The arm Jiang Hansheng had wrapped around her went rigid. It took him three or four seconds to process what he’d heard — and then a deep, consuming jealousy ignited and refused to be contained, burning so fiercely his throat tightened.

He withdrew his hand and got up from the bed in urgent haste.

Jiang Hansheng had believed he could look at Zhou Jin and Jiang Cheng’s past with enough detachment — but the truth was, these things had never been subject to reason in the first place.

A dull, heavy ache pulsed through his chest, strange enough to leave him momentarily at a loss. His right hand had begun to tremble. He grabbed his own wrist and walked straight to the bathroom.

The tap ran loudly. Cold water hit his face, and droplets fell in succession from the tips of his hair.

He raised his head and looked at himself in the mirror. After a moment, he breathed out slowly and deeply, and pushed the hair away from his forehead.

The face in the mirror — Jiang Hansheng’s clean, defined brow, his eyes as dark as ink.

After forcing the jealousy down into ash, Jiang Hansheng’s spirit was exhausted to the bone.

He braced both hands against the edge of the sink. In the silence, a hidden craving surged to the surface — and the moment he recognized what he was craving, Jiang Hansheng’s expression shifted in an instant.

His arms were trembling again, cold sweat breaking out across his back. Jiang Hansheng looked toward the storage cabinet beside him. He tightened his grip on his own wrist, bit down on his resolve — and then, as if surrendering the fight entirely, pulled the cabinet door open.

He shoved aside the ordinary everyday items cluttering the front, then pulled open a second compartment. Inside were medicines of all shapes and sizes — bottles large and small. From among them, he felt out a transparent plastic bag containing white powder —

This was what Jiang Hansheng had taken from A’Juan that day.

Now he held it clenched in the center of his palm. He hesitated. He struggled. Cold sweat tracked down his face.

Jiang Hansheng could not bring himself to accept his own weakness and submission — yet he was truly too exhausted to summon any more resistance. A deep, festering self-loathing was fermenting inside him, bit by bit.

His eyes were bloodshot. He bit his teeth together and drove his knuckles twice against his own forehead.

“Hansheng?”

Two quiet knocks at the door — and yet they struck him like a bolt out of a clear sky, jolting Jiang Hansheng where he stood.

Every nightmare-like howl and craving was swept clean in a single instant. Everything around him went still — and then Zhou Jin’s voice came again: “Are you in there?”

Jiang Hansheng was in complete disarray. In the span of that brief moment, he lost all capacity for clear thought. He dropped the packet of narcotics into his pocket, and pulled the door open.

The moment he found himself face to face with Zhou Jin’s gaze, he immediately regretted opening it. His right hand stayed buried in his trouser pocket, not daring to move a fraction.

Zhou Jin looked at Jiang Hansheng, softly lit by the gentle light — his features even cleaner and more sharply defined like this. Perhaps because he hadn’t slept well, he looked a little worn.

She grew somewhat concerned and asked, “What’s wrong?”

Zhou Jin had woken from her nightmare not long after, and when she reached instinctively toward the pillow beside her, she found that Jiang Hansheng was gone.

She could hear the sound of running water from the bathroom, and had lain there with her eyes open for a while, waiting — but Jiang Hansheng never came back.

Jiang Hansheng’s throat moved as he swallowed. His voice came out rough as he answered, “I’m fine. What woke you?”

Zhou Jin gestured toward her shoulder. “The anesthetic wore off.”

“Is it painful?”

Zhou Jin said, “…It’s actually not too bad.”

Jiang Hansheng didn’t quite believe her. He had been about to check her wound, but when he went to reach out, he remembered what was in his hand.

He didn’t dare move.

Zhou Jin had lost any desire for sleep. She leaned against the doorframe and asked softly, “Professor Jiang — do you think the sniper I encountered tonight could be the same person who killed my brother back then?”

Jiang Hansheng: “…”

She pressed her lips together and continued, “I almost caught him. I was so close — and then in the end, I stood there and watched him run.”

Zhou Jin tilted her head and bumped it lightly against the doorframe, her expression full of bitter frustration. “I really should have gone after him.”

But then she had run into Jiang Cheng.

Was he really an undercover operative? And if he was — why had he chosen the most critical moment to help that man escape?

The more she thought about it, the more unsettled she became. One knock of her head against the doorframe wasn’t enough to satisfy her — she wanted to do it again, to knock herself into thinking more clearly.

Jiang Hansheng reached out and pressed his hand against the doorframe, and Zhou Jin’s temple grazed the back of his hand.

Meeting her clear, bright gaze, Jiang Hansheng recovered his composure quickly. He asked, his voice low and even, “Zhou Jin — are we really married?”

Zhou Jin blinked, uncertain why Jiang Hansheng would suddenly ask that, and gave him a casual smile. “What else would we be? Do you want me to show you our marriage certificate?”

“…”

The furrow between Jiang Hansheng’s brows deepened faintly. He looked away, and something in him became increasingly difficult to bear.

Zhou Jin saw how pale he was — lips pressed together, expression identical to how he had looked at the hospital earlier. He was probably still angry about her going off on her own.

Rationally speaking, Zhou Jin didn’t believe she had done anything wrong.

At that moment, Yao Weihai had been shot and in urgent need of rescue, while the sniper positioned at height had been suppressing far too wide a field of view. The tactic of using a fallen comrade to draw in rescuers and eliminate them was common enough — and the longer it dragged on, the greater the damage to the operation.

Using the technique Zhou Chuan had taught her to triangulate position by sound, Zhou Jin had located the approximate position of the sniper rifle — but she couldn’t guarantee her judgment was entirely correct, and the main battlefield still needed backup. Going alone to verify was the only option she had.

She had done everything within her capacity to do, everything that could not be passed off to someone else.

However objectively sound that reasoning was, the emotional reality remained undeniable — she had made Jiang Hansheng worry, and there was no getting around that.

Zhou Jin took a step toward him. She tilted her head back and studied him carefully. “Are you angry at me?”

Jiang Hansheng immediately stepped back half a pace, afraid that if she came too close, she might notice what she shouldn’t.

Zhou Jin: “…If it’s about that, I apologize.”

“I don’t want an apology.”

“Then what do you want me to do?” Zhou Jin said. “Just tell me — and I’ll make sure I do it.”

Under her questioning gaze, Jiang Hansheng fell silent. She could only say something so bold because she already knew he wouldn’t make any unreasonable demands of her.

When she saw that he wasn’t going to answer, Zhou Jin smiled in exactly the way he had expected — and was just about to say something when Jiang Hansheng pulled her tightly into his arms.

“Would you think of me — just a little? Would you?”

His voice was typically cool and low, and he had always been someone who kept his feelings reined in — for a request like this to come from him without warning was, without question, a direct blow to the softest place in Zhou Jin’s heart.

She felt herself adrift for a moment, taking in the gradually tightening grip of Jiang Hansheng’s arms and the warm breath at her throat.

“Zhou Jin.”

Only now did she realize — every time he called her name with that particular gravity, it burned all the more for how serious he sounded.

Jiang Hansheng’s warm, dry lips found the skin of her neck. His voice dropped low. “I need you.”

This was the second time Jiang Hansheng had said these words. Unlike the first time, this time held less ambiguity and far more weight.

Zhou Jin paused for a moment. Then her fingertips slipped into his hair, and she moved her face lightly against his cheek. She answered quietly: “Alright.”

“…”

After a little while, Zhou Jin wrapped her uninjured arm around his shoulders and said softly, “My shoulder actually hurts quite a lot.”

Jiang Hansheng moved to look at it. Zhou Jin didn’t loosen her arm — she held him closer instead.

Half complaint, half something softer: “It really hurts.”

Zhou Jin had been honorably wounded, and lifting her arm came at considerable cost, so no matter how much she worried about the ongoing rescue operation, she had no way of taking part in person.

All she could do was call Yu Dan every day and ask whether there had been any new developments in the search.

Each time they spoke, Zhou Jin could hear that the serious crimes unit had been pushed to the edge of disorder. Yu Dan kept her answers vague — most likely because Yao Weihai’s whereabouts remained unknown.

Jiang Hansheng went to the university to teach as usual, and came home to stay with Zhou Jin whenever he had any free time.

Occasionally, he would hold video conferences with Wang Pengzhe — who was still in Huaiguang — and the junior colleagues in the criminal research department.

Jiang Hansheng told Wang Pengzhe about the presence of a “fifth party” in the warehouse all those years ago. Upon hearing this, Wang Pengzhe broke out in a cold sweat.

The very real possibility that Qi Yan had never died — that was, by any measure, a deeply unsettling piece of news for them.

He urged Jiang Hansheng to be careful at all times.

Jiang Hansheng told him not to worry, and asked him to go back over the old case as quickly as possible using the new leads — to see whether anything could be found regarding Qi Yan’s background and identity.

It wasn’t until the fifth day of the search and rescue operation — when Zhou Jin could barely move her arm again with something resembling freedom — that she received a call from Yu Dan.

She could tell from the tone that there was news. Without even waiting for Yu Dan to finish speaking, she scrambled off the sofa and made for the wardrobe to get dressed.

With one hand barely functional, her movements were clumsy in the extreme.

Jiang Hansheng set down the remote control, walked over, and helped her get her sleeve on, then fastened her buttons.

Zhou Jin’s attention had already been pulled entirely toward whatever Yu Dan was about to say — she let Jiang Hansheng tend to her without a second thought.

A moment later, she gripped the phone tightly and demanded, “Say that again.”

Yu Dan repeated herself, her voice carrying a faint tremor: “We found two bodies in the eastern outskirts. They may well be Director Yao — and his informant…”