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Where the spring and summer festivals lent themselves to celebrations in the early day and at high noon, the festivals of autumn were always more subdued—held in that hush between dusk and nightfall, when the air turned cool enough to cradle secrets.
This year’s autumnal dusk feast lent itself to the kind of hush that had permitted the Emperor’s brother to avoid even the charade of his public mask and given the eunuch Jinshi leeway to retreat into deeper shadows for intelligence.
Gaoshun, as expected, had been invited to attend—not as himself, but as a silent emissary of House Ma. A pair of eyes behind the eyes of Jinshi. But there was a second purpose too, unsaid and understood: he was there for her.
The Emperor had not given a reason when he mandated Maomao as his consort, only the decree. No one, not even Jinshi, had questioned it. And Gaoshun had not resisted. But neither had he touched her. She remained Maomao—acerbic, brilliant, impossible. A thorny herb tucked in his sleeve. A name he said too carefully. A wife in title only.
The scent of roasted chestnuts and warm plum wine drifted through the airy pavilion, a gauze of sweetness over laughter and ritual. Overhead, paper lanterns swayed, casting the evening in honeyed amber. Gaoshun stood in the crowd of Civic and Military Officiates, stiff as ever, gaze trained on the dais.
Four taste-testers sat poised on woven mats.
Three were solemnly performing.
One was positively vibrating in her seat.
Maomao.
She was perfectly poised on her designated tatami mat, hands clasped around a small silver shale with an intrigued glint in her deep blue eyes. She looked prim in her festival robes—red-pink and moss green, the colors of Lady Gyokuyou’s court—though the set of her mouth was anything but formal. Her lips, lacquered with carmine, were already curled in something that might’ve been a smirk.
Her cheeks, already powdered with blush, gained in excited color that travelled from her face, to her neck. She raised the chalice to her nose, to her lips and she closed her eyes just briefly, as she tasted.
The moan of pleasure as she sipped carried across the pavilion, thick like incense smoke.
Her swallow was downright sinful.
She was enjoying herself far too much.
He exhaled deeply into the wave of excited bureaucrats around him, sighing and swallowing in reflex, and entirely unprepared to face the menace of an excited Maomao.
He had seen her handle poison before. But never like this.
Her cheeks glowed. Her shoulders loosened. Her eyes, when they opened again, glassed over with a sheen best reserved for private quarters, and in the intimate, amber sheen of the lanterns, her lips rolled temptingly as she tried to catch the last drop of her dish. The tip of her tongue eked past her lips, absorbing what she’d missed. In the aftermath of the chalice, Maomao looked positively indecent.
She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin, a flush still glowing under her painted blush. “That’s poison,” she sighed, utterly delighted and excused herself unhurriedly from the dais. With the poisoned bottle.
He followed her.
Of course he would.
It was duty, he told himself.
Duty, and the fact that she was his appointed wife. That the Emperor had placed her in his keeping, and Gaoshun was nothing if not a man who kept what was his. And kept it well.
Never mind that she made no demands of him. Never mind that she still referred to him as “Gaoshun-dono” with that maddeningly neutral tone that itched at his self-control like a healing scab starting to flake.
He found her in the quiet of the old apothecary’s dry house, tucked behind the garden wall and long since emptied of its former purpose. The scent of dried herbs still lingered—crushed mint, camphor. A single lantern glowed low on the shelf, its light trembling against jars and scrolls and her silhouette on the wooden kang.
He noticed the pulse at her throat, the way her lashes clung together with sweat, how the hem of her robe had fallen too far down one shoulder to be innocent. Sweat was already dappling her temples, even as she tipped another cup to her mouth to drink.
The liquid shimmered faintly violet.
He was at her side before his logic could catch up to instinct. Bent over her haphazardly strewn out person. Feet between hers, uncaring of her helter-skelter limbs, the looseness of her Hanfu as she draped over the table on the elevated kang.
“Maomao.” His voice was low, coiled tight. “What did you just drink?”
She blinked. Slow. Her pupils were blown wide, irises almost eclipsed. The flush in her cheeks was deeper now, her skin too warm in the lamplight. Still, her smile was placid. Pleased. So close to him, he could feel her heat seep through their layers, reach for his own skin.
“Gaoshun-dono,” she breathed lightly, her voice a lazy purr. Her fingers reached toward him lazily, brushing the front of his robe with the absent affection of a cat. “Just a diluted tincture from the Aconitum family. Wolf’s bane, but the trace is harmless,” her fingertips traced the edges of his layers like she wasn’t even noticing. “Mostly,” she shivered pleasantly.
“It tingles,” she panted, dazed smile widening as she slipped lower in her seat, her knees splaying to the side of one of his legs. Her thigh brushed his, and she looked up at him from beneath damp lashes at an angle that had to be uncomfortable but looked terribly inviting.
She lolled her jaw, trying to speak around the sensation, and a low sound escaped her throat—half moan, half sigh. “Like needles in the tongue, and then…”
She tilted her head back again, as if savoring the burn of something else. Gaoshun’s hands had migrated to her hips. Just to keep her on the kang. Just to make sure she wouldn’t slip lower.
“A warmth that blooms right down the throat,” she drawls, not quite drunk but surprisingly close to it for someone whom he’d known to drink Lihaku under the table. She sighs her next words: “Like being kissed by fire, but gently. Mmm. Intimately…”
Her tongue traced the corner of her lip, unconsciously and her eyes slid apart the merest sliver. “It’s exquisite.”
Her tongue flicked out, wetting the corner of her mouth.
And he stared.
Because there was nothing coy in her. Nothing performed. She didn’t know what she looked like right now, didn’t mean to look like that. She was simply honest. Unfiltered. And it undid him.
All he could think about was how her voice had dropped ever so slightly when she said intimately. How her lips had parted, pink and plush from the taste, how her breath hitched like she’d just been touched—
“You’re flushed,” he said, though the words were rough, dragged out of his chest.
She nodded with a high hum in the back of her throat. “It stimulates the nerve endings. I can feel my fingertips pulsing. And my mouth—ah,” she drew in a breath, shivering slightly. “It’s like heat pouring from the center out.”
“Maomao.” His tone was warning now, hoarse. “Stop describing it.”
“Why?” she asked, genuinely curious. “Does it bother you?”
Her lips, parted slightly, caught the flicker of lanternlight.
And he moved, faster than he should have—and caught her mouth with his.
It wasn’t gentle. He kissed her not like a husband. Not like a courtier. He crashed over her like a man who had waited too long.
His hand found her nape, pulled her forward. Her back hit the edge of the table, breath catching as he crowded close. Draping over her, his hand still at her hip, spanning her side with the heat of his palm.
He kissed her like he needed to know the shape of her breath. Like the taste of poison on her tongue had branded him.
She arched into him with a startled, helpless sound—a sound that would echo in his ears for hours, maybe days.
She tasted of metal and fire and something sweet that pulsed beneath the surface. He licked past her lips, seeking it. She melted beneath him, pliant and breathless, fingers curling in his sleeves. He chased her breath, her sound, the tilt of her head as she opened wider.
His thumb pressed gently against her chin, opening her just wide enough to lick into her. Taste more of the metallic burn of the Aconite from her. Catching the pooling saliva in the cavern of her mouth and stealing it for himself like she was the only medicine he had ever craved, like her breath could undo every tightly wound thread in his body.
Like he’d never be allowed to again.
She clutched at his sleeves, winded and overwhelmed, letting him consume her with every press of lips, every stolen drag of breath. Her fingers scrabbled against him. Her breath came in short gasps.
Her tongue met his. Tangled.
A desperate sound slipped from her, wet and low and far too much.
And when her hips rolled once—unthinking, instinctive—into his—
He swore he lost himself. Pressed her down. One hand braced behind her head, the other splayed at her waist. Her robe had fallen further open now, and her legs shifted around him. Heat. Everywhere.
Her voice rang in his ear as he shifted and the kang creaked under him as he pulled her close enough to--
--clarity struck him like a backhand.
He pulled back.
She lay beneath him, chest heaving, her robe half undone, hair unpinned and wild across her shoulders. Her lips were swollen. Her eyes half-lidded.
She was flushed from the tips of her ears down to the enticing stretch of skin framed by her clavicles, red excitement bloomed on her skin in enticing, unfamiliar flecks. Her breath came wet and ragged, her eyes, when he found them, were still unfocused.
She looked undone. Beautifully, devastatingly undone.
He’d never seen her like this.
And gods help him, he wanted to see her like this again.
“Gaoshun-dono?” she breathed, unsteady, still dazed.
Her hand was still fisted in his robes. Her fingers trembled.
Gods be good he was ruined by the mere look of her.
She licked her lips, still tasting the remains of what had passed between them as he straightened, slow and careful of the sharp-edged desire that still plowed through him.
His hands dropped from her, but they twitched against the wood next to her, reluctant to let go. Desirous of her shape in their span now that they’d had a taste.
“This might have been a mistake,” he said, though even his voice betrayed him with its husky edge.
She stared at his eyes, then at her own trembling fingers still curled into his chest. She blinked. “If that was a mistake,” she said slowly, “I’m very curious what your intentions look like when you mean it.”
He looked at her.
Truly looked.
At her rumpled robe. Her flushed skin. Her lips, still wet. The way her chest rose and fell like she’d run a great distance. How the pulse at her neck had picked up.
He would not let anyone else see her like this.
He didn’t know what they were becoming, but he knew this:
He would see this again.
Her.
Like this.
Again. And again.
And again.
