Evening folded itself over the city like a tired sigh—soft, amber-tinged, and worn around the edges.
Inside the towering building, the fluorescent hum of duty still clung to the walls. Some desks now sat abandoned, their chairs turned slightly, the ghost of productivity lingering like perfume after someone's left. Others—like Shu Yao's—still glowed dimly in the hush, a single desk lamp cradling him in yellow solitude.
He hadn't spoken in hours.
His fingers worked quietly over the final page, the soft scratch of pen against paper like a lullaby he never heard as a child. The room was slowly thinning—of people, of noise, of breath. And still he remained.
Shu Yao's body, slender and bone-tired, had grown heavier somehow. His hands ached, shoulders curled slightly forward as if trying to hold something invisible from spilling. Exhaustion was not new—but today it clung differently, like a coat soaked in memory.
The last file—one not meant for him—sat there, abandoned by someone else, fatefully misplaced near his desk.
His gaze drifted toward it.
It wasn't his job.
But neither was enduring things he'd never asked for—and yet he did that, too.
He stood, or tried to. But his legs betrayed him, stiff and half-asleep from hours folded beneath the desk. The numbness struck hard, like cold iron in his veins, and he nearly collapsed. A hand braced against the edge just in time, knuckles pale.
He didn't curse. Shu Yao never did.
He waited, silently, until the needles of sensation stabbed back into his feet—then stood again, slower this time, like someone carrying too much and trying not to spill a single thing.
The hallway stretched before him, hollow and glossy. Each step echoed like a question no one dared answer. He clutched the file to his chest. His breathing was shallow. He wasn't sure why.
The elevator came with a gentle ting... ting... ting... as if mimicking a heartbeat just before something broke.
Then came the voices.
Raised. Clashing.
Shu Yao froze outside the tall double doors of the executive office, the file trembling just slightly in his grasp. The voices inside were muffled, but not enough.
One was Bai Qi's.
The other—his father.
And though their words blurred together, what Shu Yao heard most clearly wasn't the content—it was the anger.
The kind of anger dressed in disappointment.
The kind of fury too sharp for a room so polished.
He hesitated. His hand hovered near the wood grain of the door, fingers soft against it, unsure. He didn't want to knock.
He didn't want to interrupt.
He didn't want to hear.
But something inside him—some quiet ache for understanding—moved his hand anyway.
The knock was timid. Almost apologetic.
A breath.
Then silence.
The shouting paused behind the door like a curtain held mid-draw.
Shu Yao stood there, small, trembling, with a file not his own, wrapped in bruises no one could see under sleeves too long and silence too loud.
And for a fleeting moment, he wanted to run.
But he didn't.
He waited—for the door, or for fate, to open.
Just as the shouting broke off—shattered mid-echo like glass dropped in a dream—the silence thickened.
Shu Yao stood outside the door, his breathing shallow, the file pressing into his chest like a shield made of paper. And then, from beyond the threshold, a voice sliced the stillness.
"Come in."
Cold. Commanding. The kind of voice that didn't raise itself often—but when it did, it froze everything in its path.
Shu Yao flinched.
His fingers tightened around the file, nails nearly pressing through the thin folder, and yet—he obeyed.
Because that's what you do when you're small in someone else's world.
The door opened with a hush, and he stepped into the space that felt more like a showroom than an office. Glass walls stretched wide, letting in the dying gold of evening, a city glowing far beneath them like it had no idea how people ached above its skyline.
The room was too large for two men. Too clean for the shouting that had just lived inside it.
At the far end, bai qi's father —posture sharp, presence sharper. His ocean blue toned eyes, cold like Storm long forgotten, turned to Shu Yao and narrowed just slightly. Not in concern. In calculation.
Shu Yao's hands trembled as he approached the desk.
He walked slow—like he could outrun attention if his steps were soft enough. His figure, wrapped in a vest that hung too neatly for someone so weary, cast a pale shadow against the polished floors.
He reached the long glass desk and carefully placed the file upon it—like one lays an offering before a god who is known for neither mercy nor wrath, only judgment.
And that was when Bai Qi looked up.
The young boss, draped in his shadow-black suit that shimmered like ink under flame, had been leaning against the edge of the desk, one hand resting near his chin, the other curled near his side. His onyx eyes lifted—and fixed on Shu Yao.
He looked different.
Not the usual quiet.
Not the graceful silence Bai Qi was used to.
No—this was distance.
Like Shu Yao had stepped out of his own body and left something vacant behind.
His eyes were glassy, rimmed with sleepless red. His lips—
Bai Qi's gaze froze.
There, against the paleness of Shu Yao's face, the lower lip bloomed with a bruised hue.
Not the kind earned from clumsy teeth or the cold.
But the kind that came from something else entirely. A pressure. A bite.
Bai Qi's breath caught—not in his throat, but somewhere deeper. The kind of catch you feel in your bones before your mind can even name it.
That bruise wasn't accidental.
And it wasn't innocent.
His father didn't notice. Too absorbed in the folder, flipping through pages with the ruthless efficiency of someone who measured human worth in productivity columns.
But Bai Qi noticed.
Shu Yao turned his face slightly, as if by instinct, pulling the shadow of his cheek away from the line of sight. Whether he knew Bai Qi had seen, he didn't show it.
But something in him shifted—tightened.
As if shame had moved under his skin like a second heartbeat.
Bai Qi didn't speak. Couldn't. His tongue felt heavy.
All he could do was stare—not at the file, not at the silence between them—but at that bruise.
Because bruises fade.
But some stay long enough to become questions.
And this one—
this one had already become a storm.
Shu Yao kept his gaze lowered, sparing his face to the side as if the air itself had grown too intimate.
Bai Qi watched him for a beat too long.
Something unsettled threaded through his thoughts.
That bruise—wasn't fading in his mind. Nor was it easy to ignore. He remembered, too well, the way Shu Yao once avoided the subject of women, how he had brushed away Bai Qi's teasing suggestion to find a girlfriend with polite dismissal and quiet eyes that never really laughed.
But if he wasn't seeing anyone… what was that mark?
Bai Qi turned to his father, a sudden shift in his voice.
"I need to speak with Shu Yao privately."
Bai qi's father, barely looked up. "Don't waste his time. He still has reports to file."
Bai Qi didn't answer. His gaze was fixed on Shu Yao with new weight, unreadable and sharp.
"Come on," he said instead, casually—but the command beneath the words was unmistakable.
Shu Yao flinched—not because the tone was harsh, but because it wasn't. Because even softness felt like pressure now. Because everything did.
Still, he obeyed.
The door clicked shut behind them with a sound too soft for how heavy it felt.
Out in the hallway, the world continued as usual—phones ringing, heels clicking, voices murmuring plans and profit margins. But between the two of them, the silence grew enormous.
Shu Yao didn't speak.
He wanted to go home. Not because he was tired—though he was—but because his fear lingered on quiet city corners, on echoes in alleyways, on the memory of pain swallowed beneath streetlights.
He didn't want to walk the midnight roads again.
Not after what they'd taken from him.
Not when the ghost of it still clung to his ribs.
He stood quietly, his hands clasped behind his back, head bowed as if in penance he didn't owe. The sleeves of his vest hung delicately, hiding wrists that trembled just slightly.
Bai Qi looked over his shoulder—and again, his gaze dropped to Shu Yao's mouth.
The bruise hadn't disappeared.
In fact, it looked darker now, purple ink bleeding beneath fragile skin.
A smirk tugged briefly at Bai Qi's lips, but it wasn't cruel—just confused, maybe amused. He stepped forward and, without warning, clapped a hand against Shu Yao's back.
A harmless gesture.
Friendly.
But Shu Yao winced.
It wasn't sharp—but it was real.
Bai Qi didn't hear the muffled sound of pain that escaped Shu Yao's throat. He didn't see the way his shoulder flinched, or how his breath hitched before returning to forced steadiness.
"Come on," Bai Qi said with that lazy smile, unaware of the invisible strings he was tugging. "Who is she, huh? You didn't want a girlfriend, but now you show up with lips like that? Or are you still charming the ladies behind my back?"
His voice was light, teasing.
But it fell like salt in an unseen wound.
Shu Yao didn't reply.
He couldn't.
Because if he spoke, something else might come out—something cracked, something too honest, too broken. So he stood still, trembling slightly, his voice buried beneath the wreckage of dignity.
And Bai Qi—he didn't see the sorrow resting just behind those brown eyes. He didn't see the red rims, the hollowness of exhaustion, the way Shu Yao's body seemed to fold in on itself like a page crumpled under too many annotations.
He saw only what was easy.
A bruise.
A mystery.
A game.
Not the ache that was trying so hard not to bleed through the seams.
Not the way Shu Yao's silence screamed.
He saw only the surface.
The rest—
the rest he never thought to read.
Shu Yao stood still beneath the hallway light—its glow pale as milk, casting him in the soft, unforgiving clarity of early evening. His eyes, red-rimmed from sleeplessness, refused to meet Bai Qi's. He held himself with the quiet poise of someone barely stitched together.
"It was an accident," he murmured, his voice low, ragged at the edges like paper soaked in rain.
Bai Qi raised a brow, unconvinced. "An accident?" His tone curled, playful, but sharp. "Come on, Shu Yao. That's what people say when they crash cars, not when they come to work looking like that."
He circled around him slightly, eyes narrowing—not cruel, just curious. But curiosity, sometimes, was a scalpel.
Shu Yao's lips parted as if to reply, but no sound followed.
Bai Qi, ever the one to push, leaned against the cool wall beside him. His black suit shimmered like ink poured into a mold, perfect and deliberate. The ring on his finger caught the dying light, flashing like a crown he hadn't earned but was born to wear.
Then, teasingly, with a crooked grin:
"So, how was your first night?"
Shu Yao's heart skipped—but his face stayed still. He blinked once, twice. The corners of his mouth stayed flat. A bruise bloomed beneath the silence where words should've lived.
Bai Qi nudged lightly, his voice low and playful. "Come on. We've been friends since… what, You work here now. I'm not being hard on you. You can tell me."
He tilted his head. "Did you charm some poor girl into your arms with all that quiet-boy mystery? Is that it? Is she still asleep in your bed?"
Shu Yao looked down. Not at Bai Qi. Not at anything. His gaze dropped to the floor tiles—grey, smooth, indifferent.
He said nothing.
Because there were no girls. No one wrapped in his arms, tangled in sheets. No kiss shared beneath the moonlight.
Only the ghost of fingertips pressed too hard into his ribs. The memory of breath hot against his neck. The sting of shame written in bite marks and bruises. Hands—uninvited—that had touched him like they owned him.
It hadn't been his night.
It had belonged to someone else.
And yet, here he was—the one wearing its aftermath.
"I want to go home," he said softly, like a confession more than a request.
Bai Qi blinked. "What?"
"I… want to leave early," Shu Yao whispered. "Just today."
The words floated between them, fragile and exhausted.
Bai Qi tilted his head, a smirk still playing on his lips—but his eyes narrowed slightly, reading between lines he didn't yet understand.
"You didn't sleep, huh?" he said, not unkindly, but far too casually. "You look like hell, man."
He didn't know.
He didn't see.
He couldn't.
To him, Shu Yao's hollowed eyes were just evidence of passion, not aftermath. A joke. Not a wound.
Because who could imagine something else?
Who would look at Shu Yao—quiet, composed, tender—and see that?
And Shu Yao, once again, said nothing.
He couldn't tell him that the only thing lingering on his skin wasn't love—but violation.
That what clung to his chest and hips and ribs were not memories, but fingerprints.
That what kept him awake wasn't romance
It was survival.