The grand house was a tomb of silent indifference, its marble floors and high ceilings only amplifying the deafening quiet that existed between them. For weeks, the pattern was unchanging: Gu Yichen would leave before dawn, a ghost in the hallway, and return late at night, a stranger moving through the shadows. The only communication they shared was through the unspoken language of avoidance. Mei Lian lived on her side of the house, a prisoner in a gilded cage, her days a monotonous blur of loneliness and the dull ache in her heart. She often found herself wandering through the sprawling estate, her hands tracing the cold lines of the furniture, her mind replaying the same loop of what-ifs and could-have-beens. She was a silent observer in a life that was supposed to be her own.
But one night, the pattern broke. The hour was late, the city long since asleep, when a car door slammed outside, a jarring sound that shattered the perfect silence. Moments later, the front door creaked open, and a figure stumbled into the foyer. It was Gu Yichen, but not as she had ever seen him. The crisp, clean lines of his tuxedo were rumpled, his tie was loose, and the scent of alcohol and cigar smoke clung to him like a second skin. He moved with a heavy, uncoordinated grace, his movements unlike the sharp, controlled man she knew. He was a different person in this state-vulnerable, broken, and unburdened by the cold façade he wore every day.
His eyes, when they finally found her standing in the hallway, were unfocused, glazed over with a deep, sorrowful emptiness she recognized all too well. It was the look of a man grieving so profoundly he could no longer hold himself together. For the first time since her return, he didn't look through her. He looked at her, and in that gaze, something in her brittle heart sparked with a dangerous, foolish hope.
He began to walk toward her, his footsteps heavy on the polished floor. Mei Lian felt a tremor of fear mixed with an overwhelming, desperate longing. Her body tensed, her mind screaming for her to run, but her feet were rooted to the spot, a moth drawn to a flame. He reached her, his hand coming up to gently, almost tenderly, touch her cheek. His touch was a startling contrast to the frigid silence he had maintained. Her breath hitched in her throat. Could this be it? Was this the moment the ice finally began to melt?
"Huayin," he whispered, his voice thick with a pain that was older than memory.
The sound of her sister's name was not a word, but a knife twisting in the wound of her heart. It was a cold, sharp blade that sliced through the fragile hope she had just allowed herself to feel. He leaned in, the scent of him overpowering, and his kiss was not her own. It was a kiss meant for a ghost, a desperate, sorrowful claim on a woman who was no longer there. His lips were harsh and desperate, his hands not gentle as they moved to hold her. Her body trembled under his touch, not with desire, but with a profound, bone-deep sorrow. He forced himself upon her, his grief a heavy, suffocating weight, a cruel, violent reminder of her place as a replacement.
Every part of her being screamed in silent agony. The physical pain was nothing compared to the emotional desolation. She was a stand-in for his grief, a temporary cure for a wound that would never heal. As his body moved against hers, his breath on her neck, he whispered the name again and again, a desperate, broken prayer to a woman who would never answer. "Huayin, Huayin, why did you leave me?"
In that moment, the last shred of the girl who had loved him since childhood shattered into a thousand irreparable pieces. The hope she had held onto, the foolish belief that he might one day see her for who she was, was gone. She was nothing to him. A shadow. A vessel for his grief.
The morning after was even worse. He woke alone, the memory of the night a foggy, distorted nightmare. He didn't look at her, didn't speak a word. The coldness was back, sharper and more painful than before. The subtle flicker of connection from the previous night was extinguished, replaced by a deep-seated shame and a renewed wall of ice between them. The scar that had been left was not just on her body, but in her soul. It was a wound that she thought would never heal, and in the lonely nights that followed, her silent tears were the only witnesses to a love that had not only been rejected but had now been violated and used. The marriage that began as a business deal was now an unbearable, living nightmare.
And it was in the suffocating silence of that morning that a new, terrifying possibility began to take root in Mei Lian's mind-a possibility that would change the course of her life forever, and one that she could never, ever tell him about.