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Xia Ruoya was, she thought, settling in quite nicely to her new life.
As the precious only daughter of a well-off demon family from the far south, she had grown up expecting to spend her whole life in her natal home. Her chosen husband would marry in, they would have as many daughters as she could spit out, and she would die happily surrounded by her many descendants. It was decidedly very human for her to move away from home, but you couldn’t just say no to the Emperor. Besides, who would want to?
Their first meeting had been an accident: His Highness had come south for one of his imperial tours, and, somewhere along the ceremonial qilin hunt, he had stumbled, in turn, upon Xia Ruoya and a nest of Lover’s Delight Bats that had brought them both under their thrall.
Frankly, Xia Ruoya had been expecting Luo Binghe to enjoy their coincidental tumble and move along. Much to her surprise, he made an honest woman of her instead. In a matter of days, she had appointed her favorite of her brothers’ wives as the new matriarch of her family, packed up, and moved north to join the emperor’s harem.
Xia Ruoya flattered herself to think that she had a good head on her shoulders, and so she adapted quickly to palace life. She learned who the favorites were: quiet Liu Mingyan; Ning Yingying, the Emperor’s childhood best friend; Qin Wanyue with the big boobs; Sha Hualing, who was one of Xia Ruoya’s own distant cousins. No accounting for taste there. She made friends: a pair of demon twins who liked to braid the tiny snakes that served as Xia Ruoya’s hair; Lü An, a former silkworm broker; Zhizhi, an immortal from the far west.
Even Xia Ruoya, who had spent her entire life surrounded by her lineage’s matrilines, had never seen so many women in one place. Surprisingly, there was very little in terms of court intrigue. Luo Binghe was generous with his affections, generous with his court appointments, and generous with his seed; his immortality made the standard succession dramas rather pointless. The palace was like a small village inhabited only by women and babies, with the occasional intrusion by one man in particular.
Well. Two men, actually. That was the one point of tension in Xia Ruoya’s new life.
She had briefly met Mobei-jun on the same hunt in which she had met Luo Binghe. Her impression had remained the same since: she found him annoyingly impassive, frustratingly northern, and very, very… present.
She raised her concern with Lü An one evening. Lü An was quickly becoming Xia Ruoya’s best friend in the palace, and her occasional bedmate as well. Xia Ruoya poured her a cup of wine, and then asked, a bit hesitantly, “I have one question about our husband.”
“Shoot.”
“Let me preface this by saying that I’m not shy or embarrassed about this. I’m a demon. We’re a little less… squeamish about sex than you humans are.” Lü An nodded, not denying anything. “But is Mobei-jun always… there?”
“I was wondering when you were going to ask about this,” Lü An said. Xia Ruoya waited for the answer, with which Lü An did not seem to be particularly forthcoming. “Yes,” Lü An finally said. “As long as you and Luo Binghe are in the palace, he is always there. And most of the time when you aren’t. He can do that whole shadow-walking thing, you know, so he can show up at any time.”
“Doesn’t it seem strange? Luo Binghe seems to be very… jealous, otherwise.”
“It is strange,” Lü An agreed. “But we’ve all just learned to deal with it.”
Xia Ruoya tried to press her for further information, but that was all that Lü An seemed to know. She asked around, and this seemed to be a common experience: marrying Luo Binghe introduced you to a harem of a hundred other women, and one man.
Call her old-fashioned, but Xia Ruoya thought that your husband should make it clear that there will be an omnipresent third every time you have sex before you’re married. She’d had sex under voyeuristic circumstances like these ones, of course–who hasn’t?–but it was one thing for it to be an accident, and one thing for it to be a condition of any intercourse at all. And Luo Binghe had a lot of that.
She tried bringing it up a few times, but it was hard to stay on topic mid-coital action, considering. It was kind of ridiculous how big Luo Binghe’s dick was. She could practically feel her thoughts being pushed out of her brain every time he thrust into her. It didn’t really seem that important anyway, while they were actually having sex, unless Luo Binghe was distracted by Mobei-jun’s presence—which had happened. When she asked the other wives about it, she learned that this was not an uncommon experience, either.
She finally managed to say something while she and her husband were indisposed in some hallway, Luo Binghe holding her up against the wall and fucking her quite vigorously. It was a little easier to ask a personal question like this, when they were pressed so close together, and she wasn’t in danger of accidentally making eye contact with Mobei-jun. Hopefully.
“Husband,” she managed, between toe-curlingly deep thrusts, “do you think we could do this with… privacy, some time?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, smiling his winning smile at her. She immediately smiled back.
Come on, Ruoya, she cursed herself. Have a backbone. Don’t immediately fall for a cute boy’s tricks! Especially when that boy is in his thirties and has killed millions.
“Well…” she hedged. “Does Mobei-jun always have to be here?”
His handsome smile immediately fell into a frown. “Is my wife truly so squeamish?”
“I’m not, I’m not,” Xia Ruoya soothed. “It just seems strange that he’s… always here.”
Luo Binghe looked away from her to ask his next question: to Xia Ruoya’s left, where Mobei-jun stood. “Isn’t that the place for a loyal retainer? Always at his lord’s side?”
If Mobei-jun responded to this in any way, Xia Ruoya wasn’t aware of it. A moment later, Luo Binghe leaned down to kiss her throat, almost in apology.
“He’s only here to protect us, my love,” he murmured. “Pay him no mind.”
With that, he held her higher against the wall, and the slight change in angle knocked any other thoughts from her head. Her head fell back against the wall as she whimpered with every thrust.
Fine! she acquiesced mentally. Keep playing your weird psychosexual games. If you can keep hitting my g-spot like that, I don’t really care. There were far more interesting things about living in the palace than some unresolved sexual tension between her husband and his lieutenant, anyway.