After hanging up the phone, Su Qiao stood rooted to the spot for a long time without moving.
The female officer’s formulaic voice still echoed in her ears. Every word felt like a tiny needle piercing her heart.
Highly classified.
Emergency mission.
Unable to make contact.
After surviving ten years in the apocalypse, she was far too familiar with those words appearing together.
They usually meant only one thing—
Extreme danger.
Su Qiao’s expression slowly darkened.
“Well, damn,” she muttered under her breath. For the first time, there was no trace of her usual ease or playfulness in her voice. “Looks like… I may have taken things a little too far.”
Her original intention had merely been to tease that innocent paper tiger. She had used her secrets as bait to lure him back from thousands of miles away, just to see how flustered he would become over her.
She never imagined that one phone call would actually “lure” him straight into a real battlefield filled with bullets.
What was this?
The butterfly effect?
After ten years in the apocalypse, Su Qiao had always calculated everything perfectly. For the first time, she felt that things had slipped beyond her control.
She slowly walked home and closed the door, shutting out everything from the outside world.
The house still looked just as comfortable and cozy as she had arranged it herself. The sofa was soft, the carpet thick, and sunlight streamed through the clean windows, filling the room with warmth and brightness.
Yet for the first time, she felt that the safe house she had painstakingly created seemed a little empty.
And her heart felt empty, too.
She forced herself to calm down and sat on the sofa, beginning to analyze the situation.
Given Gu Changfeng’s identity and abilities—a full-regiment-level combat officer and one of the best soldiers among the elite—any mission that required him to cut off all external communication could never be something as simple as suppressing bandits.
Heavy weapons.
Unknown background.
Two failed attempts at suppression…
These fragments of information rapidly pieced themselves together in her mind, forming an extremely dangerous picture.
Her heart sank uncontrollably.
Over the next few days, Su Qiao’s entire routine was thrown into disarray.
She no longer had the heart to study recipes. Even the tempting delicacies in her space seemed utterly tasteless now.
She also found an excuse to temporarily suspend her black-market dealings with the square-jawed man. Money could be earned anytime, but right now, she simply wasn’t in the mood.
Every day, the thing she did most often was sit in the courtyard and stare blankly at the dirt road leading toward the entrance of the military housing compound.
Every shout from the mail carrier made her heart tighten. Yet every time, the news she received was never the news she was waiting for.
She kept telling herself: Who was Gu Changfeng? He was an elite soldier, the pinnacle of combat strength in this era. He was brave and resourceful. Good people were blessed with good fortune. Surely nothing would happen to him.
Yet that uncontrollable worry was like a rapidly growing vine, wrapping tightly around her heart and making it difficult to breathe.
Only then did she realize that, at some point, that man thousands of miles away, whom she had only met a few times, was no longer merely her “contract partner” and “long-term meal ticket.”
He had become a real and tangible person she cared about in this unfamiliar era.
He was the clumsy man who would secretly write “Stay safe” at the end of his letters.
He was the innocent man who would be thrown completely off balance by a single “Hubby” from her.
He was the dependable man who would use his connections to clear every obstacle in her path.
Without realizing it, she had already grown accustomed to having him in her life, accustomed to living freely and fearlessly beneath the safe shelter he provided.
Dependence.
That word, which she had regarded as the most fatal weakness in the apocalypse, now appeared unmistakably in her mind.
She, Su Qiao, had actually become dependent on a man.
The realization frightened her a little, but more than that, it filled her with an indescribable… irritation.
Her unusual behavior did not escape the notice of the neighbors.
“Hey, look at the Gu family’s wife. Why does she look like she’s lost her soul these past few days?”
“Exactly. We used to smell the meat cooking from her house every day. Now we hardly even see her.”
Sister-in-law Wang was the most worried. She carried over a bowl of freshly made steamed egg custard and came to her door.
“Qiaoqiao, what’s wrong? Are you feeling unwell?”
“I’m fine, Sister-in-law Wang.” Su Qiao forced a smile and accepted the steaming bowl of egg custard. “It’s just… I miss him a little.”
One sentence made all the questions Sister-in-law Wang had been about to ask die on her lips, leaving only sympathy and affection in her heart.
“Ah, a short separation makes the heart grow fonder. It’ll be fine once Changfeng comes back.”
Su Qiao smiled and nodded, but her heart was bitter.
Once he came back?
Would he still be able to come back?
A week passed.
There was still no word from him.
Su Qiao felt like a prisoner being roasted over a fire, every minute and every second an agony.
This was the first time since coming to this era that she had experienced this kind of torture called worrying about someone.
She even began to regret it.
Why had she sent those things to him?
Why had she called him and deliberately teased him?
If she had never provoked him, would he not have been affected by her?
Would he not have…
“Knock, knock, knock!”
Just as she was lost in her thoughts and nearly drowning in a pit of self-blame, a faint yet urgent knocking suddenly came from outside the door!
The sound was especially abrupt in the dead silence of the night.
It wasn’t the mail carrier.
It wasn’t a neighbor.
Who could possibly come at this hour?
Su Qiao’s heart instantly jumped into her throat. The vigilance she had honed during ten years in the apocalypse made her entire body tense.
She silently slipped out of bed, pulled the black stun baton from beneath her pillow, and gripped it tightly in her hand.
She tiptoed to the door, lowered her voice, and tensed every muscle in her body, ready for battle.
“Who is it?”
There was a moment of silence outside.
Then a familiar voice, hoarse to the extreme as though it had been scraped raw by sandpaper, came with heavily suppressed, labored breathing.
“…It’s me.”