Yunjinna woke up at six thirty.
Not because she had to.
Because she wanted to.
She lay in her bed for exactly thirty seconds staring at the ceiling, then sat up, pushed her hair back, and reached for her phone.
No messages from Chu Jintan yet.
She'd update him later.
She set the phone down and looked at the wall between her room and the east wing.
Yun Jiao.
She'd spent half the night thinking about that girl and she was not happy about it.
Not happy at all.
She'd shown up yesterday looking like she'd stepped out of a painting, sat through dinner saying all the right things in all the right ways, and somehow managed to make Yunjinna feel like the difficult one without doing anything that could actually be pointed to.
It was impressive, honestly.
Yunjinna hated that it was impressive.
She got out of bed, crossed to her vanity, and looked at herself in the mirror.
Beautiful.
Composed.
The Yun family's real daughter.
She'd been the princess of this house for seventeen years.
She had the friends, the connections, the university pedigree, the wardrobe.
She knew every staff member by name.
She knew which teachers at Jinhao gave out grades generously and which ones didn't.
She knew this city like the back of her hand.
Yun Jiao knew nothing.
Yun Jiao was a girl from an orphanage who had never been anywhere or done anything and had somehow waltzed in here yesterday like she already owned the place.
Yunjinna picked up her skincare and started her morning routine.
She needed to establish something.
Quickly.
Before that girl got too comfortable.
She thought about it while she applied her toner.
The welcome breakfast.
Her mother had planned a small one — just family, nothing formal.
A chance to ease Yun Jiao in gently.
Yunjinna had a different idea.She picked up her phone and typed a quick message.To: Bai Mengqi, Shen Lulu, Zhao XinyiCome over for breakfast.
Bring your A-game.
She set the phone down and smiled at her reflection.
Let's see how well the little orphanage girl handled a room full of Jinhao's finest.
—Down the hall, behind a different closed door, Ruan Suyin was already awake.
She sat at her own vanity in her silk robe, phone pressed to her ear, voice low and unhurried.
"She arrived yesterday,"
she said.
A voice on the other end.
Muffled.
Asking something.
"Prettier than expected."
A pause.
"Smarter than expected too."
Her reflection looked back at her, composed and unreadable.
"It doesn't matter. The timeline stays the same. Liang Boshen is patient."
Another pause. Listening.
"She won't be a problem,"
Ruan Suyin said quietly.
"She's seventeen and she just came out of an orphanage. What could she possibly do?"
She hung up.
Sat for a moment.
Looked at herself in the mirror for a long, quiet second.
Then she picked up her jade hairpin and began putting her hair up.
Breakfast in an hour.
She still had a role to play.
—Yun Jiao had been awake since five.
She hadn't meant to.
Her body had simply decided that five AM was a completely reasonable time to be fully conscious and operational, the way it always had, the way it probably always would, because apparently even getting shot and dying and being reborn into a new life wasn't enough to break a mercenary's internal clock.
She lay in the soft bed for approximately forty-five seconds.
Then she got up.
She pulled on a light jacket over her pyjamas, slipped Hawk into her pocket, and eased the door open without a sound.
The hallway was empty. Dark. Still.Perfect.
She moved.
—The Yun estate at five in the morning was a completely different animal from the Yun estate at dinner.
No performance.
No arranged smiles.
Just a big quiet house breathing slowly in the dark, all its careful surfaces stripped back to something more honest.
Yun Jiao moved through it like she'd lived there for years.
Ground floor first.
She mapped the hallways, the exits, the distance from the kitchen to the back garden gate, the angle of the single camera covering the east corridor and the three-second blind spot it created every time it rotated left.
Three seconds was plenty.
"Hawk," she murmured, barely above a breath."Morning." He sounded alert.
He was always alert. It was one of his best qualities.
"West wing sensor is still down. No one's touched the maintenance request."
"Ruan Suyin's doing."
"Almost certainly."
She turned down the side corridor, past the formal sitting room, past the door that led to Yunting's private wing.
She stopped at the base of the west wing staircase.
Looked up.
Third floor.
Yunting's study.
The safe she needed to get into, with the documents that would tell her exactly what he'd signed and when and who had witnessed it.
Not today.
But soon.
"Second floor window," she said quietly."
Third from the left. Sensor reads green on the system but the magnet's loose.
Push it from outside and it won't trigger."
She fled that away.
"Timeline on Liang Boshen?"
"His meeting with Yunting's finance team is in three days.
But—" Hawk paused.
"There's something else."
"What."
"He sent a gift this morning. Arrived at the estate gate at four AM."
Another pause.
"Flowers. White chrysanthemums."
Yun Jiao looked at the staircase.
White chrysanthemums.
Funeral flowers.
Her jaw didn't move.
Imteresting..
Her expression didn't change.
"Noted,"
she said softly.
She turned and walked back toward the kitchen.
She needed food.
She thought better on a full stomach.