Chapter 41 (2/2)
Outside, the rain lashed down.
It was as though she were wrapped in molten lava, burning her down until not even bone remained. Her face had gone pale and green. Her long fingers clenched so tightly that her knuckles turned white.
Then suddenly she let out a scream.
For all that, Shen Cheng still loved her.
Even knowing what her motives had once been, even hearing the cruel things she had said, the hurt in his heart still did not outweigh the pain of seeing her suffer like this.
She stood there in the dim hall, the whole place darkened by the storm outside. Her frame looked slim and fragile, carrying a kind of lonely vulnerability.
Shen Cheng rose and wrapped his arms around her from behind.
Her body stiffened. Then she turned and clung to him in return.
The moment she embraced him back, satisfaction and comfort flooded Shen Cheng’s chest. He held her, stroking her hair gently, and said in a soft voice, “You don’t have to be this upset. He won’t be pleased with himself for long. My brother has wanted him gone for ages. He’s going to Austria next week. When the time comes, we’ll see what becomes of him. Once he falls, you can deal with Mu Wan however you want.”
After leaving the Mu residence, Mu Wan took Liu Qianxiu to the Mu family cemetery. After paying respects to her mother on the tenth anniversary of her death, the two of them returned to Liu Qianxiu’s place.
It had rained without stopping ever since they left the Mu house. Neither of them had brought an umbrella, and both were half soaked through by the time they arrived.
Liu Qianxiu unlocked the door.
Mu Wan followed him inside. The door clicked shut behind them, and he handed her a towel. Mu Wan looked up at him, took it, then stepped closer and rose onto her toes to dry his hair for him.
Outside, the rain darkened the sky. Inside the living room, there was only shadow and the small forms of the kittens, who had already come tumbling out of the cat room at the sound of the door opening.
The torrential rain was muffled by the windows. Inside, it felt peaceful and warm. As Mu Wan dried Liu Qianxiu’s hair, he took another towel and wrapped it around hers as well.
Their clothes were wet through.
Mu Wan dried herself off, then looked up at him in the dimness, her eyes bright, the corner of her mouth lifting.
“We should wash up,” she said softly.
The movement of the towel in her hair paused for just a second.
He looked back at her, eyes shifting darkly.
Then he bent, lifted her into his arms, and carried her straight into the bathroom.
Once they were clean, desire naturally followed.
By the time it was over, Mu Wan lay in his arms, thoroughly satisfied in body and mind. She did not even feel like eating dinner anymore.
The rain outside had stopped. Night had fallen completely. The floor-to-ceiling window stood cracked open, letting in the cool air after the storm. Wrapped in a thin blanket, Mu Wan still had one shoulder and a little of her body exposed, and her skin had gone cool.
She shivered slightly.
The next moment, Liu Qianxiu drew the blanket higher and tucked her in until only her small, pale face remained outside. Mu Wan wriggled twice before he gathered her close again and prevented any further movement.
Outside, insects had begun to call.
Relaxed, Mu Wan’s thoughts drifted. She was tucked against him like a little chipmunk, bundled in the blanket. Looking up, she kissed the underside of his chin and asked, “Why didn’t you ask when I figured out who you were?”
Since Liu Qianxiu had shown up at the Mu house, and since they had gone together to pay respects to Mu Wan’s mother, neither of them had mentioned his identity again. It was as though both of them had silently agreed not to break the spell.
Liu Qianxiu lowered his gaze to her. She was visibly excited, and he followed her lead.
“So,” he asked quietly, “when did you figure it out?”
“This morning,” Mu Wan said at once. “Actually, I’d suspected it before, but I didn’t have anything solid to support it. Then all of a sudden my resources got better, and even my company started paying more attention to me. That was strange. But it was only strange—until I recognized Mei Yaozhi yesterday.”
She lifted her head slightly as she spoke, her eyes bright.
“But when I asked, you denied that he’d come to see you. And I believed you. Still, I wanted to test it, so this morning I brought up Mu Qing. And sure enough, Mu Qing got removed from the role and Mi Yu replaced her.”
“If you had swapped in Tang Qin, the one I’d mentioned, it would’ve been more obvious. But honestly, for me the goal had already been reached. I didn’t care who the lead actress was, as long as it wasn’t Mu Qing.”
She paused, then went on.
“And then Aunt Wu called me in the evening. I went to the Mu house and texted you that I was going there to destroy myself with them if I had to. If you weren’t the real Liu Qianxiu, you would’ve asked me where the Mu house was. But you didn’t. You just came.”
When she got to that point, she looked up at him and huffed a little.
“The truth is, you didn’t really want to keep hiding it from me anymore, so you just let things follow the path I’d laid out.”
At the beginning, Liu Qianxiu had never really intended to conceal his identity. He had even told her once that he could invest in her productions. But she had refused, and had gone on saying things about keeping him as her sugar baby. He must have found that amusing and simply followed her lead all the way up to now.
This wolf in a saint’s clothing.
At the thought of all her earlier grand declarations, Mu Wan’s face heated up. Still, she forced herself to continue.
“We agreed last night,” she said, “that if you really were Young Master Liu, then you’d be the one keeping me. You already said yes.”
The moment she finished, his body shifted.
There was a soft, startled sound from her as she was lifted and turned, only to land sprawled across his chest instead.
Her ear pressed against him. She could hear the deep, steady beating of his heart. And then his answer.
“Mhm.”
Mu Wan’s arms lifted and settled over him, folding tighter and tighter.
There was no rain outside anymore. The whole world had gone quiet, as if only the two of them remained.
“How did you know my mother liked bird-of-paradise flowers?” she asked.
Liu Qianxiu had not gone to the Mu house empty-handed. He had brought flowers—blue bird-of-paradise, beautiful and pure. Mu Wan always brought a bouquet to her mother’s grave each year. She liked them too.
“Your father told me,” Liu Qianxiu answered quietly, his fingers playing with her hair.
She lifted her head. Novelty flashed in her expression, but not surprise.
It was the first time she had ever heard anything about her father, so novelty made sense. But since the information had come from Liu Qianxiu, there was nothing left to be surprised by.
“You helped me in the beginning because of him?” she asked.
Ever since that first emergency visit, after Liu Qianxiu noticed the bamboo-leaf birthmark on her, he had treated her differently. Helping her raise the cats, keeping her for dinner... Love had begun from that strangely delicate starting point and grown from there. It had been fate for both of them.
“Yes,” he said. “I was once the target of an assassination. Your father saved me, but he died.”
“When?” Mu Wan asked.
“When I was studying in England.”
The incident had happened long ago. So long ago that Liu Qianxiu no longer remembered the exact details of the day. He only remembered walking down the street, being shoved aside by a homeless man, and then realizing too late that the man had taken the bullet for him.
The police caught the gunman. Liu Qianxiu buried the homeless man. In his clothes, he found a photograph.
In it, a woman wearing a qipao held a bouquet of bird-of-paradise flowers. In front of her stood a baby carriage. Inside the carriage lay an infant. On the upper left side of the baby’s chest were two birthmarks shaped like bamboo leaves. Beside the image were two characters:
Qingzhu.
He had people investigate the homeless man’s identity.
His name had been Song Kangze. He had entered England illegally. He once ran a business in Chinatown, but after it failed and he became entangled with loan sharks, he collapsed completely and drifted through life on the streets.
As for the woman in the photo, the image was too blurred for him to identify her. The only real clue had been the bamboo-leaf birthmarks and the name Qingzhu.
“I buried him in England,” Liu Qianxiu said. Then he looked down at the woman in his arms and asked, “Would you like to visit him someday?”
As he spoke, Mu Wan felt as though she were listening to somebody else’s story.
Her father had never once been part of her life. Even today was the first time she had heard his name. Liu Qianxiu said he had gone to England to do business. Perhaps, if she wanted to be sentimental, she could imagine that he had intended to come back for her and her mother after making something of himself.
But in the end, he had failed. He had fallen into debt. Perhaps he had simply given up then, clinging to that one photograph and wandering on like a shell of himself.
If their luck had been better—if her mother had not been born into the Mu family, or if her father’s business had succeeded—then perhaps theirs might have been like any ordinary family, whole and complete.
But their luck had never been good enough.
One wrong step had led to another. Even when they tried to correct it, tried to fight fate, they had only stepped wrong again.
And so the family scattered. People died. In the end, only she remained.
Mu Wan felt a strange emptiness in her chest.
Nothing else.
“If I get the chance, I’ll go,” she said.
Then her expression shifted, and the subject slipped away. She looked at Liu Qianxiu and said, “So television isn’t entirely fake. Great-family heirs really do get assassinated.”
Liu Qianxiu watched her face. The sadness in her eyes, like a reflection cast over water, disappeared almost the instant it appeared.
“Mhm,” he said. “My father was the one who arranged it.”
Mu Wan stilled.
She remembered him once telling her that he, too, had lost both parents. She had heard gossip about the Liu family before—that Liu Fengmian had always preferred his eldest son, Liu Qingyuan. She had thought it was just the sort of shallow talk people spread about wealthy families. She had not expected the truth to be crueler.
“If you had evidence, why didn’t you have him arrested?” Mu Wan asked, her brows knitting tightly.
“My grandfather told me to let him go,” Liu Qianxiu said calmly. “And he told me not to let the Mei family know. He said that if I could do that, he would pass the position of family head to me.”
People always said it was pressure from the Mei family that forced Liu Qianxiu to become head of the Liu family. But the head of a family like that was never chosen because of a little pressure from a related branch.
Liu Qianxiu had walked to that position by himself.
“We can’t let them off,” Mu Wan said quietly, folding his hand into hers.
“Mhm.”
He drew the blanket up over her back and said, “I’m going to Austria next week. I’ll be there for about two weeks.”
She jerked upright at once, her whole body going tight where she lay against him.
His mouth curved faintly. His hand smoothed slowly over her back, calming her.
“You don’t have to worry,” he said. “I’ll come back on time.”
“Wait for me here in the country. They won’t dare do anything to me. And they certainly won’t dare do anything to you.”
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