What The Fox? (Completely Free!)

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

The nightmare always started the same way. The villagers were back with their rotten teeth, snarling faces. They accused me of making their river run black with poison. In my dream, I screamed that it wasn't me. In reality, I had laughed at them and yelled insults at their ancestors for their weak threats. But, in my dreams, they stood ten feet taller, looming over me, with their hoes and shovels. These stupid rice-farmers, what right did they have to know the truth?

The truth was that Julong made me do it. Julong Tian, I'll never forget his name, not even after my bones turn to dust. He promised to meet me on the other side of the river when the deed was done. He never came.

He left me behind with only my own wits to save me from the angry mob. I served half a decade as the prisoner of the devil because of that charlatan.

I woke up in bed covered in a thin layer of my own sweat even as the snow continued to fall outside my window. I put my hands through the long flowing sleeves of the ruqun and disdainfully washed the silk tasseled waistband around my body. Sixi was a fan of pink dresses that were decorated with floral embroidery. I thought I looked comical, wearing so much pink like a young, virginal girl.

The truth was, I was not a virgin. I'm sure in my past there were those who said a fox-spirit such I could never have claimed such an innocent title. But the truth was, I was a virgin before I met Julong, and he took that from me like he took the remains of my beating, girlishly adoring heart.

I wrapped a fur robe around my shoulders and went outside. I needed fresh air. I felt like I could barely breathe inside that room where everything smelled of jasmine and peach blossoms.

The sun was only coming over the horizon, and in the distance, I heard a cricket under the blanket of snow. Alix, the hard-working slave that he was — was already up. He was chopping firewood in a distant corner of the garden. Now, I know how cliché this sounds. There he was — a boy who was newly purchased from a slave market, stripped to the waist, flexing his muscles, and hacking at firewood. He might as well have been oiled down, glancing down at his heaving abdomen, with a single drop of sweat slowly dripping from his bellybutton down into the hairy abyss of his low-hanging pants.

It was nothing like that.

Alix was still limping about, holding his side with every other movement. He was wearing a shirt and pants. My servants had given him a furry wool tunic to wear over his other clothing, but I could tell he didn't need it. He wasn't shivering. In fact, I saw beads of sweat forming on his brows.

He was Lycan. They didn't feel the cold the way humans did. I wonder if he even knew that this was one of his gifts. Poor boy, perhaps, he had so much to discover about the world, and even more about himself.

"What are you doing out here?" Alix asked me as he nodded in deference. It was actually insulting how unruly he was to stare at me in the eye. If he were taking this role of a slave seriously, he would have fallen to his knees and started banging his forehead on the floor by now to have interrupted my morning walk with his ugly presence.

Instead, Alix grinned at me. No, maybe it was more like a smirk. With these young, stupid boys, who could tell the difference anyway?

As he went back to chopping wood, I paced in a semicircle around him like a hungry panther. He was well-muscles for a boy who had been starved during the long march from the woody wastelands of Mongli to the Imperial City.

I knew Alix to be in his late twenties, but the mischievous grin on his lips made him appear younger. Yet, his bone structure looked too well-defined to belong to anyone younger. Although his smile was quick and youthful, he moved a comfortable gait indicative of a man who was used to his body. And why not? He had quite a body. I liked the way Alix stood over the wood with his muscular legs apart like an animal ready to devour his prey. I liked the tendons bulging from his sturdy neck as he worked and of the hot, white puffs of air that he emitted from his lungs.

His chest was thick and powerful, and I could see the outline of his broad shoulders even through the muddy brown hemp of his slave attire. After he made a pile of chopped wood, he turned to me and wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his sleeve.

"Am I worth my selling price, Lady Teng?"

"Yes, since I paid nothing for you, that's what you're worth," I retorted. He was close, too close for comfort. I didn't like the way he was looking at me with that smug smile on his face. I poked his chest with my index finger intending to shove him away. Instead, he threw his ax aside and seized my wrist.

"Let go, I'll scream," I hissed.

"Will you?" Alix teased with a wicked glimmer in his Pu'erh Tea-colored eyes. I recognized that look in his eyes. Men looked at you like that when they felt a stirring in their loins for you. I remembered Julong looked at me like that too, in the grasslands of Henan, where we first met. He was just a simple Jianghu vagabond, strutting around with a rusty sword at his side and a shoot of bamboo hanging from his chapped lip. I was stupid enough to fall for that boy among the grassy fields. I thought he would love me for as long as the sky, that our feelings would be as old as the earth.

How wrong I was. Julong kissed me. Julong made love to me. And then Julong left me on the banks of the Qin river.

How is it that after all these years, I still couldn't forget that skinny, soft-skinned bastard?

I needed to forget. There was only one way to forget.

I leaned in, closed my eyes, and planted a kiss on Alix's lips.

He grunted in surprise as I attacked his smelly, stubbly lips with my tongue.