The rain that night was a torrential wall of gray, much like the day of the variety show. Lin Yan sat in the back of her black sedan, her face as pale as the silk scarf knotted at her throat. She looked at her reflection in the darkened window; the woman staring back was a ghost of the CEO she used to be.
The "Three-Year Winter" was ending, but not with a thaw. It was ending with a freeze.
Earlier that evening, she had overheard Zhao Feng in his study. He wasn't talking about business. He was laughing with his mistress—a young starlet who looked remarkably like a twisted, cruel version of Su Qing.
"The doctors say she's barren, Feng-er," the woman had purred. "If she stays the legal wife, I'll always be in the shadows. And my baby... our son... will be a bastard."
"Don't worry," Zhao Feng's voice had been cold, devoid of the humanity he once faked. "The Lin Group is mine now. Her father is senile. She's just a liability. Accidents happen in this weather, don't they?"
Yan hadn't felt fear. She had felt a strange, terrifying sense of relief. Finally, she thought. The cage is opening.
She had dismissed her driver, claiming she wanted to drive herself to the family estate. As she steered the heavy car onto the coastal highway, the headlights struggled against the downpour.
She reached into the glove box and pulled out the only thing she had salvaged from her old life: Su Qing's first demo CD, a scratched disc that had never been released. She put it in.
The haunting melody filled the car. "In the mud, I find my soul... in the rain, I find my goal..."
Yan closed her eyes for a split second, savoring the vibration of Su Qing's voice in the confined space. In that moment, she wasn't the "Barren Wife" or the "Fallen Queen." She was just a woman in love.
Suddenly, a pair of high-beam lights blinded her from the rearview mirror. A heavy SUV was tailing her, swerving aggressively. She tried to accelerate, but her brakes felt spongy, unresponsive—just as Zhao Feng had hinted.
The SUV rammed her rear bumper. The sedan spun.
Yan gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles white. She saw the cliff edge approaching, the black maw of the ocean waiting below.
"I'm sorry, Qing," she whispered as the car broke through the rusted guardrail. "I tried to protect you by leaving, but all I did was leave you alone."
The car plummeted. The impact wasn't a roar; it was a cold, crushing embrace. As the freezing seawater rushed into the cabin, Yan didn't struggle. she reached for the CD player, her fingers brushing the plastic case one last time.
Her last thought wasn't of her empire or her father. It was of a pinkish-purple flower Su Qing had once pointed out behind the studio. "It's beautiful because it survives the storm," Qing had said.
The Aftermath
The news hit the headlines at dawn: "TRAGEDY AT SEA: LIN GROUP EX-CEO DECLARED DEAD IN CAR ACCIDENT."
Su Qing was in the middle of a film set when she saw the crawl on the monitor. She didn't scream. She didn't cry. She simply sat down in her director's chair and watched the rain hit the studio roof.
The world went silent. Every award she had won, every cent she had earned to "be worthy" of Yan, turned into ash in her mouth.
"She waited for me," Su Qing whispered to the empty air. "She waited for three years in that hell, and I was too busy being 'pure' to go get her."
The realization that Yan had died in a "loveless" marriage, while Su Qing had lived in a "lonely" success, was a poison that began to circulate through her veins.
"If you're gone," Su Qing thought, her eyes turning as cold and dark as the ocean that had taken Yan, "then there is no reason for the sun to rise tomorrow."