Chapter 32: Embezzled a Bandit Lord's Fortune

Mian Tang had no idea what kind of ledger it was. But the words came out before she could stop them: "Don't tell the young master yet. Let me go through the accounts first."

She buried herself at the desk and began recalculating. Somehow she knew, even as her brush moved, that she was fabricating entries — hollowing out the main account, splitting a mountain of silver into countless invisible streams flowing god knows where.

Then came the carts. Horse after horse, cart after cart, rolling past in the dark. She couldn't see inside the boxes, but she knew. Silver ingots. Banknotes. Enough to make her stomach drop.

She woke with a splitting headache and a vague, shameful feeling, like she'd been caught doing something she couldn't take back. The dream was absurd. She had sold her husband's shops — all of them — and still couldn't have accumulated that kind of wealth. And she'd been skimming it like some crooked official. It had to be that thief's ranting that had crept into her sleep and turned into nonsense.

Except it hadn't felt like nonsense.

She lay staring at the ceiling beams for a long moment.

"You're awake." Cui Xingzhou set down his book. "Do you want water?"

Night had settled in. The candle on the table burned low, casting thin shadows across the room.

Mian Tang turned her head toward him, something off in the way she felt — that hollow disorientation she'd had when she first woke from her serious illness, looking at her husband like a stranger. She tried to sit up and couldn't manage it. "How did I faint?"

"The thief you knocked out came to and attacked you." His voice was measured. "How do you feel? Do you remember anything?"

She looked at his face — composed, handsome — and felt a flicker of something she immediately pushed away. The thought that maybe he had been the one to knock her out was too absurd to even finish forming. She swallowed it and asked hoarsely, "My head is killing me. Who were those men? What kind of people demand money in broad daylight like that?"

---

Cui Xingzhou turned the question over in silence.

His secret guards had worked hard for the answer. Nine of the ten captured men said nothing. The tenth broke after the branding irons and finger presses — and what he said was illuminating.

When Liu Mian Tang fled Yangshan, she had personally falsified the stronghold's accounts, siphoning off a substantial sum. The forgeries were meticulous. With the stronghold's businesses scattered across multiple locations and accounts only tallied once a year, no one caught the discrepancy for a long time. It wasn't until a woman named Yun Niang took over the books that the gap surfaced — and that's when they sent men down the mountain.

When the guards pressed for more — who was Yun Niang, who was this young master, how had Liu Mian Tang gotten access to that kind of money — the man had started to answer. Our young master is—

He never finished. A dying bandit nearby raised his head and spat a poison needle. Clean, precise. The informant dropped. The remaining men exchanged one look, bit their tongues, and that was the end of it.

The guards stood there with no survivors and nothing more to work with.

Cui Xingzhou had listened to the report with a still face, assembling the pieces. That Lu Wen was stranger than he'd initially thought — letting a woman manage the accounts was unusual enough. But the scale of the stronghold's assets, the businesses spread across the country, the men who died before giving up a name — none of this fit a simple mountain bandit with a pardoned surrender.

Who exactly was Lu Wen?

As for Liu Mian Tang stealing the money — he didn't doubt that for a moment. He'd watched her long enough to know she had both the nerve and the capability. It explained the tendons in her arm and leg. It explained why no one had come after her until now.

But now they had. And Liu Mian Tang, with no memory of Yangshan and no way to defend herself, was a soft target.

He had been considering abandoning the North Street house ever since Lu Wen's amnesty was processed. He'd been lazy about it, thinking he'd wait and see. That had been a mistake. He wasn't leaving now. He needed to tighten security, keep drawing out information, and find out exactly who Young Master Ziyu was — and who this Yun Niang was — and most importantly, what role Liu Mian Tang had actually played on that mountain.

---

Mian Tang noticed the change after the street incident. Her husband was home far more than before.

Aside from stepping out for a few hours at midday, he spent most of his time in the house — playing chess with her, reading, lounging in a way that suggested he had given up on being productive. He had the air of a man who had decided to be lazy and was committing to it fully.

But his eyes on her sometimes had an edge she couldn't name.

Having him home was good. She didn't want to make something of the other thing. Still, she asked eventually.

He said, without looking up from the board, "I've been studying chess for months and I'm still no better than you. Might as well stop."

She blinked. She hadn't realized she had done that to him. Then another thought surfaced. "I didn't know how to play chess before. Do you know who taught me?"

Cui Xingzhou finished collecting the pieces and looked at her. His smile had a slight chill to it. "I don't know either. Maybe Young Master Ziyu."

The words landed quietly and didn't move. Mian Tang sat with them. She thought of how strangely familiar it had felt, watching Ziyu play — the way her hands had known what to do before her mind caught up. How many games must they have played? What had she been thinking, getting that close to another man while her husband was traveling?

Her interest in chess evaporated.

To make it up to him somehow, she pulled out some fabric she'd been saving and held it against Cui Xingzhou's frame, trying to measure.

Summer was ending. He would need warmer clothes. Outer robes could be bought ready-made, but undergarments — those a wife made herself. She'd been ill and had forgotten most of what a wife was supposed to do. She was relearning it in pieces, sitting outside with the other women on North Street, cracking melon seeds and watching how they handled their households. Following their example, she had found one of his old undergarments to use as a pattern and spent several days bent over her sewing, producing something that only mostly resembled what it was supposed to be.

Cui Xingzhou stood patiently while she measured him for the third time.

She came up to about his chest. Despite being tall for a woman from Jiangnan, she looked slight against him. She was quick and sharp when numbers were involved — with a needle, she was a disaster. She had already re-cut the sleeve four times.

He watched her from above. She frowned, measured his waist, measured again, and then broke into a wide, satisfied smile as if she had finally solved something.

The smile unsettled him more than he expected.

He had been thinking about it for days — turning the question over without arriving anywhere comfortable. Had she been miserable at Yangshan, surviving by necessity at the side of a powerful man? Or had she, over time, actually come to care for Young Master Ziyu? A woman taken against her will could still develop genuine feeling. It happened. And she had willingly managed his accounts — that wasn't nothing.

But then there was the embezzlement. She had stolen from him on the way out. Substantially. Boldly.

Cui Xingzhou found himself feeling, against his better judgment, something like respect for that. Whatever she had done there, she had known when to leave and had covered her tracks on the way out. That wasn't the behavior of a woman who had lost herself entirely to a bandit lord.

Still. How had a woman with no martial ability managed to take that much? Nobody had come looking for her until recently, which meant Ziyu had either not known she was alive, or had chosen not to act. Until now.

He thought about Yun Niang — the new woman who had taken over the accounts and discovered the gap. He knew that type. His father's household had been full of them. It wasn't hard to imagine what had happened: Mian Tang fell out of favor, a new woman moved in, and that new woman quietly helped along the discovery of a convenient target to blame. Possibly she had taken some of the money herself and was now pointing in another direction.

He looked at Mian Tang again — at the way she was frowning at the uneven sleeves, already knowing she'd made another mistake before she'd even checked.

She had been pulled out of a river. Whatever cleverness she had, it hadn't been enough to save her from ending up there.

She looked up and caught him staring. Then she looked down at the garment in her hands, and her expression fell.

The sleeves were different lengths. Again.

"Husband," she said quietly, setting the clothes back in the basket, "do you think I'm hopeless at this?"

He came back to himself. The embarrassment on her face was genuine and a little funny. "You're fast with an abacus. Being a bit slow with a needle just means your talents are balanced. If you were good at everything, what would be left for everyone else?"

It was such a small thing to say. She looked at him like he'd handed her something.

"Since you've given up on chess," she said, recovering quickly, "you should let me teach you the abacus. And honestly, I'd rather you take over the shop accounts. Looking at ledgers gives me a headache."

He hadn't seen that coming. He frowned slightly. "You can keep managing the shop."

She was in the middle of helping him undress when he said it. She stopped, and a flush moved up her neck.

"The women on the street — Mother Yin and the others — they keep asking when the Cui household will have children." She kept her voice low and did not look at him. "They say handling copper and silver is inauspicious for conceiving. I thought... you're not getting any younger, and we should be thinking about it. So I thought I might step back and take better care of my health."

Her voice got quieter toward the end. She was aware of how it sounded — aware that she was saying the thing that properly should have come from a mother-in-law or a matchmaker, not herself, with her face burning. She could only hope he didn't think she was complaining about the state of their bed.

He had misunderstood. He looked down at her — the flush spreading from her face to her throat — and was quiet for a moment.

She had shared a bed with him for over a month. He had kept his distance and maintained his composure, but her reputation had still taken the hit. He had thought, originally, of sending her to a nunnery when this was over. Then he had considered helping her set up her own household. Both options felt increasingly inadequate given what he now knew about Yangshan. The bandits were not finished with her. Even after he cleared the ones already caught, there could be others. A woman with cut tendons, no memory, and no protection was easy prey.

He found himself running through the options. Zhao Quan of Zhennan had clearly developed a fondness for her — but Zhao Quan was too loose and too careless. He couldn't be counted on to keep her safe. He might get himself in trouble trying.

He stopped thinking about it, reached out, and patted the top of her head the way you'd calm a child. "Your health still needs time. I'll give you a child eventually."

She looked up at him for a moment — understanding that he'd been waiting out of concern for her, not indifference. The embarrassment drained away. She wrapped both arms around his waist, pressed her face against his chest, and laughed softly.

He looked down at her with mild helplessness. The thought drifted through him, almost without invitation: once everything was settled, keeping her as a concubine wouldn't be an unreasonable arrangement. His future father-in-law had already drawn the wrong conclusion about that and mentioned it to Lian Suilan, who hadn't even raised the question. If he managed the Lian family's interests carefully enough, the whole thing might pass without incident.

He wouldn't formally marry Mian Tang — that would create a problem for Lian Suilan as the future mistress of the wang's household. But he could give her a comfortable life. Security, money, protection. She had earned something better than a river.

With that resolved in his mind, the tightness in his chest loosened somewhat.

They lay down. Neither slept immediately.

Mian Tang talked about small things — the household, the changing season, the neighbors — and then drifted toward her dreams, which had been strange and busy lately. Ever since the bandit attack, she'd been dreaming of silver. Moving it, counting it, exchanging banknotes at strange hours in unfamiliar places. She would wake in the dark not knowing what time it was, that hollow confused feeling settling in her chest.

It helped that he was here. When she woke from one of those dreams now, he would ask what she had seen. Having someone next to her in the dark made it easier to shake off.

Still, the dreams nagged at her. She turned the question over a few times before asking it: "Husband — did the officials say anything about who those men were? Why they came after us? Could it be that I... took money that wasn't mine?"

He was absently winding a strand of her hair around his finger. "It was just a dream. Would you take money that wasn't yours?"

She considered this seriously. "Why would I? If something isn't mine — money or anything else — I don't want it. Even if someone tried to give it to me for free."

She meant it as more than an answer about the dream. She was telling him, without quite saying it, that she had no interest in Young Master Ziyu or in men like Zhao Quan with their strings of concubines. Whatever she might have done or felt in a past she couldn't remember, this was who she was now.

Cui Xingzhou let the corner of his mouth lift slightly. He said nothing.

---

Up on Yangshan, in a secluded room, Yun Niang smashed her cup against the floor.

"How is that possible?" Her voice was sharp. "Her tendons are cut. She has no martial skill. She married a common merchant. How did every single one of those men fail to come back?"

Her confidant Yan Chi chose his words carefully. "This servant looked into it afterward. There were people blocking the carriage that day, but they happened to run into a group of off-duty soldiers from the Lingquan Town garrison passing through. They were captured and interrogated. Someone saw the bodies carried out of the torture chamber. They didn't talk."

Yun Niang pressed her lips together, her fine brows drawn tight. "Liu Mian Tang took the operating cash from the stronghold's satellite shops and the Crown Prince's private assets on top of it. All that, and she just... left. She betrayed everything the young master gave her."

She paced, calculating. Yangshan had soldiers to feed and pay. If that money couldn't be recovered and the stronghold's remaining funds dried up, what was the alternative — open robbery?

A voice from outside the door: "Miss Sun. The young master asks for you in his study."

Her maid Hua Ping went pale. Once the footsteps receded, she leaned in and whispered, "What do we do? What if the young master finds out about the general's men taking that silver?"

Yun Niang turned a sharp look on her. "Stop panicking. Whatever my father's men took, it's a fraction of what Liu Mian Tang stole. We put it all on her. There's nothing to trace back to us."

Settled, she changed her clothes, fixed her hair, and walked to the study.

Ziyu had refined taste in everything. Outside the study door, a stand of rare emerald bamboo grew in careful arrangement. Inside, the calligraphy on the walls was all master-grade, each scroll worth a small fortune. Ziyu himself stood by the open window in black fox fur — strange for summer, but the mountain ran cold after rain — listening to his subordinate's report with his eyes fixed on the bamboo.

Yun Niang watched him stare at it and felt the familiar twist in her stomach. Liu Mian Tang had planted that bamboo for him. Specifically for him.

She moved closer, curtsied lightly, and said, "It just rained, young master. You should step back from the window." She reached toward his collar to adjust it.

He brushed her hand away. Not roughly, but without his usual gentleness. Then he looked at her directly. "Why did you send people down the mountain to go after Mian Tang?"

Yun Niang's eyes filled. "Young master, how can you think that of me? The stronghold accounts were short. I had no choice but to go through everything carefully, and that's how I found Sister Liu's discrepancies. I only sent people to ask where the silver went. How is that causing trouble for her?"

Sun Yun Niang was pretty in a quiet way — not the kind of beauty that stopped a room, but delicate and soft, the kind that made men instinctively lower their voices. Right now she looked like a rabbit someone had frightened, her eyes red-rimmed, her voice unsteady. Most men would have softened.

Ziyu did soften, a degree. He exhaled and said, more evenly, "Mian Tang always acted carefully. You should have come to me before doing anything. Instead you created a mess, alerted the officials, and lost six men. How do you plan to fix this?"

Yun Niang had no answer for that, so she went another direction: "I only wanted to ask. I never meant her any harm. For her to call the officials down on her own loyal subordinates like that — that's not right of her."

"Enough." His voice sharpened again. "The people who went reported that they ran into Huaiyang Wang's men by bad luck — plain-clothed officers on their own business. Are you saying Mian Tang somehow commands Huaiyang Wang's people?"

Secretary Qin, who had been sitting with the young master through all of this, stepped in quietly. "Young master. Miss Sun was anxious about the accounts and moved too fast. She couldn't have anticipated how it would turn out. There's no need to be too hard on her."