The night was a deep, luminous blue.

Jiang Han sat in the study, in front of the dark red wooden desk, leaning back against his chair, face toward the ceiling.

“More than ten years now, and the Wang family still chases after us like a dog that’s spotted a bone.”

His head throbbed.

All these years, everyone had been running their own businesses, minding their own affairs. There was room in the world for everyone, and more than enough money to go around — even with an appetite as large as old Wang’s, there was no reason he had to keep his sights fixed on Sansheng and Longquan.

“Mr. Jiang! Mr. Jiang!”

Liang Xing’s assistant was outside the study, hammering at the door.

Jiang Han went to the door and pulled it open. “What is it?”

His expression was cold, his sharp-featured face radiating displeasure at the assistant’s lack of decorum.

“Second Miss Liang and First Miss Liang just had a huge argument in the room. Now the Second Miss is packing to leave. Please come quickly —”

The assistant hadn’t even finished before Jiang Han pushed past her, leaving nothing but a retreating figure as he headed straight for Liang Meng’s room.

Liang Meng was inside, packing in a fit of rage.

Her vintage travel case lay open on the bed, and she was furiously hurling clothes and dresses into it with all her strength, her expression stormy and set.

Jiang Han leaned against the doorframe, making no move to go in, arms folded, watching her throw her tantrum.

“Where are you off to this time? The Four Seasons? The St. Regis? The Indigo? Or the Ritz-Carlton?”

“Where I’m going is none of your business. All I know is I can’t stay here a moment longer!”

Liang Meng’s face was flushed red, and beneath her lower lashes, tears of hurt kept threatening to spill over.

She had wanted to leave six months ago.

Three people with no blood ties between them, forced to live under the same roof — was it to split the utility bills?

Jiang Han, you’re cold and heartless. Liang Meng, you’re distant and aloof. The two of you are perfectly matched — go be happy together without me!

After a long silence.

Jiang Han quietly walked into Liang Meng’s room and caught hold of her busy hands.

“You’re not going anywhere.”

“It’s not your call.”

Liang Meng grew more furious and shook his hand off.

“I’m only going to get in the way of you and my sister,” Liang Meng said, her heart full of grievance.

She had no reason to stay.

Even six months ago, when things between her and Jiang Han had still been murky and undefined, there had been a moment when Jiang Han walked through the villa gate with Liang Xing’s hand in his — and everything had become suddenly, brutally clear.

He did not love her. Whatever feeling had once been there, it had not been enough.

Jiang Han’s heart was in torment, too.

Too much that could never be said had trapped him in a state of extreme suppression.

He did not want Liang Meng to misunderstand. He did not want her to go on a blind date.

But the nightmares that came night after night were a constant reminder: he was the “killer” responsible for the death of the people this woman had loved most.

He knew that Liang Meng had feelings for him. In England, the four years they had spent living under the same roof — every day of that time, Jiang Han had woken up with a quiet, trembling joy.

Liang Meng was radiant and spirited, like a rose in full bloom, spinning and dancing in the depths of Jiang Han’s heart.

Jiang Han was steadfast and restrained, like a hot spring buried deep beneath a glacier — cold on the surface, and quietly warming everything Liang Meng’s heart touched.

“Liang Meng, I can’t…”

It was the last night they would spend in England, and Jiang Han lay there with quiet resignation, speaking the words that would stay with Liang Meng the longest of anything he had ever said.

That night, Liang Meng had received her diploma, and she and Jiang Han had arranged to celebrate at their villa in England.

In a Christmas Eve atmosphere, the two of them had drunk a great deal of strong liquor, then stood before the floor-to-ceiling windows, holding each other as they danced.

Liang Meng had drunk too much. She leaned softly against Jiang Han’s shoulder.

Her smile was dreamy, blurring in and out of a room full of dark green, vivid red, and gold.

Jiang Han was wearing a single layer from Lona Scott. The steady, urgent rhythm of his heartbeat pressed toward Liang Meng, who was drifting in hazy, intoxicated softness.

As they swayed, lost in the music — to the sound of Passenger’s “Catch in the Dark” — Jiang Han’s soft lips found Liang Meng’s, as though it had always been destined to happen.

His lips were tender. His breath was warm, carrying the scent of strong liquor, and it pulled Liang Meng in completely, helplessly.

“Do you like me?”

Liang Meng’s expression was full of tender longing. Her eyelashes trembled like butterfly wings.

She raised both hands and held his face, and in a voice that could have melted anything, asked very softly.

“Mm.”

Jiang Han drew closer in a moment of abandon, pulling her into another deep kiss rather than answering — just a low, muffled sound resonating in his chest, as a response.

Liang Meng took it seriously. She pushed him back and asked again, with deliberate care: “Do you like me.”

The deep emotion in Jiang Han’s eyes dimmed by a fraction. He lowered his head, letting his fringe fall across his eyes, and said nothing.

Liang Meng turned away in disappointment. Jiang Han caught her at once, the atmosphere thick and charged — ten years of feeling, impossible to let go.

Another fierce, urgent kiss.

Liang Meng was lost.

She had been waiting for this — all of this — from Jiang Han, for exactly ten years.

The one she loved was right here. Life was short. Better to seize the moment.

Liang Meng stopped asking. In the flickering candlelight, they kissed and kissed, and before she knew it, they had tumbled together onto the sofa draped in a cream-colored wool throw.

Liang Meng’s sweater slipped from one shoulder, baring a glimpse of skin as delicate as the heart of a hibiscus flower.

Jiang Han’s kisses shifted from gentle to fierce. His breathing moved from even to ragged. Liang Meng became very aware of the softness beneath her and the hardness above.

But right at the final threshold, a flash of an image from a dream suddenly crossed Jiang Han’s eyes.

He saw a pair of eyes — Liang Father’s eyes.

He was falling backward from the twentieth floor of an unfinished building, lying face-up as he dropped. His gaze — desperate, despairing — locked onto Jiang Han, as if by staring hard enough he could catch him, pull himself back.

Jiang Han struggled to break free. In the gleam of the jingle bell, another face surfaced before him: Liang Mother’s.

Dark hair sweeping through the air, her pale and bloodless face filled with utter despair — a sharp contrast to Liang Father. When she fell, there was not a trace of longing for the living world in her expression.

“What’s wrong.”

Liang Meng felt the change in him. She stopped, pulled herself from the bliss of that dream, and reached up to touch his face, alarmed.

“Jiang Han — what’s wrong.”

“Liang Meng, I can’t…”

Jiang Han’s back was drenched in cold sweat. He drew his long legs back, climbed down from Liang Meng’s side, and stepped away.

He stood upright, breathing in heavy, labored pulls, pressing the heel of his hand to his forehead — burning with cold and heat at once — his chest rising and falling without pause.

Liang Meng didn’t believe him. She sat up and reached for the thin fabric at his waist, trying to pull him back.

Jiang Han seemed to become an entirely different person in an instant. He pushed her away with something close to revulsion.

Liang Mother’s dark hair swirling endlessly through the air. Liang Father’s hollow eyes, desperate with the will to live. Together they wove a net, and Jiang Han was wrapped in it, cocooned and bound.

Soul and flesh. Love and desire.

In that moment, they threatened to tear Jiang Han apart.

Liang Meng had quietly loved Jiang Han for ten years.

Throughout those ten years, he had played at love carelessly — girlfriend after girlfriend, night after night of revelry — earning himself a reputation as a heartbreaker without a second thought.

Yet how could he possibly not be capable.

Liang Meng had always believed, too, that she held a place in the cold and complex heart of Jiang Han.

What she could not accept was this: out of everyone Jiang Han could have chosen, why was the person he had ultimately settled down with her sister Liang Xing?

A weight from the past, and an ambiguity in the present that refused to resolve itself.

The Liang Meng cradled tenderly in his palm. The Liang Meng ripening in the warmth of England, full as a summer peach. And the Liang Meng of this moment — steel-edged, resolved, cutting away every last thread of lingering feeling.

These were three versions of the same feeling, alive in Jiang Han’s heart.

All three were love.

The jealousy of knowing Liang Meng would soon go on a blind date. The desire suppressed for so long it had curdled. The fury that she was about to walk out the door. Together, they cornered Jiang Han until there was nowhere left to go.

He grabbed hold of both her struggling arms, and something in him gave way — beyond control, beyond reason — and he jerked forward, crushing his mouth against hers.

Liang Meng froze.

That familiar tenderness shattered something in her heart in an instant.

Then, rising above it, her reason surged past her feelings.

Furious now, she groped through the luggage beside her and grabbed a bottle of SK-II Essence, and without pausing to think, cracked it against Jiang Han’s head.

The SK-II came in a frosted glass bottle — solid and unyielding. It left a vivid crimson mark at the corner of Jiang Han’s temple.

Jiang Han felt a sharp pain at his left brow, then a warmth. He reached up to touch it — heat, and the metallic scent of blood. He was bleeding.

Liang Meng drove a fierce kick straight into Jiang Han’s abdomen — deliberately clear of anything vital. That, in itself, was an act of extraordinary mercy toward him.

“You’re absolutely out of your mind!”

Liang Meng glared at him with fury, then slammed her half-packed vintage suitcase shut and stormed out the door.

Every tender, complicated feeling that had been twisting through her on the way home — all of it collapsed before the eruption of her righteous, bone-deep sense of decency.

Jiang Han — this was incest. What he had done.

No matter how deeply she had once loved him, tonight he was the worst kind of man, and this was wrong.

Liang Meng wanted to destroy him. Every last piece.

In the cold night wind, Liang Meng wiped furiously at her icy tears and sprinted out of the villa.

She could not stay in this “home” for another single moment.

If earlier she had been throwing a temper tantrum, then what Jiang Han had done just now was a declaration — he had driven her out.

And now she had to figure out how to face her sister afterward.

Jiang Han propped himself against the wall. The blood from his temple crept down slowly toward the corner of his mouth.

“Your sister and I… never registered the marriage…”

A feeble, useless defense, dissolving into the hollow corners of the empty room.

He pushed himself upright with what was left of his strength, fumbled for his phone, and called his assistant: “Get someone to follow Liang Meng. Now.”

Liang Xing stood with her arms crossed, cold and still, on the second floor.

She watched her sister drag a suitcase across the grey stone courtyard below, fleeing in wild, desperate haste. Liang Xing breathed out slowly, her heart heavy and tired.

“Notify Liang Meng’s assistant. Go to the St. Regis and stay with her.”

Why the St. Regis?

Because the St. Regis was closest.

“President Liang — Mr. Jiang is bleeding,” the assistant reported.

“Leave him.”

Liang Xing said it quietly, without expression, then turned and walked off to shower.

……

By the time Lin Qing received the call from HR and rushed headlong to the St. Regis, she was frantically scanning the entire lobby for any sign of Liang Meng.

“Excuse me, miss — are you looking for someone?”

“Could you please check for me — Liang Meng — has a Miss Liang checked in yet?”

Lin Qing had just slapped her ID card down on the marble front desk when she heard it drifting in from behind her — the quiet, lingering notes of Joe Hisaishi’s Castle in the Sky.

She turned around.

Like everyone else in that moment, her gaze was drawn without her choosing to a solitary, haunting figure.

There was Liang Meng, seated at a glossy black grand piano near the center of the lobby. A large travel case stood beside it. Her fingers moved across the keys — ten of them, flowing and dancing — and she played with tears running freely down her face, lost inside her grief, alone in a crowd.

“She plays beautifully.”

A guest stopped to listen, murmuring in quiet admiration.

“Is she one of the hotel’s pianists? She’s wonderful.”

The seamless, revolving music made the hotel lobby feel larger and more exquisite than ever.

Lin Qing quietly found herself a sofa and sat down, watching Liang Meng play — thoroughly captivated.

How many more surprises did her boss have hidden inside her, that she had yet to discover?

Lin Qing didn’t know what had happened to Liang Meng after she returned home tonight, but the expression on her face as she played said everything — she was carrying something enormous, something crushing.

And it was in that moment that Lin Qing understood, more deeply than she ever had before, what it truly meant to be a “flower of wealth and privilege raised in this world.”

A real society heiress in the grip of grief did not throw fits or smash things, sending porcelain crashing to the floor for the spectacle of it.

What she did was hold it all inside — and the restraint of that sorrow cut straight through to the heart.

Lin Qing sat quietly with Liang Meng, listening to the last resounding notes of Nostalgia ring out, and only then gently helped her up from the piano bench and walked her to her room.

“What happened?”

The moment they were inside, Lin Qing helped Liang Meng to a seat, her voice full of concern.

Feel sorry for a man, and you’ll regret it for a lifetime; feel sorry for a boss, and you’ll regret it for eight.

Lin Qing decided that tonight, she would not think of Liang Meng as a boss. She would think of her as a friend.

Liang Meng said nothing. She pulled open the mini-fridge, took out a bottle of vodka, and tilted it straight back in one long pull.

She choked on it, tears streaming.

“Drinking like that — are you trying to kill yourself?”

Lin Qing found her moment and reached in to take it from her.

“If something’s wrong, say it. Don’t go throwing your life around.”

That was Lin Qing’s rule for living — and for dealing with everything that came her way.

“While the alcohol hasn’t kicked in yet — quick, tell me what happened.”

Some pain is too deep to share with anyone outside.

Liang Meng glanced sidelong at Lin Qing, then turned and walked into the room, bottle still in hand.

Another sip.