Huo Yan did not sleep.
He sat against the wall for an unknown length of time, the back of his head pressed to the rough cement, the uneven surface grinding faintly against his skull.
Shen Qingqing’s snoring paused for a moment. She turned over, the bed creaked, then the soft, kitten-like nasal sounds resumed.
One burst every three seconds.
He counted, his mind was running through accounts.
Not money, but a chain of evidence.
First, the calluses on her hands. Fixing vehicles, chopping vegetables, tossing a wok. The distribution of hardened skin in three different areas perfectly matched the hands of someone accustomed to long-term manual labor. Shen Yaning had not done a single day of work since she was fourteen. Her palms were so delicate that even opening a bottle cap would leave them sore.
Second, her heartbeat. When he had gripped her wrist, her pulse had not carried the rhythm of fear. Fear was fast and scattered. Hers had been fast but heavy, with a clear sense of intent.
She was not afraid of him.
She was afraid he would not believe her.
Third, her scent. Sulfur soap. Shen Yaning only ever used one perfume, a limited edition from La Mer, stolen from the Huo Family. She sprayed three pumps onto her neck every day, enough to fill an entire corridor with its cloying sweetness. The woman now carried no trace of synthetic fragrance, only the coarse but clean scent of sulfur soap.
Fourth, that bowl of noodles.
Huo Yan’s tongue pressed against his molars. The tiny bit of scallion that had been lodged there was long gone, yet the taste remained. Not truly present, but his brain refused to erase the memory.
She had given him all the pork lard.
Shen Yaning would not share even a strand of hair’s worth of benefit with anyone. Once, he had earned an extra fifty yuan at the construction site and hidden it beneath his insole. Shen Yaning searched his entire body, found it, slapped him twice, and called him out for “hoarding private money.”
The same person?
Impossible!
Huo Yan’s hand slid from his knee, his fingertips brushing the concrete floor.
He had made a decision.
Three days ago.
Though trapped in this broken body, blind and penniless, he was not truly alone. The Huo Family believed him dead, but one person knew he was alive.
Lin Yu!
His special assistant, who had followed him since he was twelve, the only one he had secretly sent away before the Huo Family’s purge.
Lin Yu held three separate funds he had hidden over the years, along with two undiscovered overseas routes.
His original plan had been simple. The moment Shen Yaning left the house, he would find the nearest public phone and dial the number he had memorized for six years.
Eleven digits.
He recited them in his mind every day, never forgetting a single one.
Once Lin Yu received the call, he could arrive in this city within forty-eight hours at most. Shen Yaning would be dealt with cleanly, his eyes would be sent to the best ophthalmology center, and the countdown to the downfall of the Huo Family would begin.
As for how to deal with Shen Yaning, he had considered many methods.
At first, he thought of slitting her throat.
Later, he decided that was too lenient, and changed it to burying her alive.
Then one day, after being kicked by a foreman at the construction site and falling face-first into dust, he changed his mind again, deciding she should experience the taste of dirt herself.
He had a hundred ways to make someone wish for death.
That was what the Huo Family had taught him, the only thing they had ever truly taught him, how to make people suffer.
And yet, he had not gone to find a phone today.
Nor yesterday. Nor the day before.
He sat against the wall, his nails scraping lightly against the concrete, making a faint rustling sound.
Shen Qingqing’s snoring paused again. She muttered something indistinct, rolled halfway over, and the blanket slipped down.
Huo Yan’s ears caught the sound of the fabric shifting.
His foot moved.
Bare feet against the floor, toes curling slightly.
One step, two.
He returned to her side.
Closer than before.
Her breath brushed against the back of his hand, steady and slow, the rhythm of deep, unguarded sleep. The airflow lifted the fine hairs on his skin and let them fall again, carrying a faint warmth.
She had no idea what stood before her.
She thought she was caring for a wounded stray dog.
She did not know that this dog had crushed an adult man’s windpipe at fifteen when the man tried to assault him.
Forty-seven seconds.
For the first twenty seconds, the man struggled.
The next ten, he convulsed.
The final seventeen, he went still.
Huo Yan remembered that sensation. The collapse of cartilage beneath his fingers, the faint vibration of breaking bone, and the entire process of a carotid pulse fading from movement to stillness.
His hand rose again.
Fingers angled downward, slightly spread, following the sound of her breathing.
Past her forehead, warm, lightly damp.
Past the tip of her nose, where her breath struck his finger in steady warmth.
Lower still.
Her neck. The artery pulsed there.
Once, twice.
Again.
A steady, safe, defenseless rhythm.
His thumb and forefinger curved, hovering loosely on either side of her carotid artery.
Not closing.
Two seconds. That was all it would take.
Close, tighten, cut off the blood supply. Her consciousness would blur within eight seconds, and within thirty, everything would stop permanently.
Quiet!
Clean, no blood.
Then he could find her phone, his shoes, leave the room, locate the nearest public phone, and dial those eleven digits.
Lin Yu would come for him.
Everything would return to its proper course.
His thumb pressed lightly against the side of her neck.
Warm! Her pulse pressed back against his fingertip.
And then the scent reached him.
Not something he sought, but something carried to him by the wind. A draft slipped through the iron bars of the window, sweeping past her and into his nose.
Sulfur soap.
And pork fat.
The lingering aroma of cooking oil clung to her hair, absorbed while she fried noodles, unwashed, still carrying that smoky, human warmth.
The two scents intertwined without conflict, one forming the base, the other settling over it, a clean foundation layered with the smoke of everyday life.
Huo Yan’s thumb stopped.
Resting against her neck, applying no pressure, yet not withdrawing. Each pulse pressed lightly against him.
His breathing changed.
What had been shallow and controlled faltered for a moment. His nostrils flared slightly, drawing in twice as much air as before.
He was smelling her.
Deliberately.
His head lowered, inch by inch, his neck tilting forward, the weight of his skull pressing into his spine as his jaw angled downward.
His nose hovered above her neck.
Less than a centimeter away.
He caught more.
Beneath the sulfur soap lay a faint, almost imperceptible natural scent, her own, untouched by cosmetics, carrying a slight trace of salt, the residue of dried sweat embedded in the texture of her skin.
His nose moved half an inch lower, sliding from the side of her neck toward her collarbone.
His breath brushed her skin. Shen Qingqing shifted slightly in her sleep, her neck shrinking away.
He did not retreat. His nose touched her skin.
The contact was no larger than a soybean.
But for someone blind, someone who built his world through touch and smell, that tiny point of contact held more information than an entire painting.
Her skin was warm. Her pores relaxed. Her muscles slack.
Complete ease.
Trust! Absolute, unguarded trust.
She slept like soft clay before someone who could kill her at any moment.
Huo Yan’s lips moved. A whisper of breath, lighter than sound.
“Who are you?”
No answer.
Her soft snoring resumed, uneven, like a distant engine struggling to start.
“You are not her.”
His nose remained near her collarbone, his voice rising from the deepest part of his chest, nearly dissolving before it reached his lips.
“But you are inside her body.”
A pause. His thumb withdrew from her neck.
The artery continued to pulse, unaware of how close it had come to death.
Huo Yan straightened and stepped back.
His hands hung at his sides, fingers curled, the rhythm of her pulse still lingering in his skin.
He stood in the darkness, facing her, those sightless eyes directed toward where she slept.
He thought of Lin Yu.
What would Lin Yu do upon receiving the call?
He would arrive within forty-eight hours.
And then?
The room would be emptied. The rental returned. The broken tricycle was discarded. The bag of dried rice noodles on the stove was thrown into the trash.
And her.
She was not Shen Yaning. She was someone else, someone struggling to survive in this world within Shen Yaning’s body. She woke at four in the morning, pedaled her tricycle, bought meat for five yuan, gave him all the pork lard, and shouted at him to live properly.
If Lin Yu came…
What would happen to her?
Lin Yu would treat her as Shen Yaning. Lin Yu would carry out the plan he had set.
Huo Yan clenched his teeth.
The muscles in his jaw tightened, his temples pulsing.
He turned and walked back to the wall, sliding down until he sat again.
He would not make the call. Not because of kindness.
He knew well that he did not possess such a thing. The Huo Family had starved compassion, mercy, and empathy out of him during those three years in the basement.
He would not call because he wanted to keep her.
That bowl of fried noodles.
That scent of soap. That sentence, telling him to live properly.
And the warmth of her lips brushing the back of his hand when she blew on his wound.
All of it together had taken up a small place in his chest. Not large, but firm. He tried to dig it out, fingers pressing in, only to find its roots too deep to pull free.
He did not know what this feeling was.
There was no word for it in his life experience.
He only knew that if she disappeared, that occupied space in his chest would become empty, and that emptiness would swallow him whole.
He would not allow it.
He would keep her by his side.
No matter who she was, where she came from, or why she inhabited Shen Yaning’s body.
Keep her, confine her.
Lock her in place.
His hand found the red string around his wrist. The frayed nylon fibers pricked against his fingertips, rough, yet he had no intention of tearing it off. His thumb traced along its texture, from his own wrist to the other end.
The other end was tied to her. He clenched the string tightly in his fist.
Holding it like that, leaning against the wall, he closed his eyes.
There was no difference. Open or closed, it was all darkness.
But with his eyes shut, the scent of soap seemed stronger.
An illusion.
He knew, he did not care.
Time passed, though he could not tell how long. The stray cats outside fell silent, the distant barbecue stalls quieted, and the alley sank into stillness, broken only by the faint hum of aging electrical wires within the walls.
Shen Qingqing turned over.
The bed creaked. She mumbled something.
This time, Huo Yan heard clearly.
“Add more… eggs… two yuan extra is expensive… not expensive…”
She was setting up her stall in her dreams.
The grip of his fingers on the red string loosened slightly.
A faint curve touched his lips, unnoticed by himself.
Shen Qingqing turned again, one arm falling off the edge of the bed, her hand hanging in the air above him, no more than a dozen centimeters from his head.
The night breeze slipped through the window bars, brushing her neck.
She shrank slightly.
Then again.
Something stirred on her skin. Half-asleep, she could not tell whether it was the wind or something else, only that the small patch of skin itched and prickled.
It was where Huo Yan had just been, where his breath had lingered, the warmth now replaced by the cool touch of night air.
Her brow furrowed as she mumbled vaguely.
“Mm… get lost…”
Her hand came back from the edge of the bed and slapped down blindly at her neck.
She missed. Her palm landed on her face.
“Pa.”
The sound was soft, but solid.
Shen Qingqing’s hand struck Huo Yan’s left cheek.
More precisely, as she turned, her arm swung outward, her palm landing squarely on his cheekbone.
At some point, he had leaned closer again, sitting on the floor, body inclined forward, head angled toward her, less than a palm’s width from the bed.
When her hand came down, his nose was pointed directly at the patch of skin beneath her ear that carried the faint scent of soap.
The slap landed.
A dull sound. Huo Yan’s head tilted slightly from the impact.
A faint handprint bloomed on his cheekbone. It was not severe, but Shen Qingqing, accustomed to physical labor, had strength in her hands, and the strike left his skin tingling.
“Damn mosquito…” she muttered, pulling her hand back, dragging the blanket over her face as she turned away, her snoring resuming.
She never woke. Not for a second.
Huo Yan remained with his head tilted, holding that angle for three seconds.
His cheek was warm, her palm print lingering on his skin.
The corner of his mouth moved.
Barely.
If there had been light, one might have seen his lips curve upward by less than half a centimeter, revealing the faint edge of his teeth.
Then a sound emerged from his chest.
Low, muted.
Forced out from between his ribs.
A laugh, not mocking.
Not cold. Not the practiced social smile he had worn in the Huo Family.
This was real.
Pure! A genuine, amused laugh.
Only one breath of it, brief, like a bubble bursting in water.
He raised his hand, pressing his fingertips to the cheek she had struck, rubbing lightly.
The warmth of her palm still remained.
“Damn mosquito,” he repeated silently, the curve of his lips deepening slightly.
The dignified bloodline of the Huo Family, one of the top three heirs in the capital’s hierarchy, had just been seriously considering whether to crush her carotid artery.
And now he had been slapped like an insect.
He leaned back against the wall, the back of his head knocking lightly against it.
She shifted restlessly, kicking off half the blanket, exposing her calf, her toes curling in the air.
Huo Yan heard it.
He bent down, found the edge of the fallen blanket, and pulled it back over her legs.
The movement was awkward. He had never covered anyone with a blanket before.
The edge fell crookedly over her knees. He adjusted it twice, then gave up.
It was enough. As long as she wasn’t cold.
He retreated to the wall again, gripping the red string, closing his eyes.
This time, his breathing slowed.
Not sleeping.
Just another notch loosened in that string that had been taut for nineteen years.
Outside, the eastern edge of the sky shifted from black to deep blue.
Dawn approached.
In a dozen hours, the sun would set again, the streetlights would come on, and the night market at the crossroads would open.
That woman would load two large buckets of ingredients onto her broken tricycle, pedal forward with him, and plunge into the thickest bustle of human life.
He did not know she would be selling fried rice noodles.
But he knew that wherever she went, the other end of that red string would lead to him.
He would not let go.