Cassian unfolded his arms. He straightened from the balcony door and took one step toward her. Just one. But the way his gaze shifted as he spoke made that single step feel like an advance across an entire battlefield.

"A kiss can be placed there." His eyes dropped to her neck, to the tendon running along the side of her throat, and the weight of his stare pressed against her skin with the same heat his mouth had left behind minutes ago. Cixi’s hand moved involuntarily to her throat, her fingers touching the exact spot his lips had traced.

"There." His gaze rose to her earlobe, and the memory of his mouth pressing against that delicate curve of flesh hit her so hard that her knees softened once more and she shifted her weight to stop herself from swaying.

"And your delicate, slender neck." His eyes lowered to her closed eyelids, and she felt the phantom brush of lips she had never actually received there, her lashes fluttering as though her body was already preparing for a contact that existed only in his voice.

"Here." His gaze descended to her collarbones, visible above the neckline of her oversized dress, and something tightened in the base of her throat like a fist closing around her windpipe.

"Your navel." His stare dropped to her stomach, tracing the flat line of her abdomen beneath the loose fabric as if there was an X-ray in his mind, and he watched with an intensified focus that the muscles below her navel contracted on their own. A slow, involuntary clench that sent a churning heat twirling through her lower belly.

He named each location as if reciting a textbook, but his eyes told a different story entirely. They moved across her body with a territorial possessiveness that turned each word into a claim, each glance into a touch, and each pause between sentences into the space where her resistance was supposed to live and was rapidly failing to.

Cixi stood rooted to the spot. She wore a loose, oversized dress that revealed nothing, covered everything, concealed every line and curve of her body beneath layers of shapeless fabric. And yet, Cassian’s lingering gaze made her feel bare.

The churning in her lower belly intensified. Her thighs pressed together, an instinctive response she could not control, and she prayed he had not noticed. Her breathing had gone shallow, and every inhale brought the lingering scent of his cigarette smoke and cologne back into her lungs, flooding her with the sensory memory of his chest against her back, his arm around her waist, his mouth on her nape.

He was cunning. Cixi screamed in his head, but her body screamed for his touch that she wouldn’t accept it. Never.

She needed to speak. She needed to shatter whatever spell his voice and his eyes were weaving around her before she lost the ability to think altogether.

"The contract," she managed, and her voice came out rougher than she recognised, "was written with the understanding that a kiss means lips to lips. You knew that when you signed it. You knew exactly what I meant."

"Did I?" Cassian’s lips curved upward. One corner. Just one. The same slow, devastating pull she had seen a hundred times, the smile that carried no warmth and all danger, the smile that told her he had been waiting for her to say exactly that.

"Then perhaps," he took another step closer, and Cixi’s spine stiffened, but her feet did not move, "you should have been more specific in your drafting."

He stopped so close that she could smell the smoky cedar on his skin. Close enough that if he reached out, she would be in his arms.

He did not reach out.

He simply looked at her, his gaze resting on her lips for three full seconds before rising back to her eyes with an expression that told her the conversation was not over, the contract was not as airtight as she believed, and the next time his mouth found her skin, it would not be her neck.

"I suggest you go home and reread the clause, Lousy Kisser." His voice dropped to a murmur. "Before I find more definitions to teach you."

"Stop ordering me around!" Cixi gritted her teeth. She opened her mouth to fire back, but Cassian spoke first.

"So let me understand your position." He tilted his chin downward, his gaze locking onto hers with an amused precision that made her stomach tighten. "You prefer that when I kiss another woman, I restrict myself exclusively to her body parts." Cixi frowned at his words. Why did it sound like nightmaresish? Why did she want to slap Cassain for uttering those words?

"That is the arrangement you are comfortable with. My mouth on another woman’s lips is forbidden. And as long as I follow the correct anatomical placement." He looked at her stormy expression. "Is that what you are telling me?"

The words landed in Cixi’s ears like a grenade with the pin already pulled.

Her mind went white.

Not the blank, static white of speechlessness she had experienced earlier when his mouth had been on her neck. This was a different kind of white. The blinding, searing white of a realisation so catastrophic that every thought in her brain collided at once and produced nothing but wreckage.

The Grim Reaper’s curse.

The contract she had signed was not the one sitting in Cassian’s briefcase. The real contract, the one that governed her life, her soul, and every breath she took past midnight, had been sealed with the ex-Empress of the Qing Dynasty. The terms were etched into the marrow of her existence: if the person Cassian kissed placed on anyone other than her, that person would fall under the Cixi’s cursed list. And the curse did not stop there. It would tether itself to Cixi, weaving a new obligation into her already impossible workload. She would have to make that person fall in love with her, too...