The low hum of the coffee machine filled the quiet corner of Rothenberg Industries, its faint hiss matching the slow, steady rhythm of Shu Yao's breath. Steam curled in lazy ribbons, catching the light from the high glass windows.
In front of him, the man stood awkwardly—though his gaze tried to play it cool—holding out a single rose. Not an apology. Not a peace offering. Just… a rose.
Chestnut hair, tousled in that careless way that looked more intentional than it should, fell partly over his eyes. His irises were the deep, restless blue of an unsettled sea.
Shu Yao's eyes, however, were fixed only on the rose.
It was beautiful—unreasonably so. A rich, velvet red, without a single thorn along its stem. It looked as though it had been made for hands unaccustomed to pain.
It wasn't that Shu Yao forgave him. Forgiveness was far from his mind. But there was a quiet, unspoken part of him that admired the flower—its delicate defiance, its unflawed edges.
The man's fingers trembled faintly as he held it out, his cheeks flushed in the exact shade of its petals. His breath caught, as though the silence between them were a fragile thread he might break.
Shu Yao lifted his hand. Slowly. Deliberately. His fingers hovered over the bloom, so close the air between them seemed to quiver.
And then—
"Gege!"
The voice rang clear, bright, and unmistakable from behind him.
Shu Yao froze. The sound of Qing Yue's voice lingered in his ears, almost too soft to be real, yet sharp enough to cut through the haze around him.
He turned his head, just enough to see her standing a few paces away, framed in the pale industrial light.
The man followed Shu Yao's gaze, his own expression unreadable. Then, as if caught in a moment too fragile for witnesses, he shifted.
The rose vanished behind his back.
He didn't notice the quick footsteps approaching so fast until fingers, small and eager, closed around his wrist.
"Gege!" Qing Yue's voice rang bright, carrying the irrepressible joy of someone who had not yet learned to suspect shadows. Her autumn hair swayed as she all but bounced to his side, her smile wide enough to chase away any lingering quiet. She barely spared a glance for the man with the rose — if she noticed him at all. Her thoughts were elsewhere, fluttering toward the minutes ahead when she would be close to Bai Qi, the man who drew her in like the promise of spring after a long winter.
She tugged Shu Yao toward the far side of the lobby with a force that betrayed her excitement. The paper cup in his hand wobbled dangerously, sloshing the thin ribbon of coffee he'd poured moments before. He hadn't yet tasted it. he'd been too transfixed, too rooted in the sight of that rose.
He took a single step, then glanced back.
The man hadn't moved. He trembled faintly — not from weakness, but from the tension coiling through his hand. His hair caught the morning light at a precise angle, turning each strand into a shimmer of pale gold that framed his face like the edges of a forgotten painting. His eyes, a deep and glacial sapphire, flicked from Shu Yao to the empty space between them, as though measuring the distance to something he could never quite reach.
Then, with a motion as quiet as it was final, he lifted the rose to eye level. His gaze lingered on it, sharp and unyielding, until the petals seemed to shrink beneath it. And then, without ceremony, his fingers tightened. The soft resistance of the bloom gave way, petals folding inward, bruising, breaking. It was an act that spoke not of carelessness but of quiet fury — a controlled destruction.
A metal dustbin stood nearby, its brushed steel surface gleaming dully in the morning sun. He dropped the crushed rose inside; it landed with the muted whisper of something beautiful reduced to waste.
Qing Yue, oblivious, had already led Shu Yao toward the coffee machine's other side, the sunlight from the eastern windows painting their silhouettes across the polished floor. Shu Yao's wrist still felt the echo of her grip, but his mind — his mind was still on that cut Thorne Rose.
The man's gaze followed them for a fraction of a heartbeat longer. Then he turned sharply, heading in the opposite direction, his stride carrying the quiet finality of someone who had already made a decision. His shadow stretched long behind him, severed cleanly from Shu Yao's path, yet somehow still tethered by something neither of them could name.
And when he disappeared beyond the far corner, the lobby seemed to exhale, as if it too had been holding its breath.
They reached the far corridor — a quiet place, away from the hum of cameras and the clink of cups. Here, the air felt still, the kind of stillness that holds its own breath before something important is said.
Qing Yue didn't pause. She stepped into his space, looping her arms around Shu Yao's middle with the ease of someone who had done so countless times in childhood. Her head pressed briefly against his chest, her joy spilling into the gesture. But when she looked up at him, her eyes carried something more — something layered, bright with excitement yet faintly edged with curiosity.
Shu Yao's thoughts were elsewhere, tangled between the memory of the rose still lingering like a phantom in his mind, and now Qing Yue's sudden embrace. His expression, for a heartbeat, was unreadable.
She stepped back, the light from the largest windows pouring over them, turning their outlines into something almost mirrored — twin silhouettes drawn in autumn tones. His ponytail fell neatly down his back, strands brushing the line of his spine. Loose wisps framed his face, catching the light like fine threads of copper. Those long, deep-brown eyes — framed by lashes so delicate they almost seemed to waver under the weight of light — met hers.
Her own autumn hair, cut to her shoulders, shone like a dusk horizon. The golden belt on her black dress caught the sunlight and seemed to pulse with it, a small crown around her waist. And her eyes — wide, doll-like, full of movement — were almost too alive for the still air.
Then she said it.
"Gege… I know what you're hiding."
The words hit him like a stone dropped from a height — sharp, unrelenting, sinking fast into the water of his composure.
Shu Yao stilled. There were things he had buried from everyone — his mother, Bai Qi, Qing Yue herself. Only George knew. But how could she…?
Before he could even begin to put his thoughts into order, she spoke again.
"Gege, why didn't you tell me before?"
Her voice was soft but persistent, as if she had been holding this in for too long.
He blinked, the fog in his head thinning, and she continued, her smile breaking through.
"You told Bai Qi about me… so I could be in this campaign with him, didn't you?"
The knot in his chest loosened a fraction. Relief came, quiet and cautious, though his body still ached — the familiar pull in his back, the dull throb behind his eyes. Was it exhaustion? Or the weight of too many thoughts he never let escape?
Qing Yue's face shifted, her joy tinged with emotion. She hugged him again, tighter this time. Her arms wrapped around him like a promise he had never asked for but always given in return. Shu Yao had always been that brother — the one who would rather break himself than let her stumble, the one who quietly placed her happiness before his own.
And she… she could give him nothing back for that. Not because she didn't want to — but because Shu Yao never allowed anyone to mend him.
The truth was, there was only one person he had ever wanted to heal him.
Bai Qi.
And Bai Qi's gaze… had never lingered on him the way it did on Qing Yue.
That was the part that carved its place deepest inside him.
So Shu Yao smiled — the same flawless smile that kept the world from knowing he was already in ruins from head to toe.
Qing Yue's voice was a fleeting ribbon of sound in the still air.
"Gege, it's Bai Qi's turn in a moment," she said, and the corner of her mouth curved into that luminous smile of hers — the kind that lit her entire face, as though the world had just leaned in to hear her secret. The engagement ring upon her finger caught the overhead lights, scattering them into a pale, trembling halo.
Shu Yao smiled back. Softly. Automatically.
And then she turned, her heels carrying her briskly toward the corridor's far end, vanishing into the glassy architecture of Rothenberg Industries. Her absence felt immediate, almost violent — like the sudden snuffing of a candle in a room otherwise drenched in night. Shu Yao's smile did not disappear all at once. it lingered, lingering like breath on cold glass, until it thinned into something brittle, something that might have once been warmth but had calcified into the faintest bitterness.
The coffee cup in his hand — a flimsy paper vessel — had gone cold. Its weight felt lighter, as though time itself had drained it of purpose. He stared at it for a moment, thumb resting on the rim, feeling the chill seep into his skin. Somewhere inside him, he imagined the taste had turned just as flat, just as empty. And yet he didn't care.
He pressed the rim to his lips.
The liquid touched his tongue in slow procession, a reluctant tide against an unmoved shore. He drank without rush, without thought — as though swallowing the cooled coffee might delay the inevitable march of whatever was to come.
When he reached the far end of the building, the walls opening into a dim cross-corridor, he dropped the cup into a brushed steel bin. The hollow thunk echoed faintly, like the close of a chapter too brief to satisfy.
The clipboard was where he'd left it earlier — on the side table by the lobby's marble pillar, its edges stacked with sheaves of pale paper, waiting in the sterile patience of inanimate things. He took it up again, the cool metal of the clip biting faintly into his palm.
The lobby lay behind him now, its polished floors reflecting a muted winter light through the glass façades. Ahead, the world seemed to stretch in hushed geometry — corridors yawning toward unseen offices, light and shadow folding themselves into each other across the high ceilings.
Shu Yao's steps were deliberate, measured in a cadence that seemed almost rehearsed. His mind, however, was a far less orderly place — a quiet churn of thoughts, of memories slipping like threads through a restless loom.
He passed the expanse of the inner hall where muted conversations hummed in closed meeting rooms, where glass walls caught his faint reflection and fractured it into slivers. Every pane he passed seemed to carry a ghost of himself, fragmented, walking alongside him yet never quite aligned.
The air smelled faintly of cedar polish and the sterile cleanness of recycled ventilation. Somewhere deeper in the building, the faint click of a printer punctuated the stillness.
And then, ahead — the courtyard.
It was an enclosed sanctum at the heart of Rothenberg Industries, a rare concession to openness in a place otherwise obsessed with glass and steel. Beyond the threshold, framed by double panes, it offered the faint illusion of escape: tall ornamental grasses swaying in the late-winter breeze, a line of slate benches half-shadowed by the skeletal branches of leafless trees.
His hand tightened on the clipboard. For a moment, he stood still, poised between inside and out. The air beyond the glass seemed sharper, brighter, and yet colder than the coffee he'd just consumed.
He stepped forward.
The doors opened with a pneumatic sigh, releasing him into the muted chill. Out here, the sound of the building receded — replaced by the soft whisper of wind through dry branches, the distant hum of traffic filtering in from streets far below.
Somewhere, high above, sunlight strained against the overcast sky, its pallid glow catching faintly on the steel edges of the courtyard's design. It felt neither warm nor inviting — only watchful, as if the day itself had paused to see what he would do next.
Shu Yao moved on, his breath visible in the crisp air. Each step across the slate tiles felt like crossing a narrow bridge between moments: the one just behind him, fragile and half-forgotten, and the one ahead, whose shape he could not yet see.
The clipboard shifted in his grip. He adjusted it absently, eyes skimming the far side of the courtyard, where the glass walls of another wing gleamed faintly. Inside, shadows moved — workers at their desks, their faces bent to screens, their lives sealed in the hum of corporate machinery.
And still, he walked.
Perhaps without purpose. Perhaps with too much.
The courtyard, for all its stillness, seemed to echo faintly with footsteps that were not his own.