The Spanking Bench

The lottery platform stood a little above the floor on four lacquered pillars, so that whatever happened on it could be seen from every corner of the hall, and by the time the VIP circle reached its steps, half the guests who had watched the race had followed to see what came next.

The thin organizer in black and silver waited behind a long table with two lacquered boxes, one red and one black, and a tray of eight jade plates laid out before him in two neat rows of four. Each plate was the size of a palm and carved with a single numeral in gold, one through four, and each row had its own box.

He bowed to the great men as they came up the steps with the deep, flexible bow of a man whose spine had been trained for exactly this, and when he straightened, his smile had the sleek polish of an organizer who was very well paid and intended to stay that way.

"Honored guests," he said, raising his voice just enough to carry to the crowd below. "The swapping game. For those who have not played it before, the rules are simple. Each master in a group of four gives his slave a number. The numbers go into the box. Each master draws one. Whichever number he draws, that slave is his until the third bell, to enjoy however he likes, within the house rules.

"At the third bell, chains go back to their proper owners, and nobody holds a grudge." He smiled wider. "Officially."

Laughter rippled up from the crowd.

The masters split themselves into two groups with the speed of men who had played this game before and had already decided whose company they preferred. The four merchants, Xu Jie, Huang Qi, Zhao Yan, and Liu Jun, took the black box and the second row of plates and began haggling among themselves about the order of the draw, Zhao Yan's rings chiming with every gesture.

The first group took the red box: Patriarch Yan Tian, City Lord Zhang Haotian, Wang Fengrui, and his son Wang Xuan, who looked as if he could not believe his luck at being included.

The organizer handed out the numbers in the order the masters stood.

"Number one," he said, and laid the first jade plate on a silk cloth in front of Yan Tian. Yan Tian looked at it, then at his slave, and nodded. The organizer turned the plate to show the crowd, and a murmur ran through it, because everyone in the hall knew which slave would be number one.

Yan Mei stood at her husband's side with three red handprints on her ass and her hands folded in front of her, and when the plate was raised, the men below looked at the gold numeral and then at her body and then at each other.

"Number two," said the organizer, and laid it before Zhang Haotian, for the red-haired beauty with the ruby plug.

"Number three," before Wang Fengrui, for the brown-haired slave in her strips of cloth.

"Number four," before Wang Xuan, for his full-bodied mother-slave, who bowed her head.

The organizer gathered the four plates, showed them to the crowd one last time, and dropped them into the red box with a clatter. He closed the lid and shook the box, three hard shakes, the plates rattling against the lacquered sides like dice, and then he set it on the table and opened a small round hole in its top just wide enough for a man's hand.

That was when Yan Chi saw it.

He had come up the platform steps with the waiters who carried wine for the masters, and he stood a pace behind the organizer's left elbow with a jug on his tray, close enough to see the organizer's hands but placed at an angle nobody else in the circle shared.

While the organizer was shaking the box, Wang Fengrui had stepped forward to pat him on the back in a gesture of jovial camaraderie, and his ringed hand had lingered on the organizer's wrist for a moment longer than camaraderie required, and when it withdrew, there was a heavy gold coin in the organizer's sleeve that had not been there before.

The organizer did not blink. When he opened the lid to show that the plates were well mixed, his thumb moved over one of them, a quick small press against the edge of the plate marked one, and slid it to the side of the box nearest Fengrui's hand.

Yan Chi's mouth went dry. He looked down at his jug and poured nothing into nothing.

"Our host draws first," said the organizer smoothly. "As is traditional."

It was not traditional. Nobody objected. Fengrui pushed back his plum-and-gold sleeve, wriggled his fat ringed fingers through the hole with a theatrical grunt, rummaged for exactly the length of time it would take an honest man to choose, and drew out a jade plate. He held it up to the crowd.

The gold numeral on it said one.

The crowd made a noise that was half groan and half cheer, a hundred men simultaneously envious and delighted. Wang Xuan made a sound like a kicked dog. Zhang Haotian looked at the plate, then at Fengrui, then at the organizer, with the long, measuring calm of a city lord who had heard every trick in Jinling and could see this one plainly, and then he simply smiled and said nothing. Yan Tian did not move at all.

"What luck," said Fengrui, beaming at Yan Tian. "What extraordinary luck! Patriarch, I promise I'll take good care of her."

"I'm sure you will," said Yan Tian.

The others drew. Zhang Haotian reached in with a city lord's lack of ceremony and came out with three, Fengrui's own brown-haired beauty, and looked at her with frank appreciation. Wang Xuan, sulking, drew two and found himself the temporary master of the red-haired winner, which cheered him up considerably once she was led over to him.

The last plate in the box was four, and it went to Yan Tian, which meant that Wang Xuan's mother-slave would spend the next stretch of the night kneeling at the feet of the most powerful man in the Yan clan.

She went to him and settled at his ankle with her cheek on his knee.

Wang Xuan recovered his good humor with the speed of a young man who had never in his life been denied anything for longer than an afternoon. He looped the red-haired beauty's chain around his wrist, cupped one of her pierced breasts in his palm as if weighing a purse, and leaned over to his father with a sly grin, muttering that he would trade back for the mysterious one any time Father grew tired of her.

Fengrui swatted the back of his son's head without even looking at him. Zhang Haotian, meanwhile, had beckoned the brown-haired slave to his side with two fingers, and she went to him with her composed, dignified walk, her strips of cloth framing her bare breasts and the band between her cheeks tugging her plug at every step.

The city lord rested one huge hand on the small of her back and let it slide down over the curve of her ass with the leisurely ownership of a man who had already decided exactly which bench he would bend her over.

In the second group, behind them, the merchants drew their own plates and argued about them loudly and then laughed and traded slaves with a great deal of slapping of shoulders and rattling of chains, but nobody in the hall was watching them.

Everybody was watching Yan Tian hand his chain to Wang Fengrui.

He did it without ceremony. He held out his hand with the silver links draped across the palm, and Fengrui took them, and that was all. But Yan Mei, standing at the end of that chain, felt the change travel up the links to her collar as clearly as if someone had rung a bell against her throat.

The weight was different. Her husband's hand on a chain had always been a stillness, a presence she could lean against without looking. Fengrui's hand was fat and warm and eager and already tugging, a small tug and then another, as if he could not quite believe the chain was really his and needed to keep checking.

She glanced at her husband before she moved.

Yan Tian met her eyes through the mask, and his chin dipped, the barest nod a man can make. Then he looked away, down at the mature beauty stroking his thigh, and laid his hand on the woman's dark hair. That was all the answer she needed. Yan Mei lowered her eyes, stepped forward to the end of her new chain, and took her place a step behind and to the left of Wang Fengrui.

[Cuckold Partner: +50 Pervert Points — listed woman given to another man's chain in public.]

The window bloomed across Yan Chi's vision and he almost laughed out loud. Two hundred and ten.

Fengrui did not wait to leave the platform before he began collecting on his luck. While the organizer was still announcing the swaps to the crowd, the merchant leader turned to his new slave and put both of his ringed hands on her body with the leisurely confidence of a man unwrapping a gift he had paid for twice.

One hand went to her breast. He cupped the full heavy curve of it from beneath, lifting, weighing, the gold sun on her nipple dangling against his thumb, and squeezed until the flesh bulged between his rings.

The other hand went straight around behind her to the flaming handprints on her ass and spread across them, and Yan Mei drew in a sharp breath at the sting of his palm on Zhang's marks. He grinned at the sound and squeezed harder.

His fingers slid down into the crease of her cheeks to tap the jewel of her plug, once, twice, the way the attendant had at the start line, and then lower still, to the soaked silk at her crotch, where his fat middle finger pressed into the scrap and found the seam of her lips and rubbed along it, slowly, while half the hall watched from below.

Yan Mei said nothing. A slave did not need to.

Fengrui led her down off the platform and out into the hall with the strut of a man walking a prize mare through a horse fair, the silver chain looped twice around his fist and his other hand rarely leaving her body for longer than a few steps.

He was in no hurry. That was the first thing Yan Chi noticed as he trailed after them through the crowd with his tray, keeping a cluster of guests or a pillar between himself and the merchant leader whenever he could.

A man who had cheated to win a beauty for a few hours might have dragged her straight to the nearest bench to get his money's worth, but Fengrui had been rich for a long time, and rich men knew that half the pleasure of a possession lay in being seen with it.

He walked her slowly. He stopped often. He took the long route around every stage so that every guest in the hall would have a chance to look at the mysterious beauty on his chain, and to see his hand on her.

The first stage they passed was a cage.

It stood on a low dais near the toy racks, a tall cylinder of gilded bars just wide enough for two women to stand inside with their bodies pressed together, and two women were standing inside it with their bodies pressed together, slaves of some lesser merchant who stood outside the bars with a cup of wine and watched with the dreamy satisfaction of an art collector.

Both young women were naked except for collars and anklets. One had short black hair and small high breasts, the other was taller and curvier, with a long braid and nipples darker than plums, and they had their arms around each other's waists and their mouths together, and each of them had a hand between the other's thighs.

The taller one was moaning into her partner's mouth. Her fingers worked steadily, two of them sunk to the knuckle in the short-haired woman's glistening cunt, curling and sliding, and the shorter woman's hips rocked into the hand in hungry little jerks while her own fingers rubbed tight circles over the taller one's swollen clit.

The bars rattled softly with their movement. A small crowd had gathered to watch, and at the front of it a pair of waitresses stood close together with their own hands drifting.

Fengrui stopped in front of the cage and put his hand back on Yan Mei's ass.

"Look at them," he murmured to her, close to her veil, his breath sweet with wine. "That's what they'll do to you, my beauty, if your master ever puts you in one of those. Put you in a cage with a pretty friend and let the two of you fight over who gets to come first." His hand slid down into the crease of her cheeks again, past the plug, to the hot wet silk beneath, and pressed. "Would you like that? Hm? I think you would."

Yan Mei watched the two women in the cage. The short-haired one had thrown her head back against the bars and was coming, her mouth open in a long silent cry and her thighs clamped around her partner's working wrist, and the taller woman held her up through it, kissing her throat.

Yan Mei's breath had grown quick and shallow under her veil. Fengrui's finger rubbed the silk along the seam of her lips, and the merchant chuckled and moved on.

The second stage was a spanking bench.

It was padded red leather on a frame of black wood, built so that a woman knelt on a low step with her belly over a curved bolster and her ass lifted high in the air, and there was a woman on it now, a plump-bellied pleasure slave with chestnut hair, being paddled by a heavy merchant with a flat leather strap while a second man held her wrists in front of her with a lazy grip and fed her sips of wine between strokes.

Her ass was the color of a ripe peach, and she was gasping and laughing at once. Fengrui stopped there too. He stood behind Yan Mei so that she could watch the strap land, and while she watched, he ran his palms over her own three handprints in slow circles, pressing just hard enough to wake the sting.

"The city lord's got a good hand," he said, admiring. "I'll give him that. Look at the color on you. Like a sunset." He pressed his thumb into the very center of the great broad mark across both cheeks, and Yan Mei's breath hitched and her thighs tightened.

"He'd like to have you on one of these, you know. I saw how he looked. Every man here would like to have you on one of these. Bend you over and paint you red all the way down to your knees." He kneaded harder. "Lucky for you, I'm a gentle sort."

He was not, in fact, a gentle sort. Two steps later, at the edge of the bench, he slipped his fingers under the waist chain that held her silk scrap, pulled the scrap aside, and pushed two fat fingers straight into her cunt in front of the dozen men who had gathered to watch the paddling.

Yan Mei gasped. Her knees dipped. The fingers went in easily, sinking to the knuckle in a single wet slide, because she was soaked through, and when he crooked them inside her and pulled them slowly back out, they came away shining in the lantern light, strings of her wetness stretching between them.

He held them up to show the watching men, who groaned approval, and then he sucked them clean with a loud smack of his lips.

"Sweet," he declared. "Sweet as plum syrup."

The spanking merchant paused with his strap in the air, staring at Yan Mei's bared lips, and his chestnut-haired slave twisted on the bench to look over her shoulder, her eyes going wide at the sight of the mysterious beauty with her silk pulled aside. Fengrui let the scrap fall back into place with a little pat, as if settling a curtain, and walked on, and Yan Mei followed on her chain with her thighs wet halfway to her knees and her breath still uneven.

Yan Chi drifted along behind them, refilling cups for guests who had not asked, and watched his mother's ass sway ahead of him with its three red handprints, and Fengrui's fat hand moving over it, and the shining trail on the insides of her thighs, and he understood what the System saw in a man like Wang Fengrui.

The merchant leader was greedy, cheating, loud, and potbellied, and he was wearing Yan Tian's wife on a chain like a new jewel, and every time his hand moved on her, a faint warmth gathered at the back of Yan Chi's skull, a pressure like a coin balanced on the edge of falling.