He looked at it for a moment, then set the phone face down and returned his attention to the presentation.
His phone lit up again.
**¥95,000 has been deducted from your XXX account.**
Then again.
**¥120,000 has been deducted from your XXX account.**
The financial director paused mid-sentence. "President Liu, is everything alright?"
"Continue," Liuxian said.
His phone lit up two more times in quick succession.
He picked it up, looked at the running total, set it back down, and folded his hands on the table with the composed expression of a man who had told someone to shop freely and was now experiencing the precise and natural consequences of that instruction.
"Continue," he said again.
Guiying checked the estimated delivery times on his orders, scrolling through the confirmation pages one by one. Same day delivery across the board. The perks, apparently, of shopping from malls owned by your husband.
He set the tablet down on the low table and looked out over the garden.
He had done it. He had actually done it. The fate that had swallowed him whole, the first time around was sitting somewhere in the future, waiting for a version of him that no longer existed. Shen Zihao would show up to the Xue household tomorrow to inspect the product he believed he was acquiring, and he would find nothing.
He thought about Liu Liuxian.
He hoped, genuinely and without much basis for it yet, that he was a better man than Shen Zihao. On the first day of that marriage, before the ink on the certificate had even dried, Shen Zihao had beaten him until he could not stand and then did what he pleased with him. Legally. Because the law had looked at that certificate and decided that whatever happened behind closed doors between a husband and his Omega was not its concern.
He pushed the memory down.
Liu Liuxian did not feel like that kind of man. He could not sense any aggression from him, not the coiled, waiting kind that Shen Zihao had always carried beneath his pleasant surface. He had looked at Guiying today with amusement and mild curiosity, not with the particular hunger of someone cataloguing what they intended to take. The staff here did not move like people who were afraid. In Shen Zihao's household everyone had been afraid, from the lowest maid to the senior staff, afraid of his voice, afraid of his footsteps, afraid of the sound of a door opening at the wrong time.
Shen Zihao had been a demon from the deepest pits of hell dressed in a tailored suit.
Perhaps Liu Liuxian was a wolf in sheep's clothing. Perhaps in a week or a month the mask would slip and Guiying would find himself back at the beginning of a nightmare he recognized. But he could not sense it. Not yet. And he had learned, across five years of surviving Shen Zihao, to trust what he could and could not sense.
He exhaled slowly.
Now that he had left the Xue household, the question was how long before anyone noticed. He had not taken anything conspicuous. He was not the type to run. Nobody would look at his empty room and immediately think escape. They would assume he was somewhere in the house, then somewhere in the city, and by the time the picture became clear it would be too late to do anything about it.
Tomorrow was when the real trouble would begin. Shen Zihao would arrive at the Xue household to inspect the Omega he believed he was about to marry, and the Xue family would have no choice but to tell him that said Omega was nowhere to be found.
He almost wanted to see Shen Zihao's face when he heard that.
Almost.
He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes for a moment.
Thinking about his entire life felt, sometimes, like being an unfortunate side character in someone else's story. What had he done? What god had he offended, in what lifetime, to deserve the one he had been handed? He could still feel the scars of his past life like phantom pain, present in the body's memory even when the body itself no longer carried them.
He opened his eyes.
The afternoon light had shifted while he was sitting there, stretching longer across the balcony floor. His stomach, reminded by the quiet and the stillness that it had not been fed since early morning, made its position known.
Footsteps approached from inside the room.
Wang Chengli appeared at the balcony doorway. "Master Xue, lunch is ready whenever you are."
Guiying stood up and followed him inside.
The corridor felt warmer than he remembered it being on the way up. He noticed it without immediately understanding it, that particular close warmth that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.
He knew what it was.
His heat was coming. He could feel the early edges of it, faint but unmistakable. Living in the Xue household, constantly saturated in the ambient pheromones of Alphas and the suppressants he had been quietly managing for years, had disrupted his cycle more times than he could count. Now that he was out of that environment the disruption was correcting itself, and apparently it intended to do so soon.
He would need to order suppressants. Today, before it became urgent.
He also noted, filing it away quietly, that most of the staff he had encountered appeared to be Betas. Wang Chengli was the exception, his Alpha designation detectable but controlled, professional, entirely unthreatening. Other than him, Guiying appeared to be the only Omega in the household.
That was, at least, a relief.
He sat down at the dining table.
The spread Old Li had prepared was generous and thoughtful, more dishes than one person needed for lunch, arranged with the particular care of someone who wanted a guest to feel welcomed on their first day. Guiying looked at it for a moment.
"Thank you," he said quietly, to no one in particular and to Old Li specifically, wherever he was.