A house without people feels too empty — a kind of coldness that warmth cannot reach.

Zhou Jin seemed tangled in darkness, hugging her knees and curled up in the corner, sleeping as though she might never wake.

She saw Zhou Chuan again.

On the snowy street of Zhizi Lane, a lamppost cast a small pool of light while snowflakes drifted down with a soft hiss.

They stood together within that circle of light and shadow.

Zhou Chuan was dressed neatly in his military uniform, kneeling on one knee before her. He pulled off his warm gloves and slipped them onto Zhou Jin’s small hands, then cupped her frost-reddened cheeks and rubbed them gently.

“Cold, isn’t it,” Zhou Chuan said.

She shook her head, then asked in a small voice, “Brother, can you not go?”

He was leaving for the military, or perhaps for somewhere very far away. For as long as she could remember, Zhou Chuan had never left Zhou Jin’s side — she didn’t want him to leave.

“I can’t stay by your side forever,” Zhou Chuan said. “Be good at home. If anyone dares to bully you, go find Jiang Cheng.”

Jiang Cheng was standing not far behind her. Hearing Zhou Chuan call his name, he walked over — hands shoved in his pockets, young as he was, already wearing the expression of someone who didn’t think much of anyone.

Zhou Chuan looked at him and couldn’t help but laugh. He opened his arms and pulled both children into his embrace at once.

He ruffled Jiang Cheng’s head and said, “You’re the man of the house now. Look after your little sister, you hear me?”

“Like you even needed to say it.”

Jiang Cheng found the sentimentality irritating and quickly pulled himself out of the hug.

He looked at Zhou Chuan. After a pause, Jiang Cheng exhaled a puff of white breath into the cold air and said quietly, “Brother, come back soon.”

The corner of Zhou Chuan’s lips curved into a smile.

Beside them, Zhou Jin pressed her lips together. Determined not to make Zhou Chuan worry, she said with resolve, “I won’t cry.”

On that snowy night, Jiang Cheng took Zhou Jin’s hand, and together they watched Zhou Chuan — dressed in his military uniform — turn and walk away.

Zhou Chuan walked slowly, but he never looked back. He disappeared at last into the vast, white darkness of the snowstorm.

On the way home, Zhou Jin kept her head down, watching her boots crunch and press into the snow with each step.

Jiang Cheng led her along until halfway home, then said, “You can cry now.”

Zhou Jin didn’t look up. Instead, she gripped Jiang Cheng’s fingers tighter and shook her head again. “I’m not going to cry…”

But the moment she said it, her tears fell.

She kept walking, wiping her eyes as she went, and said stubbornly, “I’m not crying.”

Not long after, she heard Jiang Cheng let out a helpless sigh. “Xiao Wu, what am I supposed to do with you?”

When Zhou Jin came back to her senses, she suddenly realized that the hand she’d been clutching — Jiang Cheng’s hand — was empty. Somehow, at some point, Jiang Cheng had moved far ahead of her.

A flicker of fear ran through her. She stumbled after him.

The streetlights seemed to have gone out. The road was pitch dark. Behind her, the direction Zhou Chuan had walked away held no light. Ahead was the same — but she didn’t dare look back. She could only squeeze her eyes shut and run forward.

Her foot caught hard on something. Her body lurched helplessly toward the ground — and then, in that split second, the expected pain never came. An arm reached out and caught her firmly.

She was pulled into someone’s embrace in a single motion, crashing against his solid, warm chest.

He smelled very good.

Zhou Jin looked up in surprise and saw a man with a pair of beautiful almond-shaped eyes, his thin lips curved in a gentle smile as he called her name: “Zhou Jin.”

The window had been left open. A breeze stirred the sheer curtains, and the damp, cold air quickly filled the entire room.

Zhou Jin shuddered — and woke that easily, opening her eyes into darkness. The person who had called her name vanished before her. After a long moment, she finally realized she had fallen asleep in the entryway, her back soaked through with cold sweat.

Her phone was ringing — over and over, relentless.

She closed her eyes, brushed aside the damp strands of hair clinging to her face, then mustered the energy to answer the call.

Yan Bin’s booming voice hit her directly from the other end. “Xiao Wu, are you trying to die?! Why do you keep not answering your phone?!”

Zhou Jin frowned, pushing down the irritation rising in her chest. “What is it?”

Yan Bin said, “Just wanted to ask for the boss’s phone number. I can’t reach him.”

“I don’t know it either.”

Zhou Jin endured the sharp pain in her feet and swayed upright, turned on the light, and saw the clock reading seven in the evening.

From the other end, Yan Bin was still going. “You didn’t ask him? Does he even have a working phone right now?”

Zhou Jin said, “…I didn’t think about it that much. I just bought the necessary things for him. Once the case is done, he’ll sort it out himself — you’ll find out then.”

Yan Bin could tell she was a little out of it, and didn’t press any further. “Alright then. Help out where you can.” Then, after some hesitation, Yan Bin asked, “That guy at your place — he hasn’t been giving you trouble, has he?”

“What do you mean?”

“I could see he was still pretty bothered by you and the boss having dated before. When I met him that time, I could already tell he wasn’t someone to mess with. I’d hate for him to be making things difficult for you over that.”

Zhou Jin: “…”

“If he treats you badly, tell Third Brother — or failing that, there’s still the boss. You two may have… but business aside, there’s still loyalty. He wouldn’t just leave you hanging.” Yan Bin left it there and didn’t push further. “If you’re overwhelmed, just call me.”

“Got it.”

The room fell quiet again. Zhou Jin pressed her hand to her aching temple and sat in thought for a moment. Even Yan Bin knew, she realized.

For a moment, it was as though she could hear Jiang Hansheng’s voice echoing in her ears.

“If you want to hear more, I could tell you much, much more — all the things you never said, but that I’ve always known.”

…

“Zhou Jin, it’s not that you don’t understand. It’s that you’ve never cared about me.”

…

“Zhou Jin, let’s get a divorce.”

…

Zhou Jin knew she couldn’t stay here any longer. Staying would only drag her state of mind further and further down.

She knew what she needed to do to pull herself back together.

Zhou Jin wiped her eyes, rose from the floor, and got moving. First, she cooked a packet of instant noodles and slurped them down without ceremony. Then she went into the bathroom to shower. Once she’d cleaned and tended to the wounds on her body, she got dressed and headed out.

Nine o’clock at night.

Yu Dan, who was in the middle of organizing witness statements, looked up in surprise as Zhou Jin — face ghostly pale — pushed open the door to the Major Crimes Unit.

“Didn’t Team Leader Tan give you time off?” Yu Dan asked, visibly taken aback.

Zhou Jin held up her laptop. “I came to write reports.”

The two of them were practically veterans when it came to working overtime together. Yu Dan knew exactly what Zhou Jin was like.

When there was work to be done, Zhou Jin was the type who didn’t even remember to go home. She’d sleep a bit in the on-call room when exhaustion caught up with her, eat whatever was convenient when hunger struck — as long as it filled her up. It was only after she married Jiang Hansheng that things had improved even slightly.

By midnight, Yu Dan was rubbing her tired eyes and got up to make coffee. She brewed a cup for Zhou Jin as well and quietly set it down beside her.

“Thank you.”

Zhou Jin’s eyes didn’t leave the screen, her fingers flying across the keyboard at a rapid clip.

At the end of a line, she looked up and asked Yu Dan, “The people from Hengyun Logistics — how are the interrogations going?”

Yu Dan took a sip of her coffee. “Most of the regular employees didn’t know anything about the illegal trade. We’ve gone through a round of questioning and there wasn’t much valuable testimony. That said, Bai Yang is currently cross-referencing the footage from the USB drive against their senior management and key personnel. Tomorrow Jiang Cheng will come in person to make identifications — none of them will get away.”

Zhou Jin nodded.

Since Tan Shiming had temporarily kept her off the case and limited her to writing reports, she didn’t ask too many questions now that she’d heard of the progress.

Once she’d finished her coffee, Yu Dan suddenly brought something up. “Zhao Ping… we contacted his parents in the countryside. They refused to come and claim his body. They just said they’d considered that son dead a long time ago.”

Yu Dan gave a bitter smile. Facing the death of a former colleague, she found her feelings complicated and difficult to name, and could only sigh: “People really can’t afford to go too far down the wrong path. He’s dead, and there isn’t even anyone to collect his body.”

Zhou Jin listened and quietly drifted into thought.

…Too far down the wrong path?

She thought back to the day of the Golden Harbor operation. The Major Crimes Unit had been called in for support, and she and Zhao Ping had been paired together, the two of them slowly closing in on the warehouse using the shipping containers as cover.

At that point, Qi Yan had already set up a sniper rifle in the control tower and fired a single, precise shot that wounded Yao Weihai in the leg.

Yao Weihai collapsed out in the open — and any officer who moved in to rescue him would inevitably step into the sniper’s line of fire. A textbook bait-and-ambush.

But at the time, the situation had changed so suddenly that the command center hadn’t yet issued orders forbidding anyone from approaching Yao Weihai.

And Zhao Ping — the same Zhao Ping who always called her “Senior Sister” and pushed her to charge ahead of him in every other situation — that time, he rushed ahead of her. He was the first to step out from the cover of the containers.

Zhou Jin had sharp eyes. She caught the red glow of the targeting laser dancing across his body, and without time to think, she yanked Zhao Ping back.

The bullet had grazed right past his shoulder. A fraction closer and it would have gone straight through Zhao Ping’s skull.

He had been feeding Qi Yan intelligence on police operations — could he really not have known about the sniper?

Zhou Jin didn’t dare to think about it. If Zhao Ping hadn’t been there — if the person who rushed out first had been her — would she have had the luck to still be alive today?

…

Zhou Jin and Yu Dan worked through deep into the night. When Zhou Jin went to the bathroom and was washing her hands, she felt the bite mark on her neck beginning to ache dully.

Zhou Jin was wearing a high-collared fitted undershirt. She pulled the collar aside slightly, peeled off the square bandage, and prepared to replace it with a fresh one.

At that moment Yu Dan happened to walk in — and immediately spotted the very obvious bite mark on Zhou Jin’s neck, startling her considerably.

“What happened to you?”

It was a personal matter, and Zhou Jin felt quite awkward discussing it with someone else, so she shook her head and indicated she was fine.

Yu Dan thought it over: Zhou Jin had shown up at the Major Crimes Unit to work overtime past nine at night. Jiang Hansheng normally treated Zhou Jin like she was precious — how could he bear to let her come in? And besides, apart from him, who else could possibly leave bite marks on Zhou Jin’s neck?

Putting it together, she quickly figured out the reason.

“It was Professor Jiang, wasn’t it?” Yu Dan said. “Did you two have a fight?”

Zhou Jin was a little embarrassed — she hadn’t expected Yu Dan to guess so quickly.

But Yu Dan wore the expression of someone who had seen it all coming. She looked at her seriously and asked, “Do you need me to help you file a police report? What he did counts as domestic violence.”

“…”