The bedroom was cold and dimly lit, the curtains drawn shut against the evening light. Xue Guiying sat on the edge of the bed with his hands folded in his lap, his eyes fixed on the floor. Dark hardwood, polished and expensive, the kind that showed every scuff and footprint. He had memorized every grain of them over five years.
"Five years."
His husband's voice was calm. It was always calm. Guiying had learned early in the marriage that calm was not the opposite of cruelty; sometimes it was simply its preferred delivery method.
"Five years of my life, wasted on you."
He did not look up. He had learned the cost of looking up at the wrong moment.
His husband walked slowly across the room, his footsteps measured and unhurried. He stopped near the window, poured himself a drink, and the clink of glass against glass rang sharp in the quiet.
"I had plans. I had a future. And then they gave me you." He swirled the glass once before setting it back down. "I hate coming home to this house. I hate looking at you. I hate that you exist in my space and breathe my air and have given me absolutely nothing in return."
He turned around.
"Not even a child. Five years, and you couldn't give me even that. What exactly are you for, Guiying? What is the point of you?"
Guiying thought, with the flat exhaustion of a man who had long since stopped expecting anything different: there never was a point. That had always been the truth.
"Look at me when I am speaking to you."
He looked up.
His husband's face was handsome; clean lines, pleasant surface, nothing underneath worth trusting. His eyes held no warmth as they settled on Guiying, only the cold assessment of someone looking at something that had stopped being useful.
"You ruined my life," the man said. "Just by being what you are."
The first blow came without preamble.
The fist caught the side of Guiying's face with enough force to knock him sideways. He had learned not to make a sound, because sound invited escalation. He caught himself against the mattress and straightened slowly, and the second blow landed before he had fully righted himself. The third came with a belt, buckle end, and that one he could not absorb entirely in silence. By the fourth and fifth he was on the floor, and his husband had switched to his shoe because it was simply more convenient from that angle.
Guiying stared at the leg of the bed. He breathed through his nose. He waited.
Something ceramic shattered across his shoulder blade, a decorative piece from the shelf near the window by the weight of it. Hands closed around his collar and dragged him upright, his husband's face inches from his own, close enough that Guiying could smell the drink on his breath.
"Say something. Go on. Defend yourself."
Guiying looked at him.
The grip on his collar loosened by a single fraction, just for a moment, and Guiying's body moved before his mind finished deciding. He twisted free with the desperate efficiency of someone who had spent five years memorizing exactly when a grip went slack, hit the doorframe on the way out, and did not stop moving.
He found himself in the kitchen.
His hands found the knife block on the counter. He closed his fingers around a handle and turned around. His husband stood in the doorway, watching him with an expression that had shifted from contempt to something close to amusement.
"What are you going to do with that?"
Guiying looked down at the knife, then up at his husband. The handsome lines, the easy confidence, the absolute certainty that Guiying would fold the way he always folded.
"I tried," he said. His voice came out steadier than he expected. "I want you to know that. I tried to make this work. I tried, for five years, to find something in you worth loving."
His husband said nothing.
"You talk about children." Guiying laughed, a short and hollow sound. "Who would bring a child into this house? Who would want to have a child with a monster?" He tightened his grip on the knife. "I have hated my life for five years. But out of everything in it, I hate you the most."
He turned the knife inward.
The last thing he felt was cold.
---
Memories came all at once, a lifetime arriving without mercy or order. Himself as a small child crouching in a hallway while raised voices carried through the walls. His mother's face, blurred by grief and time, the one image he had never been able to hold clearly. His stepmother's voice. His grandmother's pointed silence. His cousins' laughter. The arranged marriage, the wedding, the first night, every night that followed for five years.
Underneath all of it, threading through every memory like roots through stone, was one feeling.
Regret.
If he had run. If he had refused. If he had chosen any other path, he would never have ended up bleeding out on a kitchen floor at twenty-eight. He had known it somewhere beneath the fear and the compliance and the years of being told he did not matter. He had always known there was another way.
He had simply never believed he deserved to take it.
---
Xue Guiying opened his eyes and sucked in a sharp breath.
He lay completely still, staring at the ceiling above him. His heart hammered against his ribs. His body felt wrong, lighter than it should have been, unmarked in ways it had no business being.
His first coherent thought was that he had survived. That he was in a hospital, that his husband had called an ambulance, that it was not over.
He sat upright.
This was not a hospital.
He pressed his fingers to his throat, to the exact spot where the knife had gone in. Smooth, unbroken skin. No wound. No bandage. No scar.
He looked around the room slowly, taking in the walls, the furniture, and the quality of light coming through the window, and something cold settled over him that was not quite fear and not quite anything he had a name for.
He knew this room.
He had spent years trying to forget it.
This was the Xue family house. This was his childhood bedroom. He had not stood in this room in five years.
His phone was on the nightstand. He picked it up and looked at the date on the screen.
He looked at it for a long time.
He set the phone down and sat in the quiet of his old bedroom and breathed.
He had gone back five years. He was twenty-three years old. His husband had not yet found him. The marriage had not yet happened.
Was this what regret purchased? A second chance at a life he had already lost once?