Chapter 10: Pet
The morning began, as it often did now, with a deep, grinding pressure inside her. Leila stirred from sleep not to an alarm, but to the solid weight of Ron’s body covering hers, his knee nudging her legs apart. He was already hard, pushing into the soft, sleepy wetness between her thighs without a word. Her face was half-buried in the pillow, her small sounds muffled by Egyptian cotton. He took her like this often at dawn, a possessive, drowsy claiming, his movements slow and thorough as if reaffirming a boundary. When he finished, spilling into her with a low groan against her neck, he simply rolled off, slapped her bare hip once, and said, “Breakfast in thirty. The crispy pork today.”
“Yes, Ron,” she whispered, already moving, her body humming from the inside out.
This was her life. A contented, orbiting existence around the gravity of his needs. She cooked for him with a focus that was almost religious, learning the exact crispness he liked on his pork belly, the precise sweetness for his morning tea. Sometimes he ate alone at the long table, scanning reports on a tablet. Sometimes, to her dizzying joy, he’d point to the chair beside him. “Sit. Eat.” She’d perch on the edge, nibbling at a bowl of congee, stealing glances at his profile, the fierce concentration as he read, the way his tattooed hand held his chopsticks. She felt chosen.
The nights were a different language. The tender dawns gave way to a rougher, more explicit tuition on the vast desk, against the study wall, or bent over the foot of his bed. He used her body with a thrilling, terrifying expertise, introducing new sensations, new demands. He had not taken her ass again since that first, shattering time, but the threat of it was always there, a dark promise in his touch when he gripped her there. She existed in a constant state of sweet ache, a feeling she associated utterly with him.
It was three weeks after the night in the study that the new feeling arrived. It wasn’t the pleasant soreness. It was a sudden, lurching revolt of her own stomach.
She was chopping scallions in the vast, stainless-steel kitchen when the smell of the raw fish for lunch, usually fragrant, turned metallic and foul. A wave of nausea rose so violently she had to clap a hand over her mouth and stumble to the sink. The head chef, a burly man named Lao, frowned. “You’re pale, little sparrow. You sick?”
“No, no,” Leila managed, swallowing back saliva. “Just… the smell was strong.”
Later, it was the rich, dark coffee she brought to Ron’s study. The aroma, which she usually loved, made her gorge rise. She set the cup down with a slight clatter. He didn’t look up. “Leila.”
“Sorry.” Her voice was thin.
Then came the cravings. A desperate, visceral need for the jar of pickled sour plums in the pantry. She found herself sneaking them by the fistful when no one was looking, the sharp, tangy explosion on her tongue the only thing that settled the queasy rolling in her gut.
She was frightened. This was a disruption to her service. She couldn’t be weak. Ron required efficiency.
One evening, as she cleared his dinner plate, he caught her wrist. His thumb pressed into her pulse point. “You’ve lost weight,” he stated, his eyes scanning her face. “But your tits are fuller.” It was an observation, devoid of concern.
“I’m well,” she lied, her heart hammering. “Just… a small stomach flu, perhaps.”
He let her go with a grunt. That night, he fucked her with a peculiar, investigative intensity, his hands roaming over her stomach and breasts as if charting changes on a map. He came inside her, as always, with a deep, claiming thrust.
Across the city, in the pulsing, neon heart of a high-floor club called The Jade Serpent, Ron was failing to pay attention to a merger proposal.
The private lounge was all low lighting and deeper sins. Two of his business associates from Singapore, the Feng brothers, had a pair of women from the club’s elite roster draped over them like living accessories. The women were exquisite, dressed in shimmering threads that hid almost nothing. One was whispering something into the ear of the younger Feng, her manicured hand high on his thigh.
A third woman, her gaze trained on Ron since he walked in, slithered toward his isolated armchair. She moved with a calculated grace, all practiced seduction. She lowered herself onto the arm of his chair, the slit in her dress falling open to reveal a smooth length of thigh. Her perfume was aggressive, a cloud of jasmine and oud.
“Your drink is lonely, laoban,” she murmured, her voice like smoke. “Maybe I can keep it company?”
Ron swirled the ice in his glass of single malt. He looked at her. He saw the flawless makeup, the inviting pout, the knowing glint in her eyes. He felt nothing. Not a flicker. It was like looking at a very well-designed piece of furniture.
He’d visited this club a dozen times. He’d taken women from these very rooms to the private suites upstairs on just as many occasions. It was transaction. Release. Forgettable.
Now, the thought of those hands, not Leila’s, on him, of that mouth, not her curious, innocent one, was… irritating. It was an impediment to the conversation he was supposed to be having about shipping lanes.
“The drink’s fine,” he said, his voice cutting through the murmur of the lounge. “You’re in my light.”
The woman blinked, her seductive mask slipping for a fraction of a second into sheer disbelief. Then, professionally, she recomposed herself and slipped away without another word.
The younger Feng brother chuckled, nudging his companion off to go fetch more drinks. “Ron, what’s the matter? She was the best they have. You’re not becoming a monk, are you?”
Ron took a long drink. The whiskey burned a familiar, welcome path. “I’m becoming bored,” he said, and it wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth. He was bored with this. The entire pantomime.
He thought of the girl in his estate. The way she jumped when he entered a room, not from fear alone, but from a kind of electrified attention. The way her body yielded to his not with practiced technique, but with a trusting, dizzying surrender that was more intoxicating than any drug in this club. The way she looked at his tattoos not as decorations, but as chapters in a story she was desperate to read. He thought of her sneaking sour plums from the pantry, thinking she was being sly, her eyes wide with a guilty pleasure that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a simple, human craving.
He had not gotten bored. He was, in fact, increasingly and precisely preoccupied.
The deal was concluded, numbers agreed upon. As they stood to leave, the elder Feng clapped him on the shoulder. “You should get that stomach flu looked at, my friend. You’re not yourself.”
Ron just gave him a thin, dangerous smile that made the man’s hand drop away. “I’ve never been more myself.”
The drive back to the estate was a blur of city lights. His mind, sharp as a tactical blade, did what it did best: it connected disparate data points. The sudden nausea. The loss of weight except in her breasts. The peculiar, frantic craving for sour things. The slight, new tenderness in her flesh under his hands.
A cold, clarifying shock, entirely separate from the alcohol, went through him.
He never used protection with her.
The black car slid through the estate gates. He strode through the silent halls, not toward his own bedroom, but toward the servants’ wing. He didn’t knock. He opened the door to her small, plain room.
Moonlight filtered through the single window. She was asleep, curled on her side, one hand tucked under her cheek. Her dark hair fanned across the thin pillow. Even in sleep, she looked like she was waiting for something.
He stood in the doorway, a colossal shadow, looking at the gentle curve of her waist, the slight swell of her belly he now recognized wasn’t from his food. A strange, seismic shift occurred inside him, a tectonic plates grinding of sheer male triumph and something vastly more inconvenient.
She was carrying his child.
The empire had just acquired an heir it didn’t know it needed. And the girl, his girl, was too naive to even know the battlefield her own body had become.
He closed the door softly, not waking her. He walked back to his study, poured a fresh whiskey, and stared out at the sleeping city. A slow, deliberate smile spread across his face. It wasn’t a kind smile. It was the smile of a man who had just found the ultimate leverage, the final, binding chain.
She would be told nothing. Not yet. Let her wonder. Let her worry about a simple stomach flu. The truth was his to wield, a secret weapon. Her body was doing his work, tying her to him in a way no contract or brand ever could. The worship in her eyes was one thing. This was biological permanence.
He finished the drink. The nausea, the cravings—they weren’t signs of illness. They were signs of conquest. And he had never lost a war.