Outside the heavy door of the VIP suite, Drake leaned against the wall. Swirled his scotch with a troubled frown.
He looked at Lu. Voice dropping into a low, jagged whisper.
"Are you really going through with this? This is dark, even for you." A pause. "What happens when she finds out? She'll hate you until the day she dies."
To the rest of the world—and to Liulian herself—Lu Zhouyue was the guardian angel who appeared in her hour of need. A savior with a price, perhaps. But a savior nonetheless.
The truth was a jagged blade.
Her father's "crimes" weren't supposed to lead to a life sentence. It was Lu who had reached into the gears of justice from the shadows. Twisting the evidence until it became a death warrant.
He had manufactured her desperation. Engineered her father's ruin. Then "coincidentally" crossed her path when she was too broken to see the blood on his hands.
He knew her better than she knew herself. For her father, she would set her own soul on fire.
---
Lu poured himself a glass. Expression a mask of frozen marble.
"I'm not afraid of her hatred." His voice a hollow rasp. "I'm afraid that if I don't claim her now, she'll never be mine. Not in this lifetime."
A flicker of agony crossed his eyes. Then his gaze turned back to ice.
Drake didn't understand the urgency.
Until Lu added one final, chilling detail.
"Chris is coming back. In a few days."
The silence in the hallway became deafening.
Drake finally understood the frantic, predatory pace of Lu's plan.
He watched in silence as Lu set down his glass. Bent over. Scooped the unconscious girl from the sofa.
"What is it about her?" Drake called out to his back. Voice thick with frustration. "What makes her so special that you've spent a decade tearing your own life apart for her?"
Among their circle of elite heirs, Lu was the oldest. The most powerful. The most tortured.
While the others played the field—burning through women and money—Lu had been a monk to a ghost. Obsessed with a girl who didn't want him.
Lu let out a dry, self-mocking laugh. Didn't stop walking.
He asked himself that same question every night.
She wasn't a goddess. Didn't have a supermodel's curves or a saint's pedigree. Her family was a mess. Her temper was a weapon. She treated him like a plague.
Her heart belonged to another man.
Yet she was the only air he could breathe. A fever in his blood that no medicine could touch.
"I envy you, Lu." Drake's voice echoed behind him. Hollow. "At least you can hunt what you want. Fight for your own obsession." A bitter laugh. "Look at me—my marriage is a corporate merger. I'm just a tool for the family legacy."
Lu stopped for a fraction of a second. Grip tightening on Liulian's slight frame.
"If your father was a man who traded human lives for promotions, a man who framed the innocent just to climb another rung of the political ladder… you'd rebel against his 'arrangements' too." His voice dropped. "Your father is a man of honor, Drake. Sacrificing for him means something."
Lu's own father, Lu Fangting, was a name he loathed to even speak. A man who inspired only disgust and cold disappointment.
If he had a father he could respect, perhaps he would have played the dutiful son.
Instead, he had become a man who trusted no one. Took everything by force.
---
He didn't wait for a response.
Carried her through the winding, dimly lit corridors of the club. Heavy bass fading into a heartbeat.
He stepped out into the night air.
The lyrics of an old song pulsed in his mind:
*"If you were to peel back the layers of my heart, one by one… you would be terrified. You would find that you are my darkest, most suffocating secret."*
Years ago, I returned to this city for the first time in six years.
I was there to visit Drake. Zhuo Tingfeng. He'd just been hauled back from the States by his father to take over the family's elite academy.
Drake was drowning. Suffocating under the "Old Man's" stifling rules. His telephonic rants were so pathetic I finally gave in and flew back. To check on him. And to handle a few offshore accounts for my firm.
Before that? I was a ghost.
I'd severed ties with my father, Lu Fangting. Stayed in the U.S. for six long years.
---
My father had a blueprint for my life. The military academy.
He wanted a son with brass on his shoulders. A powerhouse for his own political climb.
But growing up in his shadow? I'd seen enough. The cold, rotting machinery of the bureaucracy.
I refused to be a pawn in his game of thrones.
I told him I was leaving. Told him I was going to study Economics and Architecture in America.
He lost his mind.
Threatened to disown me. Cut off every cent of my inheritance. Personally called the parents of all my friends, forbidding them from lending me a single dollar.
He thought hunger would bring me to my knees.
He underestimated me.
I left with nothing but the price of a one-way ticket. Earned myself.
In a country where I was a nobody, I clawed my way up. Grueling shifts. Sleepless nights.
Finished my double degree in two years.
Next four? Built my own company from the dirt. Took it public on the Nasdaq.
Never called him. Never looked back.
---
My mother's marriage died the day I left.
She moved out of the Lu mansion. Retreating to a mountain temple. Living a life of near-total seclusion.
I asked her once how she could have married a man so consumed by greed and self-interest.
She just looked at the mountains.
"He wasn't always this way, Zhouyue. He was honest once. Just. Righteous." A pause. "But power is a gravity that pulls you off your moral axis. Until you don't recognize the ground anymore."
---
I was leaning against the window in Drake's office. Half-listening to his endless complaints about his father's "tyranny." Blowing smoke into the afternoon air.
Then I saw them.
Two girls walking down the stone path below. One in red with short hair. The other—a vision in black. Long, silken hair cascading down her back.
Carrying textbooks. Whispering.
Suddenly, the girl in black let out a laugh.
A bright, crystalline sound. Cut through the stagnant air of the campus.
In that heartbeat, my world shifted.
The afternoon sun was blinding. But her smile was hotter. Brighter. Seared itself into my retinas. Blurring everything else into insignificance.
Irrational. Sudden.
A chemical explosion in my chest.
Drake realized I'd stopped listening. Barked my name. Frustrated that his pity party had lost its audience.
I didn't turn around.
My eyes remained locked on that receding silhouette in black. Until she vanished around the corner.
"Drake."
My voice sounded like it belonged to a stranger.
"Do you believe in a thing called… love at first sight?"
The morning light was a serrated blade cutting through my hangover.
I woke up with a skull-shattering ache. Rolled over in the massive, unfamiliar bed.
My eyes landed on the bedside lamp. An ornate, vintage piece of crystal and gold.
My heart stopped.
I knew that lamp. Three years ago, in a rain-drenched nightmare, that was the last thing I saw before my world ended.
The headache vanished. Replaced by pure, cold adrenaline.
I scrambled upright. Realized I was wearing nothing but an oversized male T-shirt. Checked beneath the hem.
No soreness. No bruises.
A jagged breath of relief escaped me.
The door clicked open.
A maid stepped in. Bowing low.
"Madam Lu, these are the clothes Mr. Lu prepared for you."
*Madam Lu?*
The words didn't compute. My brain short-circuited for a heartbeat.
Then the realization hit me like a physical blow.
I lunged off the bed. Grabbed the maid by her collar. Voice cracking into a frantic shriek.
"What did you call me? What did you just call me?!"
The maid paled. Trembling in my grip.
"It—it was Mr. Lu… he instructed the entire staff to address you that way, Madam."
"What's the commotion?"
A low, vibrating baritone cut through the room.
I looked up. Trembling.
Lu Zhouyue stood in the doorway. Clad in charcoal running gear. Skin flushed from a morning jog. Beads of sweat glistening on his face.
Dangerously healthy. Dangerously masculine.
I ignored his beauty. Ignored the way sunlight caught the muscles of his arms.
Surged forward. Grabbed his wrist. Pointed at the maid with a shaking finger.
"She called me Madam Lu. Said you told her to." My voice cracked. "Am I hallucinating? Is everyone in this house insane?"
Lu gave the maid a sharp, silent nod.
She scurried out like a ghost.
He didn't pull away. Instead, his large, warm hands clamped around my shivering ones. Pinning them still.
"You didn't mishear her." His voice calm. Steady. An anchor. "And they aren't insane. I gave the order."
"What?"
My head felt like it was exploding. Stared at him. Mind spinning. Unable to grasp the logic of his words.
His gaze dropped.
Because of my frantic movements, the oversized T-shirt had slipped. Exposed the sharp line of my collarbone. The swell of my breast.
I stood there. Bra-less. Half-exposed. Radiating vulnerable heat that made his jaw tighten. His throat move in a hard swallow.
Too shocked to care about modesty.
He forced his eyes back to my face. Voice dropping into dangerous, gravelly tone.
"You signed the agreement last night, Liulian." A pause. "The terms were clear. I save your father. In exchange, you become my wife."
He held my gaze.
"So tell me… what else should they be calling you?"
---
The world went black for a second.
My knees buckled.
His powerful hands caught me. Hauled me against his chest. Refused to let me fall.
I looked at the man inches from my face. Blood boiling with a rage so thick I could barely breathe.
"Lu Zhouyue… you… you…"
Then the final piece of the puzzle clicked.
I shoved him away with every ounce of remaining strength. Eyes wide with new, terrifying clarity.
"You and your father… it's a masterpiece, isn't it?"
My voice shook.
"A tag-team execution. Lu Fangting frames my father. Destroys his reputation. Sends him to the gallows." A jagged breath. "And then you sweep in as the savior to claim the spoils. To claim *me.*"
How could I have been so blind?
He was the son of Lu Fangting. In this city, everyone knew the blood-feud between my father and his. They had been rival Deputy Mayors. Clawing at each other's throats for decades.
This wasn't a rescue.
It was a harvest.