Shen Ran gnashed his teeth.
He hated it. He had always hated it — that expression. The particular way Shen Yao's eyes held their mockery without effort, without cruelty even, just a calm and devastating clarity that made Shen Ran feel seen in ways he'd spent his entire life trying to avoid. His eyes flashed. The fury moved through him like something with its own agenda.
"No one knows," he thought. "No one knows what it cost."
Everything he had — their father's affection, the heirship, the name — none of it had come freely. None of it had come easily. And still Shen Yao sat there bleeding on the floor, looking at him like the scoreboard didn't matter.
"I still need him alive," he reminded himself. His mind moved quickly through calculations, filing options, discarding the ones that satisfied feeling but damaged strategy. "Just a little bit more."
The sound of footsteps in the corridor pulled both of them from the silence.
---
She walked in wearing white.
A sundress — the same style she had worn the very first time we met. Her hair fell in soft waves around her face, and she moved with the particular arrogance of someone who had already decided how every person in the room should feel about her presence. Her gaze swept down to where I sat and held nothing. No warmth. No discomfort. Just the clean, indifferent disdain of someone looking at something that no longer concerned them.
My smirk didn't change.
My eyes did.
Without ceremony, she crossed to Shen Ran, curling against him with a practiced coquettishness that his hands answered immediately — settling at her waist with the ease of something long rehearsed. I watched.
I laughed at myself in the privacy of my own thoughts.
"What a fool."
She had been my fiancée. A marriage I hadn't wanted — the elders of both families had made that decision without consulting the people most directly affected, as elders tend to do. Their interests. Their benefits. The joining of two names into something more profitable than either alone. I had accepted it for what it was and expected nothing more.
But she had pursued me. Persistently. With a warmth that felt genuine because I had not yet learned all the ways genuine could be counterfeited. And slowly — foolishly, embarrassingly slowly — something had shifted. The relationship had grown into something I hadn't planned for and hadn't known how to protect.
Then I was drugged. She had been there. She had saved me.
She had gotten pregnant.
And now she stood in my half‑brother's arms in a room where I was chained to the floor and bleeding, and she looked at me the way people look at things they've already finished with.
"You're smart," she said. Her voice was soft. Almost kind. "I think you should have realized the truth by now."
I said nothing.
Something must have moved across my face — some small betrayal of what was happening underneath — because she smiled. Not cruelly. Almost gently, which was somehow worse.
"That look." A soft laugh. "It's exactly what you deserve."
She turned back to Shen Ran without waiting for a response. He murmured something to her — that he had one more thing to say to me, just a moment — and she walked out without looking back. Not a pause. Not a hesitation. Not a single glance over her shoulder to see what she was leaving behind.
The door swung closed.
I let my gaze linger on the empty space where she had stood. Then, slowly, I turned my head toward Shen Ran.
My eyes were cold. Not hollow anymore. Cold in a way that made the chains between us feel like the only thing keeping him alive.
Shen Ran felt it. I saw the flicker.
But he smiled anyway. Surprised, perhaps, that I still had something left. He chuckled — a low, dismissive sound — and then he crouched down beside me, bringing his face level with mine.
He leaned in close. Close enough that what came next arrived as barely more than breath against my ear. But his voice was different now — soft, almost a purr, like he was savoring each word before letting it leave his mouth.
"That look," he said, drawing it out, and chuckled "You're just like her. Both pathetic"
"To tell you the truth." he leaned so close I could feel his breath " You lasted longer"
The memory arrived before I could stop it.
Yanyan — smiling, her favorite white sun hat tilted slightly, the dress she always wore on good days. Her hand held out toward me. "Brother," she had said. Just that. Just the word, it broke him.
Shen Ran watched my face way too satisfied with himself
He opened his mouth ready to say more —
I strained my wrist pulling with every fiber of muscle, tendon and bone, pulling at the cuffs binding me.
The metal bit deep into my skin.
The cracking sound registered before the pain did. My right wrist — the bone gave way at an angle it was never designed to reach, the joint screaming its protest as the restraint caught and the force had nowhere else to go. My wrist snapped just above the cuff, a clean break that sent a shard of white-hot agony up my forearm. Blood welled immediately from where the skin had torn, dark and fast.
I didn't look at it.
I looked at Shen Ran.
He had stepped back instinctively and lost his footing, landing hard on the floor. His eyes were wide. Not from the fall. From shock.
He blinked. Once. Twice. His hand rose to his cheek, and his fingers were coated in red. A shallow cut appeared on his cheek. He stared down at the blood on his fingertips.
Then his gaze traveled to my wrist. The unnatural angle. The blood pooling beneath the cuff.
Then to my face.
The room was dark. Only a sliver of light from under the door. But my eyes — those deep azure, blue eyes — caught whatever light there was and held it like the edge of a blade. Filled with raw animosity, the kind that had made Shen Ran feel that if he had been any closer, he would be torn apart.
For a long moment, he didn't move. Then, slowly, awkwardly — under the weight of that gaze — he pushed himself to his feet. He dusted off his sleeves. Adjusted his collar. Smiled awkwardly.
"Sorry, brother." His voice was almost steady. "I have more important things to do."
He straightened his cuffs with trembling fingers. Then he turned toward the door. Walked. Calmly though it looked more like fleeing.
The door closed behind him.
The room went dark again.
I sat in it.
He roared in anguish pounding his fist into the ground — the left one, the one still whole — once, twice, until bloody prints covered the floor.
No words could describe the grief he felt.
The roar went on until he couldn't anymore.
Minutes passed. hours maybe. he could no longer tell. The difference had stopped meaning anything.
I lay still.
My gaze remained still— somewhere that wasn't anywhere, exactly. Just absence.
Then the door opened.
Light spilled in — harsh, yellow, indifferent.
A large figure entered without a word. Crossed the room. Hands closed around my throat with the businesslike efficiency of someone completing a task rather than making a decision.
I didn't fight.
"What would be the point?"
The light seemed useless now. It illuminated nothing worth seeing.
A father who had never cared. A sister I couldn't protect. A woman whose embrace had been warm but left too early. Everything he had built, everything he had been — dismantled into pieces as really cruel joke played by life
My mother's face surfaced from somewhere. Then Yanyan's. The picnic — the three of us, the laughter loud enough to embarrass all of us, the grass warm under our hands. The sound of it still lived somewhere in me that the rest of the wreckage hadn't reached yet.
As the light at the edges of my vision began to fade, I held a single tear slid down my cheek.
"Yanyan. Mother. I'm sorry."
"If there is a second life —"
"I —"
"Wish —"