hot space between her breasts.
Her heartbeat thudded against his ear through all that flesh, slow and strong, each beat sending the faintest ripple through the breast against his cheek. He could feel her breathing too: the slow lift that pushed her breasts harder into his face, the long release that let them settle and spread against him, every lift sealing him in a little tighter until he was breathing her air, borrowed and warm, out of a space she had made for him.
Under the covers, his cock twitched.
It wasn't a full erection, just a single hard throb, a pulse of heat that shot down through his groin as startling as a slap. For a year this body had felt nothing below the waist but the dull memory of an old kick. Now it jerked against the silk of his trousers, heavy and sudden, as if it had just woken up and remembered what it was for.
Oh.
Oh, fuck.
Yan Chi went rigid.
Yan Mei, mistaking the tension for something else, only held him tighter and stroked the back of his head with slow fingers that combed through his tangled hair from crown to nape. She did it the way she must have done when he was small and frightened of thunder, completely unaware that the son in her arms was cataloguing every inch of her breasts like a starving man counting grains of rice. Her other hand rubbed slow circles between his shoulder blades, and each circle drew him a fraction deeper into her chest.
"I'm sorry," she whispered into his hair. "Mother couldn't protect you. I should have been there. I should have seen it coming, I should have—"
Her voice broke on the last word. He felt the hitch of her breath against his face, felt her breasts lift and shudder and fall with it, and a warm drop landed on the crown of his head and soaked slowly into his hair.
He said nothing. He couldn't have spoken if he'd tried. He lay in the circle of her arms with his face buried in his mother's chest, Yan Fan's perverted soul drinking in every second of it while Yan Chi's face stayed politely, achingly still.
If he turned his head even a fraction, his lips would brush the inner curve of her breast where the silk ended and bare skin began. He knew exactly where that line was. He could feel it against the corner of his mouth, the faint seam of the neckline and then the warm, slightly damp skin past it, so close that his own breath bounced back off her and warmed his lips. One small turn and he could open his mouth against her and taste the salt in that crease, and lost in her tears she might not even notice.
He didn't turn his head.
He wanted to. He wanted to so badly that his jaw ached with holding still and his fingers curled into the covers to keep them from rising to her waist. Beneath the sheet his cock throbbed again, harder this time, and he pressed his thighs together and prayed she wouldn't shift her hip any closer.
I could die again right now. Right here. And it would be a better death than the last one.
At last she drew back. Her breasts slid away from his face with a faint drag of silk and skin, the cool air of the room rushing in to take their place, and he felt the loss of her heat like a door shutting. Her hands stayed on his shoulders a moment longer. Her eyes were bright and wet at the corners, and a thin track of tears had cut through the faint powder on one cheek. She smiled at him, a small, tired, relieved smile, and brushed a strand of hair off his forehead with her thumb.
The embrace had dragged the front of her robe askew. The neckline had slid sideways over her left breast and bared a wider crescent of pale flesh, and the silk over the nipple had been pressed flat and damp by his face, so that for one long heartbeat he could see the darker pink of her areola shadowed through the wet cloth, its edges plain, the nipple standing hard at its center. She didn't seem to notice. A moment later she reached up and tugged the silk straight with two fingers, absently, the way she might have straightened a cushion.
"Rest well," she said. "Don't push yourself. The servants are just outside if you need anything. Call for me, and I'll come."
"Yes, Mother."
She rose, and the mattress lifted. She smoothed the red silk down over her hips with both palms, a small absent gesture that pulled the fabric tight across her whole body for a heartbeat, over the gentle swell of her belly and the curve of her hips and the deep shadow where the cloth sank between her thighs, before it loosened again. Then she turned toward the door.
Yan Chi's eyes dropped to her ass before he could stop them.
The red silk clung to it. Her ass was round, full and heavy, two lush cheeks that filled the back of the robe so completely the fabric had no slack left, and they moved with each step in a slow, hypnotic roll. The thin silk pulled taut over one cheek as it rose and went slack over the other as it fell, then reversed, left and then right, a rhythm so steady that his breathing fell into it without asking his permission.
The silk had settled into the cleft between her cheeks while she sat on the bed, and it stayed there as she walked, sinking a little deeper with every step until it hugged the inner curve of each cheek. It stuck to the shape of her so closely that she might as well have been painted red. He could trace each cheek with his eyes alone, the place where it rounded underneath into the top of her thigh, the faint crease at the bottom that winked in and out of the silk as her legs moved. He could almost feel their heat across the distance.
The back of the robe was open.
He hadn't seen it when she came in. The silk fell from her shoulders in two panels that parted down the middle and left her back bare from the nape of her neck almost to the swell of her ass. It was a long pale expanse of skin, flawless, unmarked by scar or blemish, so smooth it looked poured rather than grown. Her black hair floated over it as she walked, swaying across her shoulder blades and parting to show the elegant groove of her spine running down and down to the small of her back. Just above the place where the silk closed again, two small dimples sat on either side of her spine like thumbprints pressed into warm wax, framing the very top of the shadow where the cleft of her ass began.
Through the side slits her thighs flashed white with every step. Each time the left slit swung open he caught the outer swell of her hip, bare under the silk's edge, and once, when she paused and reached for the door, the slit gaped wide enough to show the lower curve of her bare cheek where it met her thigh, round and pale and creased, before the silk swung back over it.
He stared. He couldn't stop staring.
Look at that ass. Look at those thighs.
A half-formed thought surfaced from Yan Chi's memories. In the demonic territories, women dressed like this. Female cultivators of the demonic sects wore their robes cut high and open and thin. They advertised their bodies the way righteous sects advertised their swords, because here desire wasn't a sin to be hidden but a force to be cultivated. Dual cultivation was an art, lust was a weapon and beauty was a kind of power. The demonic sects' reputation for depravity wasn't a slander the righteous world had invented. It was practically a dress code.
Then the thought drowned under the simple animal hunger of watching his mother's ass sway out of the room.
The door slid shut behind her with a quiet click.