Wang Chengli glanced briefly in the rearview mirror. "My apologies, Master Xue. The Young Master called while you were inside. He has asked me to bring you to the office. By the time we arrive it will be his lunch hour."
Guiying looked at the back of Wang Chengli's head for a moment.
This was precisely one of the reasons he had hesitated to tell Liu Liuxian his location. He had known, on some level, that telling him would open the door to exactly this kind of thing. The quiet, pleasant, completely immovable kind of management that did not announce itself as management and was therefore very difficult to object to.
At the same time he had also known that if he had not told him, he would never have been allowed to leave the house at all.
He leaned back against the seat.
He shrugged.
It was fine. He needed to collect money from him anyway. He needed at least five million, enough to cover 404's first payment and leave him with something to work with until his investments started producing returns substantial enough to fund the rest of what he had planned. Five million was a reasonable opening request. He was going to need a plan for how to ask for it that did not sound like what it was.
He kept his disguise on. Even in the car, even heading to a building where his husband worked, it was better to stay covered. If pictures were taken, and in a building like Liu Corporation there would be cameras everywhere, nobody looking at the footage would be able to connect the blonde in the camel vest to Xue Guiying.
His mind drifted as the city moved past the windows.
He wondered how the Xue household was handling Shen Zihao this morning.
---
The Xue family sitting room had never felt quite so small.
Shen Zihao sat in the chair that had been offered to him with the composed stillness of a man who was angry in the particular way that did not raise its voice because it did not need to. He was thirty years old, well dressed, handsome in the way his family's money had always ensured, and he was looking at Xue Deyong with an expression that made the older man want to be somewhere else entirely.
"I was told," Shen Zihao said, in a voice that was very quiet and very even, "that everything was arranged."
"It was," Xue Deyong said. "It is. There has simply been a small—"
"Where is he?"
The sitting room was very quiet.
Zhou Meilan, seated to her husband's left, had not spoken since Shen Zihao arrived. Liu Ronghui, in the chair by the window, was looking at her hands. Xue Jiaming and Xue Bowen were not in the room, having found pressing reasons to be elsewhere the moment the car pulled up outside.
"We are currently locating him," Xue Deyong said.
Shen Zihao looked at him.
"You are currently locating him," he repeated.
"He will be found shortly. It is a temporary—"
"I came here today," Shen Zihao said, still in that same quiet and even voice, "to meet my future husband. I was told he would be here. He is not here. And you are telling me you do not know where he is."
Xue Deyong said nothing.
Shen Zihao stood up. He straightened his jacket with the unhurried care of someone who had decided the conversation was over and was now simply waiting for the room to catch up with that decision.
"Find him," he said. "Before I find him myself."
He walked out.
The sitting room remained very quiet for a long time after the sound of the front door closing had faded.
Zhou Meilan looked at her husband.
Xue Deyong looked at the floor.
Neither of them said anything, because there was nothing to say that improved the situation, and they both knew it.
The moment the front door closed behind Shen Zihao, Zhou Meilan's composure dissolved entirely.
"That useless, ungrateful little wretch!" Her voice, which had been carefully contained for the entirety of Shen Zihao's visit, came out with the full force of everything she had been holding back. She stood up from her chair, her hands shaking with the particular fury of a woman whose carefully laid plans had been publicly unraveled by the one person she had always considered beneath her. "I knew it. I knew that thing would cause problems. Twenty three years under this roof, eating our food, breathing our air, and this is what we get? He runs away? He dares to run away?"
She turned on her husband.
"Find him," she said. Her voice had dropped back down but it was worse now, stripped of everything except the cold, hard center of it. "I do not care what it costs. I do not care who you have to call or what you have to do. Find him and drag him back here before Shen Zihao loses patience entirely. Do you understand me? If this arrangement falls apart because of that illegitimate little—"
"Meilan." Xue Deyong's voice was tired.
"Do not Meilan me!" She stepped toward him, and whatever was in her expression made him sit back slightly in his chair. "You let him walk around this house for twenty three years without once putting him in his place properly, and now look. Now look at what your softness has cost us. Fix it. Call whoever you need to call. Hire whoever you need to hire. But find him and bring him back, and when he gets back I will personally make sure he never gets the idea to run again."
Xue Deyong reached for his phone.
The car turned through the gates of Liu Corporation's headquarters and pulled up to the main entrance.
Guiying looked up through the window.
The building was exactly what he expected from a man who owned most of the malls he had shopped from yesterday.
Glass and steel, clean lines reaching upward, the kind of architecture that communicated power without needing to say it directly.
People moved in and out of the entrance with the brisk efficiency of a building that did not have slow days.
He was still fully disguised.
Blonde wig, rimless glasses, mask, camel vest. He looked like a university student who had wandered into the wrong district.