“The current Leader of the sect was the Head of the Disciplinary committee before she took up the position. The current Head is one of her closest associates.” Lin explained.
I nodded in understanding.
The current sect leader and her faction were the ones responsible for the death of Lin’s mother. They were obviously opposed to Lin and Kara’s business – especially when it was one as booming as the lingerie trade.
Then this was clearly them misusing their authority for corporate espionage. This Corpse Maiden must have been sent here to steal our designs.
I wasn’t really surprised. I had heard Kara mention copycat stores popping up everywhere and trying to take a bite out of the corporate pie. After all, underwear wasn’t anything too hard to reverse engineer and duplicate.
If I hadn’t shared the 21st century concept of brand power, their poaching of our customer base would be much more effective.
As it stood, we had successfully established a correlation between quality underwear and our brand in the minds of the people through the use of a logo which we displayed on all our adverts.
Thwarted at every turn by highly advanced market strategies, it was no wonder that they had resorted to more drastic measures like espionage.
I sighed.
They had found out a bit more than just corporate secrets.
Thankfully, the spy had chosen to directly confront us and take me into custody instead of sneaking off and reporting to the higher authorities. Then we would be totally screwed.
Now we were just mildly less screwed.
“What are we supposed to do with her?” I asked again. “She knows about me. We can’t let her go or she’ll bring the entire sect down upon us. But if we don’t, she’ll be missed when she doesn’t report back to her masters in a timely manner. They’ll come looking and it’ll be the same thing but with a slight delay.”
Lin rubbed her face with a perplexed expression.
“I don’t know,” she admitted with a sigh. “If it wasn’t for my sudden advance in cultivation base and the purity of my qi, I’d be incapacitated by her now and you’d be dragged in front of the Sect Leader. She’s at the seventh layer of Qi Condensation stage. Just a single stage lower than us.”
They’d really played it safe by sending her. If I wasn’t in the equation, Lin would be at the fourth layer now. She wouldn’t be able to discover or resist the spy at all. Maybe she’d wake up several hours later thinking it was just a nap, but all the documents would have already been copied. Later, when Kara tried to sell stuff according to plan, she’d find her corporate opponents aware of her every move.
“Oh well, we’ll wait for Kara to come back before we decide what to do. She did say that she’d be home before dusk. For now, we need to secure her.” I said, gesturing towards the unconscious assassin. “Bring me some rope, will you?”
Lin nodded and hurried off towards our bedroom.
“Wait!” I stopped her by calling out and she turned to me quizzically. “Bring the mana-sealing collar. We don’t want her using her poisonous qi, now do we?”
I didn’t expect that thing to come in handy so soon after being used for our kinky bedroom activities.
As I waited for Lin to fetch the stuff, I walked up to the woman and used my foot to roll her onto her back.
My eyes widened as I got a glimpse of her face. I couldn’t help but be stunned by how much she resembled a woman I knew back on earth.
Veronica wasn’t the prettiest woman I had known, or the best in bed, but she was the one who had left the deepest impression on me.
As I compared the deathly pale face of the assassin, her purple lips, and the thick coat of purple eyeshadow she wore to the image of Veronica I had in my memory, I couldn’t help but have the absurd feeling that it was her in front of me. Well, if you took her and magically smoothed out all her imperfections – then broke her nose.
Veronica was what a weeb would ecstatically refer to as a legal goth-tiny. She preferred to wear foundation one shade paler than her skin tone, giving her skin that strange zombie-like look and her eyes and lips were always painted a dark shade of plum. And despite her twenty-six years of age, she didn’t look a day beyond fourteen due to her petite stature that she accentuated by wearing elaborate black dresses with an overabundance of lace and netting.
But it wasn’t her distinctive looks that made such a deep impression on me… it was the twisted relationship we entered.
She was a regular attendee at my sermons, but she never participated in the afterparties. One day, she came up to me with her husband and asked me for a private audience.
She explained that her husband had a fetish for voyeurism and cuckoldry. In short, he had a desire to see another man take his wife while he watched. But, while they had talked to each other about this, they had never found a trustworthy candidate to try this with.
Veronica had introduced her husband to recordings of my sermons, and he had somehow decided that I was the appropriate man for the job.
While the request was quite weird, in line with my philosophy of trying everything at least once, I hadn’t rejected them outright but asked to think about it.
I was quite young then; it was just the beginning of my career as the Love Guru and I was just getting the hang of things.
Finally, I had decided to go for it just for the heck of it. After all, it wasn’t every day that you are asked by a man to NTR him.
I won’t go into the details, but it was one of the most emotionally painful things that I had ever experienced in my life. No matter how I fucked her, no matter how hard I made her cum around my cock, Veronica’s eyes never left her husband who was sitting in a chair by the bed, jacking off as he watched us. The pure adoration in her eyes… hurt. It was a stab to my chest.
After I was done, the couple very warmly saw me off at the door… but I was absolutely sure that the moment that door shut would be the moment they went at each other with a rabid frenzy. I could see it in the fire that smouldered in the depths of their eyes.
Somehow, I dunno why, I did it several more times. Maybe I’m a masochist, or maybe it was my injured pride. I kept fucking Veronica while her husband watched. With every session, the dark feelings in my chest grew stronger and stronger. I became more violent in bed, demanded more from that petite body of hers.
They never said anything. Never complained. They always saw me off with that same warmth while their eyes told me that they couldn’t wait for me to leave.
Finally, driven beyond the brink by the distorted situation, I refused to put on the condom they had set out for me and fucked her raw. I could see him clutching the hand rests of the chair with a white-knuckled grip and there were veins bulging at his temple. His face was a beet red. Still, the guy made no move to stop me.
And still, Veronica never looked at me. She only had eyes for her husband. Someone who had pushed her to have sex with another man.
Right after I came in her, I broke down in tears. For the first time since the beginning of our relationship, Veronica looked at me and hugged me. Comforting me. I felt her husband’s arms around both of us, forgiving us.
To this day, I don’t know what about that mess of a situation touched me. But it did. And I’ll never forget that couple even across worlds and in a different body.
After that day, I apologized to them and they apologized to me. We never did it again, but Veronica and Nick became my closest friends. They had a very happy marriage and two kids.
They were among the select few who supported me after I went to prison. They came to visit whenever they were in town and after I got out, they offered to let me stay over at their place until I could get my feet under me.
I should have accepted it instead of shacking up in a hovel in the seedier part of town and cooking up some half-baked plan of making a comeback.
I was disturbed out of my daze by Lin returning with a rope, the collar, and a healing salve for the assassin’s nose.
Picking her petite body up, I placed it on the chair before tying her up in a way that wouldn’t allow her to leverage her strength to snap the ropes. Then to make doubly sure, we snapped the collar on her neck, sealing her qi.
Finally, Lin wiped off the clotting blood from her face before generously slathering her broken nose with salve. Then she pinched it and with a jerk that made me wince, pulled it straight.
The assassin came to with a scream of pain that was soon cut off as Lin stuffed a balled-up sock in her mouth and gagged her with a strip of cloth.
Stepping back and admiring her handiwork, she wiped her hands with a towel as she addressed the woman who was glaring at us with hatred through eyes that were tearing up from pain.
“We’ll be asking the questions here and the answers will be yes or no. Nod if you agree, shake your head if you don’t.”