Jiang Hansheng wrapped one arm around her slight shoulders and lifted her into his arms in a single motion.

Pale moonlight spilled down around them. Zhou Jin rested against his warm chest and listened to the steady, strong rhythm of his heartbeat.

Her throat was parched. She asked him weakly, “How did you find me?”

Jiang Hansheng pressed his cheek against her cold, sweat-dampened forehead. He didn’t answer the question. Instead, he said, “I was late.”

Zhou Jin’s consciousness was hazy, drifting between waking and sleep, and she couldn’t press him any further.

By the time they reached the hospital, it was past ten o’clock at night. A curtained partition was drawn across, and the doctor set to work cleaning and suturing Zhou Jin’s wound.

Jiang Hansheng stayed by her side. His dark eyes were perfectly still — watching how the antiseptic cotton swabs were saturated and stained red with blood, watching how the ragged wound was closed up stitch by careful stitch.

Zhou Jin noticed that he hadn’t said a word. His calm was strange, almost eerie — his eyes and brow radiating a pressure as cold and unyielding as ice.

She could guess well enough that Jiang Hansheng was worried about her.

Zhou Jin had just drawn breath to say something when a voice came from beyond the partition: “Zhou Jin?”

Zhou Jin responded at once, and a moment later Yu Dan leaned her head inside.

“How are you doing?”

Yu Dan took one look at her — hospital gown draped over her shoulders, body armor and her black undershirt both removed, sitting there in just a bandeau — and immediately squeezed her way in.

One more person made the small space feel even more cramped.

Jiang Hansheng was the first to rise. He said to Yu Dan, “Would you mind looking after her for a moment?”

Yu Dan was mildly surprised. “Of course.”

Jiang Hansheng walked out without looking back.

Outside, standing in the quiet corridor, he closed his eyes. The crease between his brows deepened.

The violence he had suppressed for years stirred back to life. His mind returned, once again, to the moment his finger had closed around a trigger.

“Does killing feel good?”

The fluorescent lights overhead seemed to flicker out one by one from the far end of the corridor, and Qi Yan’s voice crept through the darkness, echoing coldly in Jiang Hansheng’s ears.

“Since Mr. Jiang has such profound insight into psychology, surely he understands by now why I find killing so necessary?”

His vision blurred. All he could see clearly was the needle of a syringe swaying before him, doubled by the haze.

“I have no choice. Without killing them, I cannot find peace.”

“Take Mr. Jiang, for instance — you appear so upright and law-abiding. And yet, right now, don’t you want to kill me?”

Jiang Hansheng closed his eyes. The line from his jaw down to his neck and shoulders drew faintly taut, giving him an air of absolute severity.

He stood there for a moment. Then he bit down hard, and gripped his own trembling wrist with a vice-like hold.

After Jiang Hansheng stepped out, Yu Dan took a seat beside Zhou Jin.

The doctor worked quickly, and before leaving gave a brief set of instructions on basic aftercare and when to return to have the stitches removed.

Yu Dan committed every word to memory.

Once it was just the two of them, Yu Dan fastened the buttons of Zhou Jin’s hospital gown and asked, “Does it still hurt?”

Zhou Jin shook her head.

Yu Dan’s eyes were full of anxiety. “Zhao Ping told us you went after the sniper alone. Do you have any idea how worried Professor Jiang and Captain Tan were about you? Zhou Jin, you got lucky this time — have you ever stopped to think about what would happen if something had gone seriously wrong?”

“I had it under control.” Zhou Jin’s reassurance came out a little perfunctory. She shifted the subject: “Speaking of which, how’s Zhao Ping?”

Yu Dan said, “Flesh wound, nothing serious. He wanted to come see you too, but I sent him back first — I can’t very well look after two patients at once.”

Zhou Jin was quiet for a moment. Only now, at last, did she begin to find a thread of clarity through the fog.

“What about Director Yao?” she asked. “Did they get him back?”

Yu Dan’s expression shifted slightly. She shook her head and said with weight behind her words, “After Director Yao was shot, the group dragged him into a vehicle and fled under covering fire.”

Zhou Jin went still. “How did that happen?”

“We conducted an emergency interrogation of the crew aboard the cargo ship and inventoried the goods on board — it really was just timber. Captain Tan believes Director Yao was set up from the start. These people came with the police as their target all along.”

“Then Director Yao, he…?”

“His life or death is unknown. But Captain Tan has already organized a search and rescue team. We can only hope for good news soon.” Yu Dan made clear that the current situation was far from reassuring and let out a long sigh. “On top of that — Captain Tan mentioned in the briefing that Director Yao had once deployed an undercover operative, code name ‘Cangfeng,’ who has been embedded in this organization for some time.”

“Cangfeng?”

Yu Dan nodded. “Apparently the intelligence on this Jingang Wharf transaction was passed along by Cangfeng. But given how things played out tonight, it’s very likely this operative was already exposed long ago — which means the search and rescue now has two targets.”

“…”

In the span of a single heartbeat, Jiang Cheng’s red-rimmed eyes flashed through her mind, again and again.

“I know!”

The tone of Jiang Cheng’s voice in that moment, the expression on his face — it struck her like a blow directly to the chest.

An undercover operative? Cangfeng?

Zhou Jin was shaken, her mind churning with a thousand possibilities.

Yu Dan was still murmuring beside her ear — urging her to put all of this aside for now and focus on her recovery, then mentioning how back in the command room, the moment Jiang Hansheng heard Zhao Ping say she had gone off alone to catch someone, all the color had drained from his face…

But Zhou Jin didn’t hear a single word of it.

At eleven o’clock that night, Jiang Hansheng and Zhou Jin returned home.

With her hand out of commission, Jiang Hansheng even helped squeeze the toothpaste for her.

He wrung out a warm towel, intending to wipe her face for her. Zhou Jin felt bad about troubling him and said, “I can manage.”

She took the towel from him and gave her face a few quick passes. She tucked her stray hair behind her ears, revealing her fair skin, and it was only then that Jiang Hansheng noticed a faint, shallow wound at her temple.

“Hold still.”

He pressed her hand down gently, swept the loose strands aside, and examined the wound carefully.

His fingers traced the skin around it. Zhou Jin drew a sharp breath through her teeth.

Jiang Hansheng’s voice came out very soft and quiet. “That hurts, doesn’t it?”

Zhou Jin shook her head. “It doesn’t hurt.”

Jiang Hansheng seemed to exhale quietly, and said, “Come with me.”

He took her by the hand, settled her on the edge of the bed, then went to the shelf to retrieve the first aid kit, and tended to the wound with careful hands.

Jiang Hansheng’s face was very close — his breath was too, a soft warmth brushing against her skin. His features were clean and handsome, and the gentle light cast a shadow beneath his lashes, falling over his quietly composed eyes.

Zhou Jin found herself a little dazed, just watching him.

Her lips parted. There were many things tangled up inside her that she wanted to bring to him, things she wanted to ask his counsel on — but they all led back to Jiang Cheng…

The words rose and then died in her throat.

Jiang Hansheng caught the shift in her mood with ease and asked, “Is there something you want to tell me?”

She pressed down the doubt and the struggle inside her, and answered, “No.”

“…”

Perhaps he ought to tell her that the next time she tried to lie, she’d do better to keep her body language and her breathing a little more in check.

Jiang Hansheng raised his hand, his thumb moving slowly across her face, and said, “Zhou Jin — don’t do something like this again. Alright?”

Zhou Jin didn’t brush it off this time. She nodded. “I understand.” She paused, as though something had just occurred to her, and asked again, “How did you manage to find me there?”

The rescue team hadn’t even made it that far yet.

This, added to what had happened at Phoenix Fire Bar before — Jiang Hansheng always seemed to appear at her side at the earliest possible moment.

Jiang Hansheng knelt on one knee and looked up at her face from below. For a long moment, he didn’t answer. Then he tilted his head upward and kissed her on the lips.

Zhou Jin closed her eyes compliantly — but this time her mind was elsewhere, and her response came out a little numb and slow.

Jiang Hansheng seemed to sense it, but didn’t pull back. He pressed his hand to the back of her neck and kept going, his kiss burning and tender all at once.

Zhou Jin pushed at his shoulders and turned away from the deepening kiss.

Her mind was a mess. There were too many things she couldn’t sort through, and she simply couldn’t summon the feeling. “I’m a little tired.”

“…” A stretch of silence followed. Then Jiang Hansheng said, “Sleep.”

Perhaps it was the sheer exhaustion taking hold — Zhou Jin’s consciousness sank quickly into the depths of darkness.

At some point, a long road stretched out beneath her feet. She walked forward, kept walking forward, until a very familiar door appeared before her.

Zhou Jin pushed it open and saw another version of herself, huddled on the sofa under a blanket.

“Get some rest?” Jiang Cheng was sitting beside her, patting her back through the blanket — as though coaxing a child. “Or eat something first?”

His fingertips carried a faint trace of cigarette smoke.

When had Jiang Cheng started smoking? Perhaps it had been sometime during that period. But he never smoked in front of her — sometimes out on the balcony, sometimes stepping outside the door.

She hadn’t noticed any of it back then.

She was curled up inside the blanket, her face pressed against the warmth of Jiang Cheng’s palm, crying to him with all the grievance she couldn’t contain: “I want my brother back.”

“Trust me — someday, I’ll catch those people with my own hands and avenge Brother Chuan.” Jiang Cheng was already wiping her tears away. “Stop crying, stop crying — I’m begging you. Be good, get up and drink some porridge and then sleep.”

He seemed to go to the kitchen. She waited for a long time, but Jiang Cheng didn’t come back.

When she finally thought to go looking for him, she saw that Jiang Cheng had somehow already changed into his formal uniform, police cap set on his head, and was about to step out the door.

A flicker of alarm ran through her. “Where are you going?”

“Xiao Wu — this is on me.” Jiang Cheng turned to look at her. He pressed the brim of his cap down, and his eyes disappeared into shadow — but the smile at the corner of his mouth was still there, irreverent as ever. “Don’t cry anymore. Not after this.”

The light above came crashing down all at once, and every scene around her sank into the depths of a dark sea.

She couldn’t see Jiang Cheng. There was only the searing pain tearing through her shoulder.

She cried out to him urgently: “Jiang Cheng!”

She went after him, one more step forward — and her foot found nothing beneath it.

Jiang Hansheng woke easily. His arm was cool and damp — Zhou Jin’s tears.

He pushed himself up and cupped her face in his hands, brushing the tear tracks from her cheeks.

“A nightmare?” he murmured, drawing Zhou Jin into his arms. “It’s alright. It’s alright.”

But in the depth of that very dark night, Zhou Jin’s sleeptalking rang out all too clearly through the silence.

She was crying softly in her dream, and she was calling out: “Jiang Cheng.”