The pot had overturned, and nearly half a basin of scalding soup had splashed onto Zhou Jin’s arm.

Jiang Hansheng came rushing in. One glance told him everything — a large patch of Zhou Jin’s arm had already gone red. His whole body gave an involuntary shudder. He seized her arm and pulled her toward the sink, wrenching the tap open and running cold water over her scalded skin.

Zhou Jin furrowed her brow. Her arm was in agony — the kind that had burned past pain into numbness, like being held over an open flame. She bit down on her lower lip and said nothing.

Mrs. Jian had been pushed to the side. When she looked up, she met Jiang Hansheng’s pitch-black eyes directly — the cold edge and silent accusation in them made her heart lurch violently.

She said in a panic, “I — I didn’t mean to—”

She had only been trying to move the small pot onto the bamboo mat to let it cool down so she could free up the stovetop for stir-frying, and had lost her grip without warning.

The stream of cold water crashed against the burning sensation on Zhou Jin’s arm. Rather than easing the pain in the short term, it intensified the discomfort. The fingers of her hand submerged in the water were trembling without her realizing it.

But to comfort Mrs. Jian and spare her from feeling too guilty, Zhou Jin murmured softly, “It’s all right, I’m fine — it’s not that hot, a bit of cold water will sort it out.”

Jiang Hansheng’s frown deepened, and he said with a note of irritation, “Zhou Jin!”

Zhou Jin saw that his expression had darkened to its worst and couldn’t understand why he was snapping at her. She was just about to ask, when from the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of Mrs. Jian reaching for the knife on the kitchen counter, trembling as she raised it toward them.

Zhou Jin froze, uncertainty flooding through her. “Mrs. Jian—”

“Officer Zhou, leave my home. Leave this place!” Her eyes were red. She held the knife toward Zhou Jin and Jiang Hansheng, threatening them. “Get out. You are not welcome here. The person you’re looking for is not here! Lao Jian knows nothing!”

Zhou Jin still hadn’t pieced together what was happening. She tried to pull her hand back so she could deal with the knife in Mrs. Jian’s hand — but Jiang Hansheng had her wrist in his grip, and he applied firm pressure, saying, “Don’t move.”

In the face of this sudden turn of events, he appeared to have expected it all along. He wasn’t surprised in the least, only lowering his head and keeping his focus intently on the patch of red, swollen skin on her arm.

Seeing that neither of them moved, Mrs. Jian advanced a step with the knife, pressing closer. Her emotional state was beginning to veer toward something distinctly unhinged. “Get out! Do you hear me!”

Jiang Hansheng did not look up. He said in a cold, flat voice, “Qi Zhen — if you still want to go on living the life you have now, and you don’t want to bring trouble down on Jian Liang, then put the knife down and stop trying to provoke me.”

Zhou Jin: “Qi Zhen?”

The vivid red garnet bracelet slipped slightly down the wrist, losing its cover. On Mrs. Jian’s wrist, a savage, terrible scar was exposed.

Zhou Jin went still, as though something had just clicked into place.

But Qi Zhen denied it sharply: “I am not Qi Zhen! My name is Jian Zhen — I, I am from the same hometown as Jian Liang. I’m not her. You have the wrong person. You really have the wrong person—”

Jiang Hansheng said, “Your identity — Jian Liang forged it for you?”

“No! No! He has nothing to do with it!” Qi Zhen looked nothing like the gentle, dignified woman of moments before. She seemed to be drowning in some kind of terror — unraveling, frantic. “Don’t hurt him — if you’re going to arrest someone, arrest me. He only helped me, he only helped me. He doesn’t know anything. I never told him a single word—”

Zhou Jin said quietly, “Qi Zhen. Put the knife down first, and we’ll talk. All right? I’m not here to hurt you.”

Qi Zhen looked at the scalded burn on Zhou Jin’s arm. Fear seized her — and alongside it, remorse. She had no desire to hurt anyone inside the home she shared with Jian Liang.

Her features crumpled, and tears came streaming down her face all at once.

She would not lower her guard. The tip of the knife remained pointed at them as she wept: “Why — why did you find your way here? Who are you, really? You’re not police, are you? You’re his people — he sent you to drag me back, to drag my son back!”

Zhou Jin caught the irregularity embedded in her nearly incoherent words with sharp instinct, and countered: “‘He?’ Who? Your son — his name is Qi Yan, isn’t it?”

At that, Qi Zhen reacted as though she had just received some kind of confirmation. Her hostility toward Zhou Jin sharpened into something unmistakable.

Qi Zhen let out several bursts of laughter — wild, discordant — then screamed in a raw, shredded voice: “You’re too late! Go back and tell that man — I strangled his son to death. His son died long ago!”

Her voice grew more and more shrill.

“I should never have harbored any illusions about a child carrying tainted blood. The son of a beast can only be a beast himself — a vile, degenerate beast! A rapist! To hell with all of you — let him and his son rot together! I will never go back with you. Jian Liang is a clean and decent man — if you dare touch a single hair on his head, I will fight you to the death!”

In the off-road vehicle, Qi Yan sat with his eyes closed. His hand still hung out the window, the wind flowing through his fingers.

His fingers began to tap lightly against the air — as though playing something. Following the rhythm of his fingertips, he started humming a melody.

The vehicle picked up speed, and the wind became fierce, gusting in with a roar, thick enough to choke the breath from a person.

Suffocation. The suffocation of drowning.

He hated this sensation of being suffocated.

Over all these years — when bullets had grazed past his ear, he hadn’t felt he would die. When he trained in boxing and combat and his opponent had beaten him to the ground, leaving him unconscious, he hadn’t felt he would die. When he had undergone starvation and endurance training deep in the wilderness, reduced to a state barely above dying — he hadn’t felt he would die then, either.

The only time he had ever come close to death was when he was fourteen years old.

That woman — the woman he loved most — had wrapped her hands around his neck and squeezed with everything she had. Tears streamed down her face, falling like beads snapped from a broken string, pattering onto his face one after another.

He was almost suffocated — the kind that felt like being drowned in her tears. The suffocation of drowning.

In that moment, Qi Yan had truly believed he was going to die.

He lay on the floor. Qi Zhen knelt over him, and in the eyes that fixed on him was a ferocious, savage hatred — her beautiful face twisted beyond recognition.

A faint shimmer of tears moved through her eyes, swallowed by the deep shadows there.

“Beast — beast! How did I give birth to you? I should have strangled you long ago — strangled you when you were small! You disgust me just as much as your father!”

She squeezed tighter, and tighter, and with more and more force.

At the time, Qi Yan still possessed the emotion called “fear” — but it was not fear of death. It was fear of the deep, abyssal hatred and terror he saw in Qi Zhen’s eyes.

She had always been so slight, so soft — loving him so fiercely it could have destroyed her. She had said once that the reason she was alive was to protect him, to watch him grow up, to see him through to a peaceful old age. Yet the Qi Zhen before him now was unrecognizable. The hands around his neck were like steel rebar — the force in them terrifyingly immense.

Qi Zhen wanted to kill him.

Had he done something unforgivable?

He had only done what he always did — hidden himself in the wardrobe.

Qi Zhen hadn’t known he would be hiding inside it, watching through the gap. Once Qi Yan grew a little older, she stopped allowing him to stay in the apartment when she had guests — she would send him downstairs to read instead.

But some habits, once formed, are very hard to break. He still wanted to hide in the wardrobe. It was safe there. He could see everything, and nothing could see him.

Through the crack in the door, Qi Yan had watched the woman with a rose stem between her teeth, eyes glazed, hair tangled, moaning beneath the man with wild abandon.

She looked so full of pleasure — her skin glistening with sweat, her face flushed deep with desire.

When the man was satisfied, he stuffed a thick wad of red banknotes into her bra, kissed her on the face, and said: “Who else could make you cry out like that but me? Does your big brother take good care of you?”

Qi Zhen laughed and hurried him out the door.

The man added: “Be my kept woman. I’ll support you from now on.”

Qi Zhen laughed and cursed at him: “Get lost.”

She drove him away, and the bedroom fell quiet.

Qi Zhen sat alone for a while. She counted the banknotes, then took her lighter and burned one of them, using that flame to light a cigarette.

She leaned against the headboard and smoked in silence.

White smoke curled and drifted and rose in the air. Then, all at once, a single tear slipped from the corner of her eye. She raised her hand and wiped it away. Her lipstick was smeared, her hair was a mess — she looked so wretched, so fragile.

She needed protecting. In that moment, Qi Yan was certain of it.

After half a cigarette, she crushed it out in a crystal ashtray, got up, and opened the window to let the stale, indulgent smell air out of the room.

Someone was honking down on the street below.

The man who had just been with her was downstairs smoking. Seeing the window of Qi Zhen’s flat open, he reached into his car and pressed the horn, calling up to flirt with her from a distance.

Qi Zhen ignored him and turned to go to the bathroom.

She always bathed afterward — it was her habit. And because of her habit, Qi Yan could take the chance to slip out of the wardrobe.

But there was still another kind of urge left unsatisfied in his body — the urge to commit violence.

He left the wardrobe and paced the living room two restless circles without relief, then snatched up a wooden stool from the corner and sprinted downstairs.

That urge exploded the instant he laid eyes on the man beside the car.

He had beautiful hands — hands made for playing the piano. When he raised the stool and brought it down on the man, it was the first time he understood that violence was as wondrous as music. Both allowed a person to release every last emotion — only by different means.

His blood was boiling. His pulse was pounding.

One blow from the stool and the man crumpled headfirst to the ground. Qi Yan grabbed him by the loosely hanging necktie — and thinking of how that same tie had once been used to bind Qi Zhen’s wrists, the urge to commit violence grew stronger and stronger still.

He drove his fists into the man’s face, one after another.

He liked the vivid, startling blood. He liked the helpless screaming. He liked the barely-breathing pleas for mercy.

Qi Yan was breathing in rough, ragged gasps, yet when he spoke, his tone was ice-cold and perfectly composed. He warned: “Touch her again, and I will beat you to death.”

“I won’t — I won’t dare—” The man’s consciousness had been beaten into a fog, and he couldn’t even form words properly.

Qi Yan shoved the man into the back seat of his own car, dialed his wife’s number on his phone, then tossed the phone onto him and turned to go back upstairs.

When he returned home, Qi Zhen had already finished her bath and come out.

She was toweling her hair dry. She told Qi Yan to shut the door, then asked him to go and play a piece on the piano for her.

He had been so young then — fresh from a fight, the fire still not fully drained from his body — and he had looked up to see Qi Zhen in her red dress, vivid and captivating.

He felt something burning inside him, something boiling. Riding that surge of heat, he stepped forward and held her tightly, fiercely.

Qi Zhen was startled, but assumed he was only being affectionate. She patted his head and asked: “What’s the matter?”

Qi Yan closed his eyes and pressed his lips to Qi Zhen’s cheek in a fervent, besotted kiss — just as that man had kissed her.

He said: “Don’t let them touch you anymore. Let me be the one to cherish you from now on. Qi Zhen — I’m already a man. I am your man.”

She would not refuse him.

Qi Yan believed this with absolute certainty, because it was what fate had ordained. He and Qi Zhen were bound by blood. She could not leave him. She would never bear to leave him.

But he was wrong.

Qi Zhen chose to seize his throat with both hands and squeeze with everything she had, intent on ending his life.

“Even hearing you breathe makes me sick,” Qi Zhen shrieked, vicious and raw. “Die! Die!”

Only moments before, he had beaten a powerfully built middle-aged man into unconsciousness — yet now, with the frail Qi Zhen’s hands around his neck, he found he had not the slightest strength to resist.

He let her strangle him, and then passed out in the suffocation.

Qi Yan had thought he would die. Yet somehow, after a span of time he could not measure, he came back to consciousness.

The pain in his throat left him briefly unable to make a sound. He opened his eyes and looked around in a daze, and finally found Qi Zhen.

She was lying on the bed. In her red dress, lying on the bed among scattered rose petals.

The wound on her wrist was horrific — cut so deep. Blood had pooled across the floor.

Qi Yan was gripped by a panicked bewilderment. His body swaying, he crawled over to her and called her name once.

Qi Zhen’s face had already gone white. There was no response.

In that moment, strangely, he felt no fear. Instead, he became certain of one thing — death is beautiful. Qi Zhen was dead. If he had also died just now, they would have been together forever.

A pity that Qi Zhen hadn’t been strong enough. She hadn’t been able to kill her son with her own hands.

Qi Yan climbed onto the bed and lay down quietly beside Qi Zhen. After a little while, he carefully tucked himself beneath her arm, letting Qi Zhen hold him, and then closed his eyes in peace.

He would die here too.

This is good. This is good.

Then — not long after, amid that world of intertwined red and black, all death and stillness — a blinding, snow-white beam of light suddenly broke through. And within that beam of light came a tall, mountain-like figure.

“Something’s wrong! Quick, quick! Someone has cut their wrist — and there’s a child here too!”

The voice was clear and urgent. It pulled Qi Yan back. His eyes opened in a daze, and he saw the man’s upright, honest face.

Jian Liang leaned close, felt beneath his nose to check his breathing, and confirmed: “The child is still conscious. Come in and lend a hand — get the woman to the hospital first—”

Jian Liang was clearly flustered. He wasn’t well-versed in emergency first aid — he only pressed a towel against the wound on her wrist as a simple compress, then lifted Qi Zhen into his arms in one motion.

Qi Yan panicked. He grabbed onto Jian Liang’s uniform and held on with all his strength, refusing to let go. “Don’t touch her.”

Jian Liang assumed the child had been shocked senseless. He gave him a quick, reassuring smile, trying to steady the boy’s emotions. “Don’t worry. I’m a police officer. I can help get your mother back to you.”

“……”

Apart from Qi Zhen, he had never trusted a single person — and he certainly could not bring himself to trust this police officer he had never met.

Jian Liang had no choice but to free one hand and pat Qi Yan on the head. “Good child.”

Whenever Qi Yan had been frightened in the past, Qi Zhen would often soothe him this same way — gently patting his head.

Slowly, the grip of his fingers loosened.

At this point Jian Liang’s colleague came in and gathered Qi Yan into his arms. Jian Liang could not afford to lose any more time. He said to his colleague: “You look after the child.”

He had trusted a police officer once before.

Only once.