Crimson Fetters

The Forbidden Shirt

Yang Bei's Bedchamber, Yang Family Main Estate | 21:40 PM.

Yang Bei had changed into dark silk pyjama trousers and a loosely belted robe that fell open across his chest, and had retreated to the long sofa with his work, putting deliberate distance between himself and the rest of the room. The blue light of his screen sharpened the lines of his face until he looked carved from something cold and permanent.

Qingli lay across the wide bed luxurious, impersonal with her earphones in, scrolling through an online clothing store and working her way steadily through a selection of modest, conservative pieces she intended to wear without comment and without incident. A full ten items into her basket before she noticed that the delivery address on her account was still the Zheng estate. A place she would not be returning to.

She looked at the broad back on the sofa for a moment. Then she climbed off the bed and walked over.

"What you at for." He didn't look up.

"I've ordered some new clothes. I'm not asking you to pay but I need the delivery address changed to your estate. I can't access the security settings for the system here." She held out her phone with a hand she kept admirably steady.

He exhaled through his nose. "You find a way to bother me at every possible hour, brazen whore."

He took the phone and moved his thumb across the screen in a rapid sequence but rather than simply updating the address, he navigated to the payment screen and settled the entire basket without glancing at the total, then threw the phone back to her without ceremony.

"Remember Da-ge's son arrives tomorrow. He's about your age. You will conduct yourself appropriately, and you will not go anywhere near him. If you do" He let the pause do its work. "I will make you understand exactly how slow and how exquisite dying alive can be."

Qingli looked down at her phone. The payment confirmation showed an amount considerably larger than her ten items could account for he had purchased everything in her saved basket as well, every item she'd set aside. She pressed her lips together. Her eyes shifted involuntarily at the mention of Da-ge's son, something moving through them that she could not entirely suppress.

She turned and went back to bed. Curled herself beneath the sheets in the dark and lay still, waiting for whatever was coming.

*** ***

06:50 AM.

Morning light came in gold through the expensive curtains. Yang Bei had been awake for the better part of thirty minutes before Qingli, attending to his own routine before the household stirred and had since been subjected to a level of domestic turbulence he would not have considered possible in thirty-eight years of living.

Qingli, awake and visibly tense since the moment she'd opened her eyes, was holding up the dark qipao his men had procured for her against the light with an expression of acute apprehension.

Yang Bei, draped across the long sofa with his arms folded, watched her with the particular attention of someone looking for an excuse. "What is wrong with the dress now, brazen w***e? Or are you planning to wander around in my shirt to show off for my nephew?"

She didn't answer. Instead she crossed to him, held the qipao against her body, and looked at him plainly. "Do you actually think I'm going to fit into an XS?"

Yang Bei's gaze moved slowly between the dress and what the white shirt she was currently wearing was doing at the front of it. He cursed under his breath with considerable feeling. "How is that even how large are they?"

He pushed himself up from the sofa, crossed to the wardrobe, and reached into the back corner for something he handled differently from everything else a narrow wooden box, old and well-kept. He opened it with a care that was out of place on his hands. Inside, folded in silk, was a qipao in deep midnight blue his late mother's, the fabric fine and close-woven. He lifted it out.

"This is what I have. I've never touched your body so I don't know your measurements." He thrust the qipao toward her, his voice reverting immediately to its natural register. "Try the blue one."

Qingli took it from him with both hands, carefully. Her face had gone warm in a way she hadn't anticipated and couldn't prevent, processing what he'd just said with the specific bluntness he'd said it in.

"You dirty old man," she said, and fled into the bathroom.

Yang Bei's hand stopped mid-air.

"Qingli. Who are you calling old?" The roar that followed rattled the door in its frame. He crossed the room in four strides and hit the bathroom door with his fist hard enough to make the walls remember it.

"I am thirty-eight! That is thirteen years older than you, not ancient! Get out here and let me educate you!" He stood fuming in the corridor of his own patience with nowhere to take it, still snarling at the closed door. "And when I pin you down and make you regret every word that came out of your mouth don't you dare lie there crying and begging this old man to stop!"

He turned on his heel, seized his jacket, and began pulling it on with the energy of a man conducting a controlled detonation of his own composure.

Outside… in the corridor, the two men on guard duty exchanged a look of quiet, reverent disbelief.

"You think if these walls weren't soundproofed, the whole house would be awake by now?" the first one murmured.

"Don't even joke." The second one kept his voice barely above a breath, deeply aware that two of their colleagues had come within a word of losing their heads last night for less. "The man is coming apart because of one woman. One…small woman."

*** ***

07:00 AM.

Qingli emerged from the bathroom in the deep blue qipao.

It was cut for a woman of different proportions loose through the waist and hips, the fabric hanging in soft folds around her slight frame. But at the chest, the silk had found its limits, pressing close and tracing the curve of her with an emphasis entirely at odds with the garment's original decorum.

She crossed to where Yang Bei stood at the window, arms folded, staring out through the gap in the curtain.

"I need to borrow a belt," she said carefully. "It's too loose."

He turned. He took one look at the situation and pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers, closing his eyes briefly.

"Why am I married to a woman who creates this many problems?" He wrenched a drawer open, pulled out a leather belt of considerable quality, and threw it at her.

"Ow!" She flinched back, one hand flying to her forehead, where the metal buckle had connected. Her eyes welled immediately the sharp, involuntary kind of tears that come from sudden pain before the mind catches up. She pressed her palm over the spot.

"Why didn't you catch it, you foolish woman!" Yang Bei snapped but something shifted in his expression for a fraction of a second when he saw the red mark blooming on that pale skin. He looked away. "Standing there letting it hit you what were you thinking!"

Qingli looked down at the belt lying on the floor. She picked it up and wound it around her waist, threading it through the side seams to give the qipao some shape then encountered the unavoidable fact that a belt built for Yang Bei's frame left a considerable length of extra leather with nowhere sensible to go. She looked up at him with an expression balanced exactly between hope and the knowledge that expressing hope was inadvisable.

"Qingli. One more problem just one more and I will open that window and throw you out of it myself."

She flinched, dropped her gaze, and began feeding the excess leather into the nearest seam with trembling hands, tucking and folding until it was at least not visibly absurd.

"Done," she said quietly.

Yang Bei looked her over from head to foot. He pressed his fingers hard against his temple a headache that had been building since before dawn, no doubt assisted by everything that had happened since. The woman standing in front of him, wearing his dead mother's dress with a man's belt improvised around her waist and a red mark rising on her forehead, was single-handedly making him reconsider every decision that had led to this moment.

"Come."

He said it flatly, and turned toward the door without looking at her face specifically without looking at the bruise his impatience had put there. He walked out ahead of her, down to face the tigers waiting below.