Zhou Wanning didn’t stand on ceremony at all. She raised her hand and slapped Li Zhanye right across the face: “Take your hands off, they’re freezing cold.”
Seeing that Zhou Wanning wasn’t truly angry with him, Li Zhanye let out a chuckle. He kissed her again and again: “My wife is amazing—she single-handedly subdued two spies. We all saw it. When we get back, I’ll have the division commander give you a medal of honor!”
Zhou Wanning couldn’t be bothered with him. After all the commotion last night, all she wanted now was to sleep.
Li Zhanye wasn’t upset in the least. He carefully tucked her back under the covers, then turned and hauled Li Zhannan out. “Kid, aren’t you going a bit too far? Don’t you know boys and girls are different? If you want to cuddle with someone, go find your own wife. Why are you clinging to my wife to sleep? Do that again, and I’ll spank your bottom.”
“Hmph, hmph.”
Li Zhannan wriggled his little body in displeasure, trying to break free from Li Zhanye’s grip and return to Zhou Wanning’s side: “Smelly, snuggle.”
“What snuggle?”
Li Zhanye carried Li Zhannan back to the west room and tossed him straight onto the bed: “Sleep by yourself.”
Ignoring Li Zhannan’s indignant protests, Li Zhanye returned to the east room and kissed Zhou Wanning for a good while longer: “You’ve worked hard, wife. I still have some business to take care of. I’ll come back to sleep with you in a bit.”
Zhou Wanning shot him a glare. Who needed him to keep her company?
Li Zhanye pinched her soft cheek: “Don’t be sulky. It’s real business. I’ll be right back as soon as I’m done.”
Zhou Wanning was so annoyed she raised her foot and kicked him in the stomach. This man was so irritating—he knew she wanted to sleep, yet he kept chattering on without end.
“Alright, alright, I promise I’ll come right back the moment I’m finished.”
Before leaving, he still couldn’t resist planting a big smacking kiss on her lips.
The moment he stepped out of the small courtyard, Li Zhanye’s expression instantly turned cold and fierce—a side of him Zhou Wanning had never seen.
“Have those two been taken there?”
Xiao Zhang looked grave: “They’ve been sent over and locked up separately. They’re just waiting for you to interrogate them.”
“Good.”
Li Zhanye pulled on his gloves, his eyes icy cold. Two months—this matter was finally about to come to a conclusion.
The sun had just risen, and the earth was already baking dry again, as if last night’s torrential rain had been nothing but a dream. Everyone went about harvesting wheat with their sickles as usual, completely unaware that besides the storm, something else had swept through the night.
At the corner of the west end of the village, in the underground tunnel, a series of agonized screams had just begun to echo out when they were immediately drowned by the roar of the generator in the courtyard.
Li Zhanye yanked off his blood-stained gloves. “Your accomplices have already confessed. Are you still not going to talk?”
“Mmph, mmph!”
“Fine. A tough one, are you?”
Zhou Wanning had hated the smell of cigarette smoke, so Li Zhanye had quit. But now he couldn’t help lighting one up. He suppressed the restlessness that the sight of blood stirred in him: “Xiao Zhang, you keep at them. I need a breather. Today, we must pry their mouths open.”
Li Zhanye didn’t leave. He just propped his legs up on the table and stared at the packed dirt ceiling of the tunnel above. Going a night without sleep was nothing to them—what truly haunted him was the lingering fear.
In the end, he had been too arrogant. He’d never imagined those people would slip right under his nose and strike at his own home. If anything had happened to Zhou Wanning and Li Zhannan, he didn’t know what kind of madness he might have descended into.
“Out of control” was how others most often described him, but in the past, his loss of control had always been deliberate. Today, however, he had nearly lost control completely—the unease of having his weakness exposed made him somewhat obsessive.
For a moment, he wanted to secretly lock Zhou Wanning away within his own territory, somewhere no one but himself would know where she was.
The miserable screams behind him continued, but Li Zhanye’s thoughts had drifted far away.
No matter how tough their bones, no one could withstand the round-robin torture Li Zhanye and his men inflicted. Within just one morning, they had gotten these men to spill everything they needed to know.
Li Zhanye had Xiao Zhang compile all the information into a dossier, then spoke alone with Division Commander Gao for nearly half an hour on the phone.
Division Commander Gao was fairly satisfied with their operation this time: “You did well on this one. Wrap things up and come back. Leave the rest to the Fifth Regiment—they’re better at reconnaissance than you lot.”
“Got it.”
After finishing official business, Li Zhanye steered the conversation toward personal matters: “My wife played a huge part in this, and everyone in the regiment knows it. You can’t keep holding up my marriage approval report anymore. I’ve been dying these past few days, you have no idea—”
Before Li Zhanye could finish, he heard the dial tone of the line going dead on the other end. Li Zhanye couldn’t help but grind his teeth. Why were there so many obstacles on his road to marriage?
No, he had to go back and cry to his wife properly, let her know how much effort he’d put into marrying her, and make her feel sorry for him.
As soon as he decided, Li Zhanye gave the order to prepare for withdrawal and turned to head home. As he walked, he wondered whether he should actually cry or not. It was a bit embarrassing, but he could tell Zhou Wanning was a soft-hearted person. When Er Ya cried, or when Li Zhannan cried, they always got good treatment from her. He was her husband—she would surely feel even more sorry for him.
With that thought, his pace quickened. At this moment, his desire to see Zhou Wanning reached its peak.
But just as he was leaving the courtyard of the regimental command post, the switchboard operator chased after him and called him back. “Regimental Commander Li, Regimental Commander Chu is on the line for you.”
“What could he possibly want with me? Could he have heard I found a fairy of a wife and called just to torture himself?”
The switchboard operator barely suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. “I don’t know. Regimental Commander Chu didn’t say.”
These past few days, their Regimental Commander Li had been acting like a madman, bragging about his wife to anyone who would listen, making everyone’s teeth itch with irritation. It was as if he was the only man in the world who had a wife. Quite a few of them wanted to gang up and beat Li Zhanye up.
But this man just loved to rub it in: “Don’t be jealous. You’ll have a wife someday too—just not as good as mine.”
“Hahaha~”
Hearing Li Zhanye’s hearty laughter, the switchboard operator’s fists clenched.
“Hey, Regimental Commander Chu, what wind blows you over here? You’re not worried I did this job too well and I’m about to outrank you, are you?”
A cold, clear voice came through the line: “My sister is dead.”
Li Zhanye froze.
Unable to help himself, he pulled a lighter from his pocket and lit another cigarette, inhaling nearly half of it in a single drag.
He heard Chu Lingxiao say: “Back then, should I have taken her away? I could have taken her with me at the time.”
After a long silence, Li Zhanye let out a light chuckle. “Brother, don’t be shameless. Even your parents couldn’t hold that person back—what makes you think you can? You think you’re a tornado, that you can just sweep people away the moment you show up?”
With that, the two fell into another stretch of silence.
Li Zhanye sighed and was the first to break the quiet. “Brother, that’s her fate. None of us can stop it. Look ahead.”