Crimson Fetters

The Problem with Her Chest

Yang Bei Bedchamber, Yang Family Main Estate

The Bedchamber Balcony

He stepped out onto the broad balcony to cool himself down, one hand lifting his phone to dial the number of the man he had quietly identified as the root cause of his new bride's troublesome disposition.

When the line connected, Yang Bei spoke immediately, his voice soft and perfectly controlled and threaded through with something cold enough to drop the temperature of the night air around him.

"Who exactly taught your daughter to dress the way she does, Mr Zheng? And to use her body to provoke every man she comes across?"

The voice on the other end stumbled at once, tripping over itself in its urgency to deflect. Zheng Yuan's tone was damp with anxiety. ( "It it wasn't me, Yang Bei! Qingli started dressing like that at university, I assumed she was following friends friends I've since removed from her life, I assure you I tried to stop her, but that girl never listens to anyone! She's headstrong and she likes the attention, that's all, that's simply who she is" )

Instantly and entirely, pinning every fragment of blame onto the daughter he had just condemned with his own hands.

"Good." Yang Bei ended the call with a quiet, contemptuous click. He allowed himself a small, thin smile.

"What a family. What a deeply, pitifully loving family." He closed his hand into a fist until his knuckles cracked.

He stared out into the darkness beyond the balcony, and the feeling moving through him was difficult to name. Contempt. Revulsion. And beneath both of those, something that was almost hunger a craving to reduce the woman named Qingli to nothing beneath his hands.

If even her own father cannot find it in himself to love her... then what possible reason do I have to show her mercy?

A cold smile spread across his face, masking the stranger thing forming underneath it quiet and unannounced. The feeling that this woman belonged to no one. And that he was the only person alive with any claim to destroy her, or to own her absolutely.

*** ***

Yang Bei's Bedchamber, Yang Family Main Estate

At the same time, within the room...

Steam filled the bathroom in slow, soft billows. Qingli stood beneath the rainfall shower and let the water come down over her, warm and relentless and let it carry what she could no longer hold back. Tears slipped free and were lost immediately in the cascade, indistinguishable from the rest. The guilt. The regret. The knowledge that she had, in the end, done exactly what her cold-blooded father had required of her and that there was no road back from it now. She was the wife of Yang Bei. A man so dangerous that her own father had offered her up as a sacrifice simply to hold a fraction of his power at arm's length.

When she had washed the evidence of weakness from her face, Qingli attempted to pull herself into the nightdress Yang Bei had provided. She emerged from the bathroom looking like a woman being slowly compressed her face drained, the satin fabric gripping the fullness of her chest with such unforgiving precision that the skin beneath had gone red where the seams bit in.

"This is unbearable," she muttered, pulling at the fabric with both hands, trying to find some increment of relief that simply wasn't there.

Yang Bei walked back into the room and stopped dead, as though he had walked into a wall.

His gaze went directly to what the nightdress was failing catastrophically to contain. He raised a hand and pressed it to his temple, jaw tight, fighting an irritation thoroughly contaminated by something else entirely.

"Your chest is take that off. Wear one of my shirts instead." He crossed to the wardrobe, wrenched a large white dress shirt from its hanger, and threw it at her face with enough force that it settled over her head entirely, blocking out the room.

"My own wife in an oversized shirt because of your chest. You are a genuine nuisance."

"If you'd done this from the start, we'd have avoided all of this," Qingli muttered, pulling the shirt off her head and gathering it into her arms.

"Shut your mouth, brazen w***e!"

She was already moving darting back into the bathroom before the storm could reach her.

Yang Bei stood alone in the centre of the room and drew a long, slow breath. The faint warmth of her soap still hung in the air, clean and faintly sweet, and it was doing absolutely nothing to help him recover the composure he was trying to reassemble. He pressed two fingers hard against the bridge of his nose and held them there.

*** ***

Outside corridor | 20:43 PM.

Two of the men were huddled in the corridor, voices barely above a breath, conducting a post-mortem on the state of their employer's sanity with the focused energy of people who had nothing more pressing to risk their lives over.

"I've heard him shout that many times today already. You think the new mistress is going to make it to morning?" the first one whispered, with the expression of a man watching a building burn from a safe distance.

"You didn't see his eyes in the study last night. If you had, you wouldn't be asking." The second one shuddered at the memory.

"What happened? Tell me."

"Those idiots the ones who always got their turn with his previous women one of them had the nerve to send Pan An to ask whether they could have a go at this one." A pause for effect.

"I genuinely thought he was going to kill Pan An where he stood. His eyes 'My bride... and you want to pin her down, do you?' the voice on him, like something crawling up from underground. Then he turned and looked straight at me and said, 'You think so too, don't you.' I nearly wet myself on the spot."

CRACK.

The door flew open.

Yang Bei filled the frame vast, still, radiating something so cold and concentrated it altered the quality of the air in the corridor. His gaze settled on the two men with the patience of something that has already decided what it is going to do.

"Quite comfortable out here, are you. Gossiping outside my door." His voice was barely above a murmur. That made it worse.

Both men broke into an immediate cold sweat, knees threatening to give but before Yang Bei could proceed to whatever came next, a voice drifted out from inside the room.

"Darling I can't get the tag off the shirt. Could you help?"

The two men stared at each other with the wide, arrested expressions of people witnessing something unprecedented.

Someone just asked the boss to help them with a clothing tag.

BANG.

Yang Bei slammed the door in their faces and turned back into the room.

"You" He was already walking toward her, the insult arriving ahead of him.

"Brazen w***e. You've got some nerve, ordering me around." But his feet carried him forward without hesitation, and he reached out and seized the tag at the back of her collar and tore it free with one sharp pull hard enough that the fabric gave a warning sound beneath the force of it.

He stood there for a moment afterward, jaw locked, genuinely unable to account for what had just happened. He, Yang Bei, had just walked across a room in response to a woman's request. He, who had once had a man removed from his presence simply for making prolonged eye contact.

He had no explanation. He did not attempt to find one.