Ming-tsu knew that of the hundred embraces that they had enjoyed, Li had been most aroused the night she had let him thrust his throbbing phallus between the close-set mounds of her luscious breasts. His hands, always manly and strong, had been rougher than usual on her tender breasts that night, crushing them tightly around his cock. So much had he enjoyed it, on that lone occasion when she had submitted to a sweaty, strenuous tit-fucking, that she had withheld that ultimate favor since, telling him, not untruthfully, that her breasts had been sore for days aftewards.

But tonight, under orders from George Chan to produce more information about her lover and his background, she had decided that she would do whatever was necessary to inveigle herself into his confidence. The Chans were lavishly generous to those who served them with unswerving loyalty, - the club, her comfortable living quarters, even the European-style bed in her bed-chamber, were ample testimony to that - as was the very chemise, still hanging by one thin shoulder strap, that she wore. George Chan had acquired a taste for French lingerie while studying in Europe, and had often rewarded her finer erotic performances with the latest (and usually the most shamelessly revealing) creations of the couturiers de Paris, most of which Ming-tsu had been obliged to pack away once she had begun her liaison with Li Chang.

But not withstanding all his gifts of jewelry, clothing, and gold, few had better reason than Ming-tsu to be fearful of of earning the Chans' displeasure. How could she not remember that unforgettable night about a year ago when George Chan, after wringing every last ounce of erotic pleasure from Ming-tsu's superb and willing young body, had told his ambitious young concubine that he had chosen her to spy on Li Chang, the newest lieutenant of the Black Scorpions. It was a precaution, he assured her, that the Chans never failed to take when a new man acceded to that office. Ming-tsu had accepted the mission, anxious to win further favor with her wealthy paramour, and a short time later she had approached Li Chang at the club and seduced him for the first time. It had not been hard to entice him to her bed, nor had it been difficult to half-fall in love with him, even though her mercenary loyalty inevitably remained with George Chan, a man of infinitely more wealth and power. Li Chang was young, good-looking, admirably virile, and most importantly, a quick learner of the things that pleased her most. He had satisfied her as few of the many lovers in her young life ever had. Ming-tsu had no reason to doubt Li Chang's allegiance to the Scorpions - the elan with which he had flogged her after their lovers' quarrel - the Night of the Forty Lashes, as they called it later - the willingness with which he had taken part in the pleasurable punishments of the girls from Madame Wong's - not to mention the stern treatment that he had helped her to administer to their blonde galley-slave - all seemed to provide indisputable evidence that he had the proper personality for a high-ranking officer of the Black Scorpions.

But George Chan wanted more information, and information she meant to provide. Not long ago, after months apart, George Chan had summoned her to his home, and he had subjected her to a vigorous and protracted bout of love-making, during and after which they had partaken liberally of several bottles of rice wine. On that occasion, for once his ever-present insincere smile had left him. Giving her a look of utmost seriousness, he had warned her that the intelligence that she had provided so far about Li Chang was insufficient, and, admonished her strongly not to disappoint him. Then, his judgment, perhaps clouded by the amount of alcohol he had consumed, he proceeded to tell her the story of Chia-lin, who once had been his favorite concubine, but who had been disloyal to the House of Chan. Chia-lin had been a sultry, sloe-eyed pleasure-girl from Kowloon who had attempted to betray the Chans by passing along information about a shipment of opium to a rival Cantonese gang. George Chan had told Ming-tsu how he and his brother Richard had arranged for two of their minions to abduct the south-Chinese beauty in the middle of the night; how the pair of black-robed Scorpions - none other than the gap-toothed Dao, and the huge bovine-faced guard who had admitted George Chan and Erika Weiss to the grounds of the Black Pagoda - had dragged the young beauty, clad only in a filmy nightgown, to the dark cellars of the Black Pagoda; how the Brothers Chan had begun by humiliating her, forcing her to disrobe in front of her leering lower-class abductors, until she had stood shamefully nude before the four men.

George had given a signal to Dao and Zheng - the ox-faced man - then, and the two Scorpions had thrown her roughly to the floor. Dao had pinned her arms while Zheng had unsheathed his huge fleshy weapon and proceeded to pound it into Chia-lin's wriggling body. Then, when the Ox had finished his brutal assault, he and Dao had flipped the beleaguered beauty over on to her knees, so that Dao could thrust his thick cock deep into the hot, tight little rosebud that George had plundered so many times before. Chia-lin, George recalled, had squealed like a Peking piglet, until the Ox had silenced her by stuffing her mouth full with his monstrous cock.

When the Scorpions were done enjoying these pleasant perquisites of their office, George ordered them to tie the girl, with her arms extended high overhead, to one of the stone pillars in the dreadful dungeon. Then he gave them instructions to wrap lengths of thin white cord around her thighs, her waist, and just below her jutting breasts, in order to fasten her to the circular column. At George's command, Zheng used all of his considerable strength to crank a special windlass that tightened the ropes around Chia-lin's body so cruelly that the marks from the fiendish cords would be visible for days. That last mission accomplished, George Chan had dismissed the Scorpions, leaving the helpless Chia-lin alone with George and Richard Chan - and a small porcelain bowl filled with several dozen razor-sharp bamboo splints. George had sat up on the edge of his huge round bed then and gestured for Ming-tsu to take her accustomed position kneeling between his legs while he continued his story. Ming-tsu had obediently begun stroking the insides of his stocky thighs, while her pretty head dipped forward in the direction of his semi-tumescent penis and his hairy testicles. They had made love three times already that night, but the recollection of the ordeal to which they had subjected Chia-lin had begun to arouse him again.

The Masters of the Black Pagoda had begun their interrogation of the alluring young turncoat by inserting splints, one excruciating sliver at a time, into the meaty parts of Chia-lin's upraised arms and shoulders, not neglecting her tender, fear-moistened, armpits. Richard had taken one side of Chia-lin's young body and George the other, and after each had driven a few sharp splinters into an upraised, they had proceeded to plunge a series of cruel spines into the Cantonese beauty's supple thighs. Ming-tsu had listened, mesmerized, as she worshipped the younger Chan's sturdy cock with her mouth, and suckled his bulging testicles as if they were the most delicious fruit of the lychee tree. She remembered how her heart had pounded so loudly - with both fear and excitement - that she feared George would hear her as he continued his cautionary tale of the Chans' revenge.

Ming-tsu soon learned what the strange hunchback had come to know, that George Chan was a master story-teller. As he continued his terrifying and titillating tale, Ming-tsu could almost imagine herself bound to that fearful pillar, the thin-lipped, cruel-visaged Richard Chan to one side, his deceptively beaming brother to the other. Her lovely body, like that of Chia-lin in the story, cold with fear, even though it was covered with rivers of perspiration and thin streamlets of warm, red blood. - Both aroused by and fearful of that memory, Ming-tsu continued to caress her swollen nipple-bud with one hand. Li Chang, flushed with excitement, was stroking his towering erection now. As she watched him pleasure himself, Ming-tsu parted her legs slightly and her left hand lifted the hem of the chemise, letting Li Chang get a visual taste of the sweet, damp petals of her womanhood. Knowing that he enjoyed watching her touch herself, she stroked her vulva artfully and ardently, and closed her eyes, remembering. -

His excitement mounting from her oral caresses, George had gone on to relate how the whimpers of the pretty Cantonese pleasure-girl had grown louder by the time the brothers had embedded the first twenty splinters in her soft flesh. Sensing that her resolve was weakening, but in no hurry to rush the pace of their cruel inquisition, they had continued asking questions about the rival gang, its leaders and their plans as they turned their attention to Chia-lin's inviting midsection, burying splinter after splinter deep in the resilient flesh of her flanks and belly. Chia-lin had begun to talk on the twenty-seventh splint. But it was not until Richard Chan had forced several torturous splinters into the soft rise of her exquisite mons and George had driven three inch-long bamboo slivers into the inner curves of each of her tempting breasts, that her grudging disclosures swelled into an anguished torrent of information, accompanied by despairing pleas for mercy. One by one the names of some of Chia-lin's confederates were extricated under the unrelenting torture. But it was not until Richard Chan had screwed a seventh vicious sliver into her right breast, that she was forthcoming with the whereabouts of the two brothers who had put her up to her treachery.

But even this capitulation had not deterred the Brothers Chan from continuing their pleasurable task. In between occasional sips of brandy from a bottle of Richard's collection of Napoleonic-era French cognac, the two brothers had continued to take turns thrusting what remained of the fifty bamboo splinters deep into her flesh, enjoying each fresh groan of pain that spilled from Chia-lin's pretty mouth. Her cries of suffering had been rewardingly anguished, George recalled, even before he and his brother had lit the first slow-burning splint. George had gone on to tell a secretly shuddering Ming-tsu how he and his brother had used a small taper to set the slender ivory-colored slivers alight, one by one, and watched, in thrall to their sadistic lust, as each tiny flame crept inexorably closer to Chia-lin's smooth golden flesh, and then beneath it, before burning itself out. They lit the spines they had driven in to the fleshy parts of her arms and legs first, preserving the more painful ones that they had jabbed so enthusiastically into her torso, her mound of Venus, and her nubile-nippled breasts for last.

During their preparations, George had stabbed each of Chia-lin's perky chocolate-chip breast tips with a long splinter, and Richard had done the same with the fleshy pink petals of her prominent labia. The nefarious brothers had saved these cruelest slivers for their grand finale, when there were already dozens of small smoky marks all over the front of her body. Richard had gone first, lighting each of the labial splints in turn. As they burned down, they singed what was left of the tiny tendrils of pubic hair which framed Chia-lin's love triangle, still raw from her bullish rape by the bovine Zheng.

George had paused to chuckle to himself, and to pull Ming-tsu's pretty head down more firmly on his swollen cock, before telling his fellatrix how, before applying the lit taper to the first nipple splint, he had upended the bottle of cognac over Chia-lin's left breast. He had carefully poured an ounce or two of brandy over that delectable breast that he had fondled and kissed and playfully bit so many times. He had had to exert a little care to avoid soaking the length of the splint itself, while his former concubine watched in shocked disbelief. Chia-lin's plump breast was sweaty and sweet and sticky with brandy when George held the taper to the tip of the dagger-like stick of bamboo that protruded from the base of her impudent left nipple. Chia-lin must have had some idea of the reason why her breast had been bathed in brandy, because she had begun to whimper fearfully as soon as George set the nipple splint alight. Her whimpers blossomed first into hysterical cries and finally into full-throated screams as the tiny orange triangle burned its fiery trail toward the damp, rounded surface of her breast. When at last the flame reached the place where the bamboo spike was painfully lodged in her crinkly aureole, it ignited the alcohol with a sudden flash of light, and for a split-second Chia-lin's breast was bathed in a glowing ring of fire.

George had smothered the blaze almost instantanteously, but not before the tortured beauty had passed out - more from shock than from pain. George had been compelled to pour a little of the brandy down Chia-lin's throat to revive her. The lovely concubine was still choking and sputtering and begging for them to stop, when the younger Chan had drenched her other love melon with the liqueur. George had then bowed and offered the taper to his elder brother, who had ceremoniously returned the bow. And then Richard Chan, the tyrannical ruler of the Black Scorpions, had lit the second nipple-splinter. Their double-dealing prisoner had convulsed in fresh paroxysms of fear and pain as soon as the alcohol in the brandy flared briefly into flame, before that brief conflagration, too, was quickly stifled by her ever-smiling former lover. The brothers had untied their tormented sex slave then and had taken her over to the very divan on which Peony had been so recently sodomized. There, they had raped her in every way imaginable, both singly and in combination, until she had passed out again.

Chia-lin, George had concluded his story in warning, had returned to consciousness three days later, when she had been woken by the pressure of the hot bowl of an opium pipe against the youthful curve of her left breast. She was lying naked on a filthy cot, surrounded by thick clouds of noxious smoke. Her arms were being held down by a couple of foul-smelling, pig-tailed coolies while two or three other glassy-eyed men groped her tender young flesh, and yet another man, crazed by the Chans' contaminated opium, tried to climb on top of her. George Chan, beaming and jovial once again, had assured Ming-tsu that Chia-lin would not enjoy her new career - as a take-on-all-comers whore in an opium den not far from the docks. And then he had fallen back on the bed in erotic bliss as he let Ming-tsu finish milking his manhood with her mouth and hands. After a few more minutes his climax came and he emptied his organ of lust-juice, firing burst after burst of thick, creamy semen down Ming-tsu's warm throat, as she pondered what her own fate might be if she were to fail at her mission of extracting Li Chang's secrets. -

It was thoughts like these that had passed through Ming-tsu's mind that evening as she had awaited Li Chang's return, and as she had given him the restorative massage. The Chans were more than generous to those who served them well, as she had good cause to know. But they would show her no mercy if she failed. Accordingly Ming-tsu had determined that she would give them the information they wanted. At whatever cost.