From CEO to Concubine-Chapter 190: The Emperor’s Dog
TW: Violence and descriptions of torture
Over the course of history, there had been many creative torture techniques invented, each one more morbid than the last. From the bronze toaster (1) to the four great tortures (2), there was no end to the ways information could be pried out past unwilling lips.
But Captain of the Brocade Guard Yao Siya was first and foremost a soldier. Despite all the frivolity some of his other job titles forced him to adopt, he still enjoyed reverting back to a brutal efficiency when it was called for.
The chilling screams emanating from Minister Yuan’s throat resounded down the prison corridors, making the other captives tremble in their cells as they awaited their fate.
Noise tended to carry in here. It was very effective at quelling disharmonious behaviour amongst the prisoners.
Yao Siya shifted in his seat near the gate of the cell that he was visiting, already impatient even though he had scarcely arrived. Ordinarily, he would have been happy to take his time but there was so much else that required his attention. He’d hardly slept since the incident in the inner palace three nights ago, only managing to catch some shut-eye here and there at the barracks or whichever forsaken place his work took him to.
Ever since the arrest of Minister Yuan and his family, His Majesty had yet to hold another morning court, preferring to let them sit back and wonder just what sort of sordid little secrets about themselves the brocade guard were obtaining. The tension brewing amidst the nobles in the capital was almost palpable and for the first time in years, the red uniforms of the brocade guard could be seen out in the streets in broad daylight.
Everyone was waiting for baited breath to see whose door they stopped at next.
Personally, Yao Siya was of the opinion that they should just do away with all the old nobles and be done with it. He knew that was an inelegant solution, that the politics of the region didn’t allow for that to happen, but it would solve a lot of problems...and allow him to crawl back to his lovely bed in his lovely palace with his lovely warm boy preferably waiting in it.
Said lovely warm boy was probably also really mad with him by now—
He stopped thinking about Hua Zhixuan before he could properly start. This wasn’t the time or place and he didn’t want to dirty such precious memories by mixing them in with the ugly ones he kept of his job.
"Who else is involved?" he asked again, once there was a lull in the pained shrieking and Minister Yuan had quietened down to wordless ragged gasps. "The right prime minister? The other old nobles...A warlord playing games from a distance or even one of His Highnesses, perhaps? I’ve provided you with a wealth of options, the least you could do is pick one and put us all out of our misery, my lord."
Minister Yuan opened his mouth to spit blood out in Yao Siya’s direction. Yao Siya’s eye twitched and he moved his foot further away from the glob on the floor. If he were in uniform he would have batted an eyelid but he was in a set of robes that gentle, tea-scented hands had helped smooth over his shoulders just earlier that morning.
"Break his wrist next."
Minister Yuan let out a despairing moan. "Stop," he cried. "This official wants to speak to His Majesty, you cannot do this, you have no evidence of any crimes, how can you arrest me?! Do you know who I am? Do you know my rank?! Where is the justice?!"
A flicker of astonishment crossed Yao Siya’s face and he turned to his second-in-command. "What, were all of you dressed in undergarments when you went to arrest this poor gentleman?"
His second-in-command promptly choked. "No, sir. We were all appropriately attired, sir."
"By which you mean you were in uniform and there was no possibility that our good Minister Yuan here had no idea who hauled him out of his ridiculously lavish house and into prison?"
"Of course, sir."
Yao Siya tut-tutted. He realised he’d developed the tendency to do that before saying something particularly mean, a bad habit he’d picked up from his friendly banter with the harem.
"Minister of Finance Yuan Zhi, have all the years spent attending morning court taught you nothing but greed and corruption? As a dishonest official, you’d think the first thing you’d learn is to avoid the brocade guard’s attention, or at least learn the conditions for arrest...of which there are none."
That was the way the brocade guard worked, which was why they consistently competed with the Eastern—and now possibly also the Western—Depot as being the most hated institution in the eyes of the officials. As the emperor’s loyal dogs, they went where they were told and bit who they were told to bite, no questions asked. They only took orders from one man and didnt have to worry about the convoluted wording of the law because their very existence already circumvented that.
They were made to supervise officials, from the highest of prime ministers down to the lowest of town constables. They policed those that policed the rest of the kingdom and they did so on the behalf of the ultimate authority.
"You’re the captain of the brocade guard?" Minister Yuan said suddenly. He made to scramble forward but most of the bones in his left hand had been smashed into irreparable fragments and he was unable to use it to pull himself up, could only wriggle with the help of his right hand and knees. "Help me tell His Majesty that I know who was responsible for it all, I didn’t want to do any of it but they made me, I am loyal to the throne, I had no choice..." He broke down into heaving sobs. With his grey hairs and his despairing voice, it was a heartwrenching sight to see him feeling around feebly with his eyes blindfolded like a beggar searching for a coin in the street. Or it would be for anyone with a conscience...who didn’t know the truth.
Yao Siya slumped over the armrest of his chair and let out a lazy yawn. "Setting aside the numerous offences regarding the amount of money you’ve siphoned each year from the military resources sent to the north, would you like to explain why the body of a victim was found within your sedan?"
Minister Yuan froze. "W-what? That’s impossible!"
Naturally he would think so. A court official that headed a ministry had no need to jeopardise his career and life by ferrying dead bodies across the capital. It had taken the brocade guard and the other relevant branches of Kaiming a while to figure out how their elusive killer was carrying out his deeds even with the ongoing curfew. They had insider help in the patrol units, certainly, but for no one to see the bodies being transported around, there had to be something more to it than that.
Lo and behold; even their suspicious emperor had underestimated just how deceitful his officials could get. In order to avoid the administrative aspects of the capital from shutting down, His Majesty had little choice but to permit officials to travel the streets in the evening as long as they could prove they were out on official business. The problem being, all manner of business could count as such, working late in the ministries being one of them.
If Fifth Official Wu hadn’t noticed the metallic scent of blood clinging to the curtains of a lower seven official’s nondescript sedan and deployed his men to investigate further, they might not have realised the sheer number of foolhardy individuals out there willing to risk their lives to gain an edge against the emperor.
If Yao Siya were His Majesty, his heart would freeze (3) over too.
These officials they’d arrested had refused to point the necessary fingers at anyone but Minister Yuan. Yao Siya had seen enough evil in this world to understand the concept of ’scapegoating’. He also knew that even if they arrested Minister Yuan, this self-serving coward might not dare to tell the whole truth, especially if there was someone even more powerful and influential behind him.
The only way they could pry answers out of him was to make him believe that he’d been abandoned.
Let the dogs bite each other (4).
"They must have set me up." Minister Yuan was babbling by now. "Now that everything has gone wrong, those bastards want to pin it on me!"
Yao Siya sighed. He didn’t know whether to be pleased that Minister Yuan was going along with the ruse so smoothly or worried that this was the calibre of the high-ranking officials in His Majesty’s court. It was a miracle that the kingdom was still standing.
"I need names to work with," Yao Siya drawled. "You can cry about your grievances as much as you like but if the brocade guard can’t pin the blame elsewhere, then you’ll just have to be the mastermind, my lord, do you follow?"
Minister Yuan reached for his blindfold but one of the guards in the cell was quick to stop him. Giving him his eyesight back would just be returning a measure of certainty to him and Yao Siya wasn’t keen on that. Not to mention, no outsider should know of his Gracious Consort alias.
(This had everything to do with the dangers of compromising his identity and absolutely nothing to do with his pride.)
"Right Prime Minister Ren told me to help the fourth prince with his plans to take down the imperial noble consort and free His Majesty of impending ruin by a vicious beauty," he said. "It was all done out of the fraternal love His Highness has for His Majes—AHHHHHH!!"
Yao Siya let the hammer slip from his hands to clatter onto the stone underfoot. The torture officials who had been flanking Minister Yuan on either side had stepped back once he’d stood up and approached, cold sweat beading their foreheads now that their boss was no longer smiling.
"If you’re going to lie," he said pleasantly. "I trust you’ll put in more effort for the next one. Don’t let me catch you again, my lord, you won’t like it if I do." One only had so many bones in the body to break, after all.
There was a long silence, where all that could be heard was the dripping of waste water from a leak in the ceiling.
Then, Minister Yuan crumbled. "I was told by Right Prime Minister Ren to implicate the fourth prince if interrogated," he said numbly. "Spare my life, my lord, I don’t know much more than this, the right prime minister had discovered that I falsified some of the ledgers for the imperial coffers and blackmailed me to do his bidding, I really didn’t want to..."
"Oh, I don’t doubt it," Yao Siya agreed. "I’m sure it’s all because of the blackmail and not due to any of the boons he’d promised you once your ploy turned out to be a success."
Minister Yuan didn’t say anything to that, which was just as well. He also didn’t ask any questions, so Yao Siya didn’t bother telling him that the body the brocade guard had found in his carriage had been placed there by the brocade guard themselves.
The emperor could afford to be honourable only when dealing with honourable men.
At this point, he didn’t have much more to ask and Minister Yuan didn’t have much longer to live.
There was just one last thing Yao Siya needed to confirm. He briefly considered asking everyone else in the cell to depart, including his second-in-command, but knew that word of this would undoubtedly get back to the emperor anyway.
Best not to give His Majesty any reason to second-guess his loyalty.
He walked over and stooped down low, his voice now barely louder than a whisper.
"What role does the Hua Family play in this?" he asked.
Minister Yuan lifted his head. "You’re working for them?" he croaked.
Yao Siya didn’t reply, let him interpret the silence for himself.
"Then we’re on the same side...captain, no, brother—" He tried to seize at Yao Siya but Yao Siya shifted away. "Please, help me send word to our master, tell him that I was wrong to be taken in by that wretched Ren Hao, please tell him to save me..."
Yao Siya straightened up, the relief flooding through him leaving him temporarily light-headed. From what it sounded like, the Hua Clan wasn’t involved this time around.
"Lock him up and await further instructions," he commanded. "Ensure he does not die before His Majesty decides his fate."
As he strode quickly through the prison, itching to report his findings as soon as possible so he could go take a well-deserved nap, another subordinate intercepted him with visible trepidation.
Yao Siya cocked an eyebrow. "Bad news, I take it?"
The brocade guard swallowed. "I’m afraid so, sir. The maidservant responsible for leading Imperial Noble Consort Yue to Yuanyin Palace and all the henchmen hired to carry out the plot...have simultaneously died."
Yao Siya’s eyes narrowed. "No one checked their mouths for poison capsules?"
"We did, sir. There was nothing that could have killed them."
He breathed out heavily. Slow-acting poison was the most likely cause of death then. "Whoever had hired them in the first place had never intended for them to survive, regardless of whether or not they had been successful." He had to salute the perpetrator for being so cruel that even the brocade guard, with its fearsome reputation, were caught unawares. "Did they leave us with any useful information?"
His subordinate hesitated. "Only...that they were hired by Imperial Concubine Pei, whose jealousy of Imperial Noble Consort Yue drove him to formulate this foolish plan..."
Yao Siya snorted quite ungraciously. "Yes, because a dying concubine with no family to support has too much wealth and nothing better to do with it. What does he have to be jealous of anyway? One good fucking and all his bones will collapse into bits and pieces, how dumb do these people think we are?"
The crude words coming from such an alluring face must have been too much for his subordinate to bear because the man wouldn’t stop scrutinising the cracks on the wall...was doing everything but meeting Yao Siya’s gaze.
"I...don’t know, sir."
"Forget it. Follow me, you can report this to His Majesty yourself. I don’t wish to bear this sort of news alone." The more of them there were for target practice, the less His Majesty’s ire would land on his poor, long-suffering gracious consort.
Before he stepped out into the sun, he suddenly remembered something and said to his very tactfully silent second-in-command, "Are my robes clean?"
The man blinked, as though surprised that anyone in the brocade guard would concern themselves with such paltry matters, especially their infamously cold-hearted captain. "Yes, sir. Not a stain in sight."
Good. His little rabbit was awfully skittish and the slightest traces of blood would frighten him away. If Yao Siya had to sleep alone again for whatever reason, he was going to apply to be Right Prime Minister Ren’s personal executioner when the day finally came.
