The room was dark, lit only by the dying embers in the fireplace. Shadows stretched across the bookshelves like claws.
Li Zeyan stood at the far end of the study, back turned, hands shoved deep in his pockets. His jaw ticked once , hard , as the door creaked open.
"President Li," Shen Rui stepped in carefully.
"Speak."
"The Pai K Clan has requested an urgent meeting. They say if it doesn't happen by tonight, something... irreversible may occur."
Li Zeyan didn't move.
A beat passed.
Then: "He's not afraid anymore, huh?" His voice was quiet, cold. "I must've gotten too soft. That's the problem with mercy, people start mistaking it for weakness."
He finally turned, the fire reflecting in his eyes like the calm before a storm. "Send him a message."
"Yes, sir."
"Tell him if he wants chaos, I'll show him what it looks like when a man who has nothing left to lose... finally stops pretending to play nice."
Shen Rui didn't respond. He simply bowed and left.
---
Li Zeyan sank into the leather chair behind his desk, but there was no ease in his posture. Only tension.
Only silence.
Only war.
He hadn't feared death since the day his parents' car went off that mountain cliff. The screams still visited him in sleep, except now, he didn't wake from them. He welcomed the numbness.
Only his grandparents were left. Grandparents who looked at him like a curse given flesh. They didn't say it outright anymore,they didn't need to. "You should've died with them." The message had already been carved into his skin years ago.
His siblings? Occasionally remembered he existed. A call on holidays. A message when they needed a signature or inheritance cleared. Not warmth. Just reminders of blood, and how empty it could be.
So no, Li Zeyan wasn't afraid of death.
But that girl…
That girl in his house.
She made him feel something dangerously close to it.
He hadn't meant to send the jacket.
It was cold, that's all. That damn room in the Moon Pavilion always held onto wind, and she was the type to sit near windows like a ghost waiting for permission to exist.
So he sent it.
And hated himself for it.
She didn't deserve him. And he certainly didn't deserve her. She was too young. Too soft. Too... calm in her pain.
He had been forced into this marriage, pushed by power games and old family debts, a pawn in his grandfather's dying strategy. And she? She had been thrown into it like a lamb in a wolf's den.
And yet, she smiled.
She wore his shirt, without asking. She curled into it like it was hers. Like it meant something.
It should've pissed him off.
But it didn't.
Instead, the image of her, bare legs tucked under her, his shirt falling over her collarbones, her eyes downcast and unreachable, it crawled under his skin and stayed there.
She didn't seduce. She didn't try. And that... infuriated him.
Because she looked like sin itself, and didn't even know.
She said she didn't want love from him.
Didn't need it.
That should've made it easier.
But somehow, it made everything harder.
Because someone like her… broken in quiet, invisible ways… was far more dangerous than any woman who'd ever begged for his attention.
She reminded him of himself. Before the world shattered him.
But his pieces were too sharp now. He had become the kind of man who didn't just walk away, he made others bleed for getting close.
She was broken, yes.
But he was ruined.
And there was no coming back from that.
Not now.
Not ever.