Chapter 9a
Disclaimer: You know the drill. Everything is not real.
A/N: This is a huge chapter so it has to be divided into two posts.
抱衾與裯
bearing our coverlets and sheets
The sound of a passing car filled up the silence swelling between Kris and Jia.
“What?” fell ineloquently from Kris’s lips. He couldn’t process what she said, and like a CD with a scratch her words kept repeating again and again in his head. She hadn’t moved, stood as still and calm as though she were porcelain.
But her voice sounded neither cold nor calm. “I’m pregnant,” she said again, more firmly this time. Kris wanted to push the words out of the air and back into her mouth. He wanted to wake up from sleep and find himself alone in bed. There was no way this could be his real life.
“You’re sure?” he asked. Meant to ask. Even to his own ears his words sounded like a harsh demand.
Jia stared at him, unmoving, for a long moment, and then she nodded her head slowly. His stomach twisted and he leaned against the side of his car. “But-we always-” he said, grasping at the air for an explanation that would make her words go away.
“Lu Han’s party,” she said in an empty voice. “You were-” she gestured haphazardly in the air for a moment and then let her hand drop and she looked at some point behind his head. Kris remembered. He’d been reckless. He wanted her in that moment. He’d done the very thing he’d been schooled not to do for his entire life, and lived according to his present desires, rather than keeping his future in mind.
She seemed like a stranger to him, distant and unreadable. Kris ran a hand back through his hair and tried to think. He had to think. He couldn’t be a father. He couldn’t be a father because-because absolutely nothing in his life prepared him-because he and Jia weren’t even that serious-because his mother would never forgive-because he wasn’t even-because he couldn’t. Looking down that road, all he could see was an impenetrable darkness.
“You can’t-” he said, faltered, and started over. “You aren’t planning to have it, are you?”
Jia’s eyes shifted very slowly from the point behind Kris’s head to meet his again. But she didn’t say anything. The look in her eyes was as dark and unfathomable as the road he imagined leading toward their future if the two of them brought a child into the world.
“Jia,” he said, “We-we can’t. We can’t have a kid. There’s no-we just-we can’t. You know we can’t.”
Jia closed her eyes for a second. He couldn’t guess at what she was thinking. His skin prickled with heat and he felt bile rising in his throat. His heart thumped hard. He ran his hand back through his hair again and realized he’d done the same motion only a few seconds before. Pregnant. If he could go back in time he would.
“Why not?” Jia asked so softly he could almost pretend she hadn’t asked something so obviously absurd.
His throat felt like it was closing up and his heartbeat ran wild. “We can’t,” he repeated. “Jia-” He almost reached out for her, but stopped himself. She still looked so distant, like someone he didn’t know. Like she hated him. Did she hate him? It took two people to make a child, after all, it wasn’t like he was solely responsible but-god, they could not have a child.
“Why not?” she asked again, her voice stronger this time.
Kris felt his heart slow and his resolve become firm. He had answers if she wanted them. He had reason on his side, not only reason but wisdom, really. He took several breaths before he spoke, wary of saying the wrong thing when she seemed to already be considering the impossible option.
“Jia, how? How the hell would we go about this?” He rubbed his palm against his neck and watched her eyes shift to that place behind his head again. “You think, what? We get married, play house? We’d hate each other. You know we would hate each other.”
In some space in his head he knew exactly what he wasn’t saying. He wasn’t mentioning the gossip that would follow them for months, even years. It wasn’t that a mistake had landed them in an inconvenient marriage-Kris had seen that played out at plenty of weddings-but that Jia was relatively poor, and hadn’t done much to endear herself within their circles. Kris didn’t think she’d be able to do endear herself elsewhere, either. Starting with his mother, who would despise her. Kris could hear his mother’s voice in his imagination, how she’d call Jia a whore behind closed doors and scold her to her face, how she’d never forgive Kris for putting such a shameful blot on their rise back to their proper place in society. If Kris’s father were to find out, Kris was sure he would laugh.
“We don’t have to get married,” Jia said. “I never said anything about that.”
“Then why the hell are you here?” The words came out before Kris had thought about them, bypassing consideration and leaping out of his mouth. But he couldn’t fathom what she was doing here if she didn’t plan to ask him to do something, whatever that something was.
Her eyes met his again. Every time this happened Kris felt as though she was more distant and more cold, which made him even more frightened. They couldn’t have a child but he couldn’t lose her, either. He needed her but without the problem in the mix. He needed her the way things were supposed to be and not the way everything was happening right now.
“You fathered a child,” she said. “You should know.”
“There’s no child yet!” Kris cried out. “You can undo this mistake, okay, there’s no reason for either of us to ruin our lives when you have a million options and Jia, no one will ever know, we can move on with our lives and-and we’ll be okay. That’s the only way we’ll be okay.”
Jia blinked. Every time she fell silent Kris felt a deep shiver rattle him all the way into his bones. Shaking, he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her. She didn’t return the hug but maybe if he held onto her tight enough he could bring her back from whatever land of fear and delusion she’d fallen into, return her to reality with him.
“Look,” Kris said, resting his cheek against the top of her head, breathing in the scent of her shampoo that was so familiar to him now. “I’ll pay for everything, okay? If you-if you need support I’ll go with you and I’ll be right beside you the whole time but-but Jia, you can’t go through with this. Don’t do that me. Don’t do that to yourself.”
She still hadn’t moved and stood stiffly in his arms. When he first saw her sitting beside his car, he thought she was going to dump him. She wasn’t, but he still might lose her. He couldn’t be a father and he also couldn’t bear to lose her. He stepped back and cupped her cheeks in his hands, lifting her head until their eyes met. He’d kiss her if he thought she’d kiss him back, if he thought the real Jia was in there.
“Jia,” he pleaded. He couldn’t be the failure his mother feared he’d be, the one his father expected him to be. And she shouldn’t ruin her life over a mistake, either. She had to know this. She had to.
She reached up and wrapped her hands around his, pulling them away from her cheeks and holding them loosely in her own. Her gaze fell away from his and dropped to the ground.
“I need time to think through everything,” she said to the concrete. Kris moved his hands to grip hers.
“Jia,” he said again, empty of words. Terror filled the cavity in his chest.
“I’ll consider it,” she said, her eyes never leaving the ground. She stepped away and her hands slid away from his. He watched as she walked away, taking in the slump of her thin shoulders. She never looked back at him, not even once.
Kris climbed into his car, slammed the door shut, and rested his head on the steering wheel. He remained very still until he conquered the urge to cry. Jia would understand. He had to make sure she understood him. She had to.
__________
She’d asked for time to think over everything, but Jia’s mind was quiet.
As she climbed the steps of the parking garage to the upper level where her own used Honda was parked, she pondered her emotions, like she was examining herself in a petri dish, pulling apart the thin and sticky specimen but reaching no conclusions. Even fear seemed like a distant, unrecognizable feeling, though on some level she knew she was scared.
After her conversation with Yixing a week earlier, she’d gone to a drugstore and purchased a pregnancy test, already half-certain of what it would say. When it turned positive, she’d sat on the tile of her bathroom floor for a long time, staring at nothing. Even now as she turned her keys in the lock of her car door, all her decisions were only partially formed, and she lived each day mechanically following her routine, unable to piece out what steps to take next. She dreamed of home, frequently-of the house in the countryside where her grandparents lived, of the carelessness and ease she enjoyed as a little girl. But even these daydreams she struggled to understand in the context of her situation.
She started the car and sat for a moment, her hands gripping the steering wheel, trying to put a name to the feeling pressing heavily on her chest. But she couldn’t find one. It was as though her feelings now transcended description, and as much as she wanted things to be fixed as simply as Kris insisted they could be, it wasn’t possible. The very thought of an abortion left her trembling, fear clawing at her throat.
She pulled out of the parking garage, forcing herself to keep a careful eye on the road as she drove. It wasn’t as though abortion was taboo to her. One of her high school best friends had gotten one, and Jia had gone to the clinic with her, waiting there until it was over and walking home together arm-in-arm. That friend never regretted it. As Kris had said, Jia’s friend knew better than to ruin her life over a mistake.
But Jia wasn’t Kris and she wasn’t her high school friend, and she knew that it wasn’t so simple for her. When her parents first found out they were expecting a child, they’d gone to a fortune teller who informed them the child would be a girl. Jia’s grandparents urged them to get an abortion, reminding them that they had one shot at this, and should try again for a boy. But her parents adamantly refused, instead bringing Jia into the world, female and thus unwanted. Except her parents always wanted her. Jia couldn’t remember a single time over the years when her parents hadn’t been quick to remind her how much they cherished her, their only daughter, their only child. Jia first found out about the fortune teller and the advised abortion when she was fifteen and her grandmother, spiraling into dementia, told her the whole story in great detail, finishing with a short “And they should have listened to me!” Jia hadn’t been able to hold back her tears later when she happened to be alone with her father. Teenage angst already made her feel worthless, and maybe she was as unwanted as she felt. Her father-a gruff man of few words-held her close to him and told her, “Sometimes there is grace in doing the thing everyone else thinks is foolish.”
Her current situation was undoubtedly foolish, from start to finish. Jia should not have let herself end up here, pulling into the parking lot of her apartment in America and considering bringing an illegitimate child into the world. Kris would, she was certain, pay for everything and go with her to the clinic and support her. But only if she chose to erase their mistake. If she chose not to, she doubted he would be able to do much of anything for her. Terror shrouded his eyes when he spoke and shook in his voice.
Jia got out of the car and climbed the stairs up to the apartment. Inside, the small rooms were cool and dusky. Hyerim wasn’t home, then. Jia still hadn’t told her roommate that she was pregnant-hadn’t told anyone but Kris. She glanced at the clock on her way back to her bedroom and saw that her parents would be awake now. She should call them. She should tell them. They would be disappointed and worried, but they would know what to do.
Her hand shook as she pulled up WeChat and dialed her mother. She left the video call off-her mother said it was cumbersome anyway, but Jia was sure that if she saw her mother’s face, she would start crying and wouldn’t be able to stop. The thought of telling her made Jia’s heart pound rapidly in her chest. She sat down on the floor by her bed and waited for her mother to pick up.
“Hello?” Her mother’s voice came clearly over the phone. Jia was on the opposite side of the globe, a massive ocean between them. The distance, which seemed so insignificant when Jia was happy and busy with school, seemed vast now.
“Hey, ma,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.
Nevertheless, her mother noted Jia’s tone immediately and asked, “What’s wrong?”
Jia brushed away the tear that slipped out and down her cheek. Her mother had such a brisk, harsh way of talking, but it was all bark and no bite. No one cared as deeply as her mother. Although Jia teased her mother often with gushy “I love you’s” that were met with an eye roll, Jia knew how deeply her mother loved her. She knew it when she was planning to come to America and her mother saved money for a whole year, unknown to either Jia or her father, bargaining vendors down and charming visitors to their restaurant into buying the highest-priced dishes. Then she gave all the money to Jia and walked away without a word, careful to hide her tears.
How could Jia tell her the truth?
“I think,” Jia said as carefully as she could, afraid of betraying anything, “I think I want to come home after I graduate.”
Her mother’s silence filled up the line for a long moment and Jia held her breath and waited.
“Did something happen?” her mother demanded. “I thought you were going to stay on with your internship? What happened?”
Jia counted to ten before she answered. “It’s-it’s nothing, Ma, I’m just not cut out for the business world. They’re really cutthroat, you know? I’m not mean enough.”
Her mother made a soft mm of understanding. “I always thought it was strange, you being friends with that socialite. She was in the paper the other day. It was very strange.”
Jia thought about Feifei, and imagined telling her about the pregnancy. She could almost laugh, imagining Feifei’s outrage. But underneath that would be a deep disappointment, even contempt. Jia couldn’t tell Feifei. She adored her friend, but she couldn’t tell her this.
“Yeah, it’s different being her friend and being her employee,” Jia said with a laugh, wiping another tear away. “I got to thinking, you know, you all are expanding the restaurants and what if I came and worked for you? Put my fancy American PR degree to good use.”
Her mother was silent again. Jia’s tears were coming faster, now, but she managed not to make any noise that would be heard over the phone. She thought about telling her mother the truth. Opened her mouth to do it. But the words I’m pregnant lodged in her throat. Oh, her mother would be so disappointed. Jia should have known better and kept her legs together instead of climbing into bed with a boy for the euphoric intimacy that never did last. Jia always wanted it to last. That was her problem. She wasn’t the girl she pretended to be, that was clear to her now. Even with Kris, she’d only gone home with him that first night because she had a feeling it would turn into something more. Unfortunately, it had.
“Jia,” her mother said finally, “sweetheart, what’s wrong?”
The uncharacteristic term of endearment forced Jia to hold the phone away from her and bite hard on her thumb so she wouldn’t start sobbing. Kris was right. This mistake could be undone. No one would know what kind of situation Jia had gotten herself into. She’d never have to tell.
But she couldn’t do it. She didn’t think she could do it.
Finally she put her phone back to her ear and squeezed out some normal-sounding words. “I’m just homesick,” she said.
Her mother took a deep breath, like she wasn’t sure what to do. “Well,” she said, “If you want to come home, your father and I will be happier than I can say. We miss you.”
“I miss you too,” Jia said. She looked up at the ceiling and felt her tears run down her temples, back into her hair and around her ears. What would her parents say, when she came home pregnant? Depending on when she bought her plane ticket, she would be three or four months by then. The night before she looked up a little chart on the internet to see if she could get away with hiding her pregnancy until she graduated. She looked at the curved stomach of the pregnant woman in the drawing and took in shallow, nervous breaths-but she could get away with it. Apparently women didn’t show much for a long time. After she looked up the drawing she went through her closet and picked out all her loosest clothing. But even if no one else noticed, Jia’s mother would know the second Jia got off the plane. What a way to come home.
“Talk to your father,” Jia’s mother said, and there was the rustling as the phone was handed over. Jia listened to the silence that followed that meant her father was waiting for Jia to speak first.
“Hi,” Jia said. She wiped her tears away with the palm of her hand. “I think I’m going to come home after I graduate.”
Her father made a gruff sound in his throat as a reply. Jia grinned up at the ceiling, imagining his somber face, the lines around his eyes, his strong arms and the scent of his favorite tea.
“Ba,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. “You know that thing you told me a long time ago? About how there is grace in doing the thing everyone else thinks is foolish?” She paused and drew in a deep breath. “Is that true?”
She listened to the sound of him breathing. Even though she was scared out of her mind, she wanted him to say that it was true. She needed him to say that it was true.
“In my life, it has been,” he said finally. “There were lots of things. The restaurant. You. Especially you. If I relived my life a thousand times I would always choose to have you.”
Jia barely managed to hold back her tears. She got out, “Thanks. I have to go.”
As soon as her father said goodbye, she hung up the phone. She wrapped her arms around her knees and sank down to the floor, lying there curled around herself, and sobbed.
__________
Yixing had an ongoing habit of having weekly dinners with Liyin, one that had been cut off in the past few weeks because he was so busy with trying to fix everything that was going wrong in everyone’s lives but his. But Liyin called the night before, and from the tone of her voice Yixing could tell that his cousin meant it when she said she wanted to see him. Liyin was a wonderful older sister, definitely, but she could deliver a mean smackdown if needed. So he was here, pulling up outside the lobby of Kim Jongdae’s posh apartment complex in his black, slightly battered BMW. Yixing didn’t enjoy collecting cars as much as his friends did.
He watched as Liyin appeared in the lobby through the glass doors, holding hands with Jongdae. She always looked wonderfully happy whenever she was around him, Yixing thought absentmindedly. It was a side of her that their employees never got to see much. Liyin believed in being a stern but benevolent boss. Jongdae kissed her before he let go of her hand. Liyin smiled at him, before pushing the door open and walking towards his car. Yixing let out a small laugh as Jongdae watched all the way until Liyin had gotten into the BMW, and then turning around to take the elevator back up.
“Hello, Mr. Busy.” Liyin said as she buckled up. Yixing made a face and turned the car out. “Would you have remembered to, you know, actually have dinner with me if I hadn’t called yesterday?”
“Yes, jie.” He said and it wasn’t that much of a lie. If Yixing had looked at his calendar he would have remembered, but it was now filled with the colour code that belonged to Jia. So maybe Liyin was right, but he wasn’t going to admit that in her face. “I’m sorry, please allow me to pay for your steak tonight.”
Liyin scrunched up her nose. “I don’t want steak. We’re Sichuanese, it’s hot pot or nothing else.”
“Does Jongdae indulge this habit?” He teased, and Liyin hit him on the shoulder. “It’s still so weird to be picking up your cousin from her boyfriend’s place.”
“Only if you’re imagining weird things,” Liyin said and rolled her eyes. Yixing laughed again. He felt more relaxed than he had been in weeks. Being around his family helped, he thought, because they were so tightly-knit. Yixing had grown up in a household that prized being together above anything else, which was apparently weird to everyone else around them.
They stopped at a red light after a few minutes, and Liyin took the chance to glance at her phone. Yixing thought it was business-related, because she was such a workaholic, but realised that Liyin was smiling to herself. Again, this was a sight that her subordinates would never get to witness, and it occurred to him that she was actually truly in love. It was a funny realisation.
“Jie,” he said and Liyin looked up, “how are you so happy?”
“What do you mean?” Liyin asked as they turned out onto another street. Yixing mused for a moment. It was just so disconcerting for him, to see her bask in happiness while everyone else around him seem to sink deeper and deeper in a desperation that he couldn’t seem to hold off for them. Lu Han was drowning but Yixing couldn’t pull him up. He didn’t want to be pulled up.
“I mean…” They were approaching Chinatown now, and Yixing glanced at his rear mirror. Traffic was heavy, as always. Life was going on as usual, but the normality was what struck him the most. That while everyone else was going about their lives, they were wallowing in a set of problems that didn’t seem resolvable. “Have you heard about Lu Han?”
Liyin’s face fell. Yixing pressed his lips together and turned into a private, quiet alley where their restaurant was located. They were old customers now, so exclusive that they didn’t need a reservation for a table. Liyin put down her phone, and took a while before she spoke again.
“All employees talk,” she said, like she was choosing her words carefully, “and those who work in Lu Han’s house are not otherwise.”
So she had, Yixing thought. Liyin looked him in the eyes, and he blinked back. His cousin was always one step ahead of everyone else, intuitive and perceptive enough to hold the fort on her own. But could she help him? Could she help Lu Han, when she already didn’t like him by sheer virtue of his surname?
“Then you should know that he’s this close to wasting himself away. He’s not telling me anything, and I don’t know if I’m going to go home tonight and see him dead on his bedroom floor because he overdosed on something.”
Yixing said it very quietly but he was sure that Liyin heard every single word. Her face was still expressionless, and she looked at him again for a while more, before she let out a small sigh and closed her eyes. She opened them again, and Yixing wanted her to say that she would help. Tell him something. Anything.
“He won’t kill himself.” Liyin said finally, and Yixing pulled up to the restaurant. The valet waited outside, but he wasn’t in a hurry to open the doors yet. “The Lu pride is strong. They would never die the death of a coward.”
She smiled sardonically, and Yixing knew that he was now even further away from an answer-if she was even going to give him one in the first place.
The valet took his keys as Yixing trailed Liyin into the restaurant. Their server was speaking to her in the front, and he watched as his cousin nodded elegantly at whatever suggestions the server was making for their dinner. He wondered, suddenly, if Lu Han was refusing to eat again. He had been leaving his dinners untouched outside his room door for a few weeks now.
“Yixing.” Liyin called when they had been seated and their server had retreated out of the room. He looked up at her and nodded silently. “I know this isn’t what you want me to say to you, but keep your distance. If you want to help Lu Han, stay away from him.”
“You keep saying that, but I don’t see how that works.” Yixing closed his eyes in frustration and took a deep breath. “If he can’t help himself, and nobody’s telling me anything, how is that going to be of any use to him? I can’t pretend not to see how much pain he is in.”
Liyin’s expression shifted but soon enough she was stoic again. Yixing couldn’t understand how she could compartmentalise everything that wasn’t about their family and the people she loved. He hadn’t thought about it before, but now as he sat here in a very expensive hot pot restaurant, in a private room lined with mahogany and oak, he realised that even Liyin was the same. All of them, inhabitants of a world padded with the weight of money, were exactly the same.
“I don’t want you to be hurt.” She said, almost robotically, but Yixing was having none of it.
“And you think it’s okay if Lu Han is? He’s someone’s son too, he’s human as well!” He tried not to yell, but it was the loudest he’d ever spoken to Liyin. She looked at him, eyes unreadable.
“Yixing. Nobody’s obliged to help anybody, especially not if you’re going in blind with no idea what’s going on.” Liyin said, her voice hard, and Yixing wanted to tell her that she was wrong. He was obliged to help, because Lu Han was his friend and that was friendship for him. Yixing gave because he wanted to, and only because he wanted to.
“Then tell me! You can’t keep saying things like that and then expect me not to help.” Yixing’s voice was rising with every word, but he tried his best to keep a hold on it. Liyin looked at him, her mouth set in a severe line, and suddenly he realised that she was looking at him like she would a rogue employee. She stared at him for a while more, before her gaze dropped to her plate.
“Lu Han’s father is-” she paused, and Yixing’s heart remained strung in the air for a moment more, “-he’s dirty.”
Yixing gaped. “What?”
He repeated that dumbly for a moment. Liyin was about to say something more when the doors opened and their server came in with their soup bases. They remained quiet as their table was set up. The server nodded at them to enjoy their meal, and Yixing watched as he left the room quietly again. The pot was silent, not yet bubbling, but Yixing knew it would soon. Apt.
“Your best friend’s money comes from people who give it to them.” Liyin said as she stared at her chopsticks. She sounded casual, almost. Yixing didn’t say anything, because he didn’t know what to. When the truth he wanted was presented in front of him, he didn’t have any other option but to become mute.
“Are we-” He asked, finally, but didn’t have the heart to carry on. But Liyin knew what he was trying to ask, and shook her head.
“No. But only because our contracts are personally approved by someone in the Politburo. Grandfather always worries about how their dinners together aren’t enough to keep us in his good books, but I guess we’re better than the people paying the Procurator-General off, aren’t we? At least we’re only dealing with the Politburo.”
She laughed mirthlessly, and Yixing swallowed, the lump in his throat still not willing to go away. Did Lu Han know about this? He had to, or else he wouldn’t be allowing himself to waste away, life slowly draining out of his too-thin body. Yixing knew that Liyin was right about the strange strain of pride that the Lu family seemed to possess.
“So why stay away, Yixing? This is why. You and I aren’t big enough for the likes of this. We can’t do anything to help when Lu Han’s family goes down. If you want to be there for him when everything goes into flames, then stay away now. If you’re not implicated, then can you offer him shelter when he actually needs it.”
Liyin’s eyes burned as she spoke, and Yixing’s chest constricted. He opened his mouth and tried to say something, but nothing came out. Liyin looked at him, and then turned away to tend to the hot pot. It was already boiling over, large bubbles heaving in the soup. Yixing remained quiet as she added the ingredients in.
“I know I’m heartless, Yixing, but I only want my family to be safe.” Liyin stirred the soup with a ladle and said, her tone self-facetious. “The people who run in our circles won’t ever be nice to you, because they’re stupid enough to only look on the surface, but if I can keep danger away from you, I will. You should understand-you want to do the same for Meng Jia, don’t you?”
Yixing blinked at her. For a moment he foolishly wondered how she even knew about Jia, but then he quickly realised that she was Zhang Liyin. If she wanted to know anything, she would have it at her fingertips within half an hour. Of course she knew about Jia.
“I don’t-” He began, but she merely raised an eyebrow. “We’re friends. Lu Han and I are also friends. I mean-”
“Sure.” Liyin reached for his bowl and ladled some soup in. “I like her, anyway. But what I’m saying is, if you want to protect someone, you have to learn how to do it within your means. Maximise what you have, then use it for or against them. That’s how you do business, Yixing. You’re next-in-line, you have to learn.”
“Your kid is next-in-line, jie.” Yixing wasn’t bothered that he would never inherit the main business. It didn’t matter to him, but Liyin clicked her chopsticks at him crossly. “It’s not a big deal.”
“So you think you can do things your way just because you’re not the heir? Yixing, if you want to make it out clean, listen to me.” Liyin put her chopsticks down and ran a hand through her hair. “Look. There are people out there who want to bring the Lus down. That’s fine by me, they’re a despicable family that I don’t care about, but if you’re going to stick your neck in there and think that you’re going to help matters by doing that then that’s not fine. I’m not going to let you do anything stupid.”
Yixing sat very upright in his seat stoically. Liyin was staring at the boiling pot, frothing over. It looked completely uncontrollable, much like the situation Yixing now found himself in. Liyin picked up her chopsticks for a moment, before she put them down again. The china clinked against each other, a sharp, ringing sound.
“When a praying mantis is hunting, there’s always going to be a sparrow behind it.” Liyin began, her voice wavering only in the slightest. It was an old Chinese proverb, one that their grandfather favoured. He was well-versed in the acumen of business, and while their grandfather had never thought to put Yixing before Liyin in the line of succession, he was always disappointed that Yixing couldn’t play politics as well as Liyin could. Yixing continued to listen without a word.
“Be that sparrow, Yixing.” She urged. “If you want to protect the people you love, be that sparrow. Stay hidden, and strike only when the time is right.”
__________
Sohee frowned as she watched Sehun’s Lamborghini peel into view in front of her. When Sehun had offered to pick her up from class so that he could share what his older brother had discovered for her, Sohee had nearly rejected him and told him to just email the files to her. Something she’d rather not acknowledge made her hold her tongue and agree instead. Now she regretted it. People coming out of the business college’s building behind her kept turning to stare. Sehun just had to put on a show.
The window on the passenger’s side rolled down and Sehun leaned over, pushing his sunglasses down and looking at her over the top of them. “Miss me?” he asked, with all the practiced charm of Seoul’s favorite playboy. Sohee rolled her eyes and made sure to slam the car door as hard as she could when she climbed into the passenger’s seat.
“Do you know where I live?” she asked.
“I have a vague idea,” Sehun said as he pulled out to the main road. He waved at some people on the street corner staring at his car, a smug little smile twisting his lips. “Minseok-hyung doesn’t hold parties there, so I don’t know exactly, but I know the area.”
Sohee kept silent as Sehun drove. It was late afternoon and she pulled out a pair of Ray-Bans to keep the light from blinding her eyes.
“How much information did your brother send you?” Sohee asked. “Did you look at it already?”
She watched Sehun’s expression slide from neutral into a small frown. She didn’t like where this was going already, and she’d only asked one question.
“He didn’t, you know, actually send me any evidence yet,” Sehun said. He flashed a boyish grin her way and Sohee closed her eyes. It just had to be Oh Sehun who found her when her car broke down.
“Then why are we on the way to my house right now?” Sohee asked, working hard to keep her tone level.
“I thought we could discuss all the hard work my brother is going through to break your brother’s will,” Sehun said brightly. Sohee snorted. “Hey,” Sehun shot back, “It’s pretty impressive, okay? Totally worth discussing.”
Sohee rolled her eyes. “You tricked me,” she informed him.
“Come on, Sohee,” he said, leaving off the nuna. Oh, she did notice, and his death was imminent.
“You should drop me off and then leave,” she said. “I could have had someone else pick me up if I’d known you were lying to me.”
“What’s a guy gotta do to spend time with you?” he asked.
“Be useful.”
He didn’t have a retort to that. She watched the street rolling by outside as they lapsed into silence. If Segyun couldn’t break down Minseok, she didn’t know what she’d do. Have to go back to her initial plan of getting information out of Chanyeol, probably.
That gave her an idea. She shouldn’t let leads go just because Sehun offered her an all-access pass to the information she really needed.
“If you really want to help, I do have another idea,” Sohee said.
Sehun’s scowl faded into a smile. “What sort of idea? I like playing spy with you, you know.”
Sohee thought about responding to his last comment, but decided to ignore it. “You can help me track down Chanyeol and see what he knows. My brother has probably gotten to everyone by now and told them to shut up. He thinks I’m meddling.”
Sehun glanced over at her. “You kind of-no, you absolutely are meddling.”
“Whatever. Are you going to help me find Chanyeol?”
Sehun sighed a little and then he glanced at her a second time. They were close to her house, now, and she had the strangest feeling of regret that the drive wouldn’t last longer. Realizing this, she huffed and glared out the window, irritated with herself.
“Sure. Anything you need. I’m your guy.” He smiled and then turned into the driveway when she pointed him toward her house. “Can I use your bathroom?” he asked next.
Sohee couldn’t very well tell him no. “Fine,” she said.
At this hour, she doubted anyone would be home, except maybe some of the cleaning staff. Minseok had his own places and only came to the family home when their parents were in town. Faced with the prospect of being very alone in a very large house with Oh Sehun, Sohee felt a little queasy. Today he was dressed in a t-shirt and some very tight jeans, and she absolutely did not check out his ass as he climbed out of the car. She did not. Frustrated, she hustled out of the car and sped past him, unlocking the garage with the keypad and rushing toward the door before Sehun could catch up.
She strode into the house, her heels clicking on the tiles, and for a distraction to her thoughts, pulled out her phone and scrolled through her emails. Because of this, she didn’t notice her brother until she was already in the kitchen.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” Minseok said.
Sohee looked up, wide-eyed. Her brother casually leaned against the kitchen counter, a box of crackers open beside him and his phone out as well. What the hell was he doing here? He never came here.
“Mom called,” Minseok continued. “She and Dad-”
He stopped abruptly.
Sohee knew without turning around that Sehun had entered the room. Her brother was looking past Sohee’s head, one of the worst scowls she had ever seen growing on his face.
His eyes shifted and they looked at each other. She could see the wheels clicking in his head. A red flush was starting to grow on his neck.
“Oh Sehun,” Minseok said, not taking his eyes away from Sohee. “What are you doing sneaking around with Oh Sehun, little sis?”
They kept staring each other down. She could see her brother connecting all the dots in his head, from Segyun’s request for information to Sehun and now back to Sohee. If Minseok realized that Sohee was the one probing into the Wang family’s accounts, he would shut the whole thing down and Sohee would be back where she started, on a sinking ship and helpless to stop it.
“Well,” Sohee said tentatively.
Her brother couldn’t find out she was behind this. Sehun promised that Segyun was close and Sohee would not, would not give in this easily. She had to do something. But she was going to regret this.
She cleared her throat. “We’re dating?”
All three of them froze. Sohee winced internally but kept her face impassive, willing Sehun not to say anything idiotic. She was going to regret this so much.
“Dating?” Minseok asked, his voice dripping with skepticism. “Him?”
Her brother would. “Well, you can see why I had to keep it a secret,” Sohee said with a roll of her eyes. “I knew you wouldn’t approve.”
Minseok slowly shifted to cross his arms over his chest. Sohee knew exactly why he did it, too-their parents had put the both of them in martial arts as children, but Minseok continued training even now. He was giving Sehun a good look at his built biceps. It was such a stupid assertion of power that Sohee had to stop herself before she rolled her eyes. Were all brothers this ridiculous, or just hers?
“It’s not so much that I don’t approve,” Minseok said. “Although I don’t. I’m just wondering what the hell you see in him.”
Sohee could almost hate her brother. He always had to be so skeptical, so cynical, so doubtful of his little sister-of course, she was lying to his face, but still. She raked a hand through her hair and reminded herself to stay calm.
“Sehun is,” she said, her mind tumbling forward, searching for something she could say with a shred of honesty. “Charismatic?”
She didn’t have to turn around to imagine Sehun’s smile going up about a billion watts. She wasn’t at all surprised when his arm landed heavily around her shoulders. It took all her willpower not to punch him in the stomach and shove him aside.
“Charismatic,” Minseok repeated. His eyes flicked to Sehun’s for a moment. Sohee refused to look at Sehun, but he was definitely far, far too pleased with this situation. Her brother’s eyebrow arched. “So, you don’t have any problems with him?”
Sohee gave one scoffing laugh. “Of course I have problems with him! He’s Oh Sehun.”
Her brother’s eyebrow arched higher and Sohee pedaled backwards.
“But,” she continued, “I find all the problems-” She mentally heaved a huge sigh. She was going to regret all of this so, so much. “-a turn on.”
A beat while Sehun radiated silent glee and Minseok’s other eyebrow lifted.
“So,” Minseok said, “You’re telling me that you don’t care that he used to date Krystal Jung, the girl who beat you in every single club you joined from ages five to fifteen.”
Sehun cut in then. “Krystal and I really weren’t that serious,” he said quickly. Oh, he was enjoying this too much. Sohee made a mental note to murder him.
“I’m an adult now, oppa,” Sohee said, mustering as scathing a tone as she could. “The blatant favoritism everyone showed toward Krystal Jung doesn’t bother me anymore”
“Uh-huh.” Minseok folded his arms across his chest and leaned back against the counter again. “And it doesn’t bother you that last week I was at a party where Sehun here was offering kissing technique evaluations to anyone as drunk as he was.”
“That was a public service,” Sehun interjected. “People can’t improve their technique without critique.”
Sohee closed her eyes briefly and opened them again. Yep, she was still here. Lying to her brother and dating Oh Sehun.
“No,” she managed to get out. “Doesn’t bother me.”
“It doesn’t bother you that your mouth has been in the same place as Jackson Wang’s?” Minseok’s eyebrow arched again as he nodded his head toward Sehun. Oh, Sohee was going to kill them both.
“It was a public service!” Sehun cried out. “I can’t turn anyone away! And, god, he is a terrible kisser.”
Sohee couldn’t restrain herself, and leaned back to get a look at Sehun. “Maybe because you were both drunk?”
“You know I am always a great kisser, drunk or not-baby.”
Sohee wondered how much a medieval torture machine would cost and whether or not she could use it to successfully torture Oh Sehun or if he would ruin the experience by finding it sexy. At any rate, she was going to kill him, and it was going to hurt very, very badly.
“I do not want to hear anything,” Minseok’s voice rose steadily into a roar, “About you kissing my baby sister.”
Cowed, Sehun let his arm drop from around Sohee’s shoulders and took a step backwards. Even Sohee quivered a little, though her brother did not scare her in the least. She was just a teensy bit intimidated. She was still going to kill them both, though.
Minseok turned back to her. “Can I just remind you that you dated an actual prince?” he asked. “And now you’re dating him?” He shoved a finger in Sehun’s direction. Sohee looked over at Sehun. He looked terrified and a little crumpled, like a marionette without anything holding up its strings.
Sohee let out a short laugh. “Okay, let’s get one thing straight-Nichkhun is not a prince. You have to make some really big leaps in the lineage to even call him royal. He just tells people that to make himself more impressive!”
Minseok glared at her. “Doesn’t change my question.”
“You dated him?” Sehun asked, forgetting to be intimidated.
Sohee ignored Sehun. “He’s your best friend’s brother!” she yelled at Minseok. “And I can date whoever I want!”
She grabbed Sehun by the wrist and marched out of the room. Her brother was so infuriating, always trying to tell her what to do. He and everyone else saw her as a china doll who belonged inside a glass cabinet, looking pretty and gathering dust. She wasn’t that, didn’t want to be that. And now Minseok was not only determined to keep the sinking trajectory of their business a secret from her, but he also immediately criticized her dating choices, and brought up Nichkhun? As if their mother didn’t do that enough?
It was only when she reached the upstairs hallway leading to her bedroom that Sohee realized she was still dragging Sehun along by the wrist.
“Sorry,” she said, letting go of him. He reeled and balanced himself, rubbing his wrist.
She looked up. He was smiling.
“Don’t you dare,” she said.
He kept smiling. “You need me.” He looked at her with glee.
Sohee couldn’t even say anything. He was right. She needed him to get information out of her brother. Now she needed him to lie for her. Why was she so stupid? Couldn’t she have come up with a better excuse for Sehun’s presence at her house?
“Okay, Oh Sehun, I need you,” she grumbled. “Are you going to help me or what?”
“I’ll help you,” he said. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”
Sohee groaned and Sehun grinned down at her. So that was that. Sohee and Sehun were now an item. It sucked.
“I’m coming up there in one minute!” Minseok yelled from down the stairs. “And Sehun you had better not even be looking at her or I will throttle you!”
Sehun shook his head, his smile never leaving his face. “Oh, man. You owe me.”
“Stuff it,” Sohee said.
__________
Feifei arrived at the office earlier than usual because Syopin Online ate up more and more of her time every day, and she was actually still enrolled in (and, somehow, attending) her graduate classes, and every spare minute of her time had to be filled with keeping the business running. She had less and less time to devote to finding evidence, and as much as she hated to admit it, her run-in with Victoria Song unnerved her. She still intended to complete her mission, but she had to be more careful now, cover her tracks and not appear too suspicious. She had no idea how Victoria knew about her plans, but someone was talking.
Her thoughts preoccupied as she strode quickly through the nearly-empty office, she almost didn’t notice her secretary flagging her down. Her thoughts clicked together slowly-first realizing that her secretary was here, then remembering that her secretary always arrived a half hour before the rest of her staff, and finally recognizing that her secretary wanted her attention. “What is it?” she asked when she’d finally processed the situation. She had too much on her plate.
“Your brother is waiting for you in your office,” the woman said meekly. It occurred to Feifei that maybe her tone of voice hadn’t been all that pleasant.
“Thank you for letting me know,” Feifei told her as kindly as she could. A difficult feat, because she had no interest in talking to her “brother” at any hour, much less before eight in the morning. Gritting her teeth, Feifei went into her office, expecting to see Kris looking up at her with a smarmy smile.
Instead he had his head resting in his hands, hunched over with his elbows on his knees. He barely looked up when she entered the room. “You have to sign off on all this,” he said, gesturing to a stack of files on her desk without lifting his head.
“Bad hangover?” she asked.
Kris just shook his head. That was odd. Feifei set her coffee down on her desk and reached for the files. Since the launch of Syopin Online, many of her old projects had been shuffled over to Kris, for him to prove himself in the same way she’d done. He worked with her old team as well, so she didn’t worry too much about him ruining anything. But she still had to sign off on everything that went through his division before it went into practice.
Kris had apparently just finished going through the files on their trans-Pacific shipping routes, a job Feifei had handled so many times she could complete every stage by rote memory. It involved handling the large number of sub-contracts involved in these routes, allocating the finances to the right places, dealing with different countries’ import and export taxes, and a huge variety of other minutia. Lower-level employees handled each stage, but someone in a senior role needed to oversee the project as a whole. Although Feifei didn’t want Kris anywhere near her inheritance, the business side of her kicked in quickly. It was a good position for Kris to start in as it required him to see the whole of their enterprise from the ground up. When she first started she’d actually insisted on a trip to go see it for herself, starting in the exit port in Hong Kong and talking with the manager of the company they contracted at the shipping docks there, and following a shipment through every stage until it arrived in the US. It was a trip she should encourage Kris to take, too. Would mention it now, if he didn’t look like he was about to vomit on the carpet.
She flipped through the files absently, pondering Kris’s demeanor. It wasn’t like him to be so unguarded and-miserable. Not in front of her, at least. He truly looked ill, and Feifei felt a twinge of pity. She should tell him to take a sick day.
She was about to open her mouth and tell him to go home when one of the numbers caught her eye. She looked at it again, scanning through the page to make sure she was looking at what she thought she was.
“You made a mistake,” she said. She turned the file around and pushed it toward him. “You’re a hundred thousand dollars short on our payment to these contractors.”
While Kris slowly raised himself into a sitting position, Feifei read the paper upside down. She frowned. Kris reached for the file, but Feifei grabbed it first and flipped it back around, looking at the characters printed for the sub-contractor of the shipping port they used in Guangdong.
“This isn’t even the right contract,” she said. She looked up at him. “How on earth did this get screwed up?”
Kris snatched the pages back from her and scowled at them, his eyes moving back and forth as he read. “No, this is right,” he said. He tossed the file back onto the desk.
“No, it’s not,” she shot back. “Think about it-the number of employees they have to have at the dock just to get this shipment loaded? This could not cover their wages. And it’s not the right contractor.”
Kris shot up out of his chair. “It’s the right fucking contractor!” he yelled. He shoved a finger at the files. “I went over this shit a hundred times! It’s right and you know it!”
Feifei gaped at him. He was shaking with rage, but as his rage cooled, he still shook a little. He looked around as though he was not quite certain where he was. His eyes roamed the files again, met hers briefly, and then he slumped back into the chair.
“Kris,” she said carefully, “Don’t take this the wrong way, okay? But-did someone give you something at a party, something hard? You’re not acting normal.”
He glared at her, his brow furrowed, and then he covered his face with his hands. “I’m fine,” he groaned, sounding anything but. “But I know I didn’t do anything wrong on these files. Okay? I am absolutely certain. I went over all the paperwork I got like, a million times.”
Feifei picked up the file again. This one definitely had the wrong contractor, and at any port, the amount allocated would be far too little to compensate the number of employees required for the job.
She picked up another file and flipped through it. Sure enough, anomalies started to appear on this route, too. Different contractors than the ones they’d used for years. Payments changed that were normally only adjusted for the volume of the shipment, the tax rates, and exchange rates.
In the third file she finally found a sign of the change-a contract with the actual shipment company who brought their goods over in boats. A different shipment company than the one Feifei knew and trusted. At the bottom of the page was her father’s signature and seal.
Feifei grew very still.
“Kris,” she said in a low voice, “Did you oversee any of these changes to contracts, or did they all come to you this way?”
He rubbed his fingers into his eyes and shrugged. “You told me not to change any of that. So I didn’t.”
Feifei saw now what this meant. When her father handed her responsibility in the company, he’d limited the kinds of executive decisions he could make simply because it would mean getting into a very public argument with his daughter. That had happened once, at a board meeting-and although Feifei had been publicly scorned for her disrespect, in private nearly everyone in the company had sided with her wisdom, because her father sought to cut corners where they simply couldn’t be cut. Recognizing a seismic shift in the sentiments of his company, her father had been more careful. In the transition from her to Kris, he’d slipped in and made the changes he wanted to.
“You should go home,” she said to Kris. “You don’t look well at all.”
Their eyes met and she had the strangest feeling that he was about to confide in her. He opened his mouth, fear darkening his eyes, but then he closed it again, and stood up. Without another word he left the office and Feifei was left staring at the files he’d brought.
She’d have to research these contractors, but the numbers indicated they underpaid their workers. Feifei was no fool and she knew that many sub-contractors, even the ones she’d worked with for years, could be less than ethical in their hiring practices, promising migrant workers a far better salary and working conditions than what they would really deliver. But she’d stuck with her old sub-contractors because they were always very nearly ethical; she knew the men in charge and never worried about them hiring on crews with what amounted to a slave contract, or doubling up their shipments with human trafficking, things she’d heard whispers about but avoided asking too many questions. These new sub-contractors, with their low payment demands, could be anything.
Feifei rubbed her temples. She could not wait any longer. She could not wait for her father to descend farther into immorality in pursuit of riches. She could not wait for Victoria Song to arrange her murder. She could not wait while the Procurator-General turned a blind eye at his country's decay.
She could not, and would not wait.
__________
Zitao gasped as he broke the surface of the water and clung onto the platform. He turned around immediately to look at the timer, its red LED pixels glowing fiercely in the harsh light of the swimming center. His family made those, and so it turned out he’d broken his personal record again. The Olympics were within sight. He grinned and inclined his chin at his coach. Coach Li merely gave him a lopsided smirk and scribbled away at his clipboard.
“Shaved two seconds off,” Coach Li tapped his pen on the clipboard as Zitao bobbed up and down near the edge, “but you need to get another two off if you want to get into the Olympics, kid.”
Zitao scowled. “I’m trying.”
“Trying is never fucking enough. Why do you think there are so many rejects floating around in Chinese pools?” Coach Li narrowed his eyes at him. Zitao resisted the urge to roll his eyes, and was about to retort something in response when one of the junior collegiate coaches ran up and whispered something in Coach Li’s ear. His face relaxed, and he turned to Zitao. “Your sponsor’s here.”
Zitao quirked an eyebrow as he turned towards the direction of the pool entrance. Kris was walking over in what looked like a bespoke suit, except that he had two buttons undone at the top, which was totally not acceptable in any formal setting, as Zitao had so been taught. But whatever, he thought as he heaved himself out of the pool. Kris was paying him to train, so it didn’t matter if he couldn’t dress respectably.
“What’s up.” Zitao raised a hand in greeting, and Kris stopped in front of him, surveying him with an interested expression. Coach Li immediately half-bowed in greeting. Zitao wanted to laugh at the old man, who was obviously in reverence of the Wang fortune but yet still proud enough to not bow all the way. What a dick.
“I heard you’ve been breaking records.” Kris said and Zitao ran a hand through his wet hair nonchalantly. They walked to the lowest row of seats by the side, where Coach Li busied himself talking about statistics and timings and probabilities of him getting into the Olympic team. The junior coach handed Zitao a bottle of isotonic beverage before scurrying away. Coach Li never liked it when the junior coaches tried to listen in. Zitao swigged a long mouthful. He really was a major dick.
“Thanks, Coach Li. I have something to discuss with Zitao in private, so if you would just let us be for a moment?” Kris nodded somewhat patronisingly at Coach Li, and Zitao watched with amusement as his coach all but crawled out of the way. He finished the bottle as Coach Li exited the pool complex, and it was just him and Kris left.
“He’s pushing you hard.” Kris said casually, like he was making an observation. Zitao snorted.
“You think?” He tossed the bottle upwards and caught it. “We fly back to China for that national competition next week. He’s so taking the chance to possibly work me to death.”
Kris laughed and Zitao frowned. The steroids regime he was on was gradually taking its course, but he wanted results faster. So he’d been pushing as hard as he could, but clearly Coach Li determined that the combined effect of the drugs and his training wasn’t going to be enough just yet. That pissed Zitao off, together with the fact that he’d been a teetotaler for months now and hadn’t seen any of his friends in weeks. Sehun had gone MIA, as had Jia.
“Where’s Jia?” He turned to Kris and asked abruptly. Kris’s expression didn’t change, but Zitao caught something shift in his eyes. “I haven’t seen her in such a fucking long time.”
“In school. Where else could she be?” Kris said smoothly, and Zitao rolled his eyes. “I’m not here to talk about her. Coach Li and I have been talking about getting you on a new regime cycle.”
Zitao stared at him. “But this one’s working.”
“Not quickly enough.” Kris replied briskly. “You said it yourself, you have a competition next week. We know you’re good enough to win that one, but what about the regionals next month? It’s you against the rest of Asia.”
“You cannot possibly be asking me to switch now.” Zitao said incredulously. This was insane. “The first thing I have to do when I get off that plane is go straight to doping.”
Kris gave him a look. “Don’t be stupid. I’m saying that we’re going to switch you out after next week.”
An insult rose in Zitao’s throat but he clamped it down. Kris wasn’t wrong, and he was merely offering what he’d been thinking of just before. There was no reason to turn him down. But as Zitao sat, still sopping wet in his jammers, and listened to Kris go on about the advantages of the new drug, it all seemed a little ridiculous to him. Then he realised that he already was on a monthly cycle of injecting himself with a serum to heighten his swim performance. Zitao wanted to laugh at that.
“You’ll be fine,” Kris had apparently finished extolling the benefits of the new steroid regime, and now had a hand on his shoulder, “we’re counting on you for our new image, future Olympian.”
Zitao tried not to make a face, and ended up frowning at the floor instead. Kris rambled on a bit more about how his entry into the Olympic team would help promote their company image as socially responsible for talent development, and how he would be perfect because he was talented. It all sounded a bit ironic, really, but Zitao listened without a word. Kris talked until he picked up a call and had to leave, and Zitao watched him go without too much regret. He stared at the empty bottle and wondered how vodka would taste like right now. He’d almost forgotten the taste of it, after too many months of almost-habitual abstinence.
He sat on the empty row of seats for a while more, before slowly making his way into the locker rooms. His phone only showed notifications of messages from his mom, and Zitao wondered what he was even waiting for. His life was consumed with the single thought of making it into the Olympics, and his friends had so helpfully cooperated by completely disappearing. He threw his phone back into his backpack, and stepped into an empty shower cubicle. When Zitao was done showering and slouched out with his backpack slung over a shoulder, he stopped in his tracks to find Sehun standing on an empty seat and waving his arms.
“What,” he began and Sehun put down his arms with a huge grin, “the fuck are you doing?”
chapter 9b
A/N: This is a huge chapter so it has to be divided into two posts.
抱衾與裯
bearing our coverlets and sheets
The sound of a passing car filled up the silence swelling between Kris and Jia.
“What?” fell ineloquently from Kris’s lips. He couldn’t process what she said, and like a CD with a scratch her words kept repeating again and again in his head. She hadn’t moved, stood as still and calm as though she were porcelain.
But her voice sounded neither cold nor calm. “I’m pregnant,” she said again, more firmly this time. Kris wanted to push the words out of the air and back into her mouth. He wanted to wake up from sleep and find himself alone in bed. There was no way this could be his real life.
“You’re sure?” he asked. Meant to ask. Even to his own ears his words sounded like a harsh demand.
Jia stared at him, unmoving, for a long moment, and then she nodded her head slowly. His stomach twisted and he leaned against the side of his car. “But-we always-” he said, grasping at the air for an explanation that would make her words go away.
“Lu Han’s party,” she said in an empty voice. “You were-” she gestured haphazardly in the air for a moment and then let her hand drop and she looked at some point behind his head. Kris remembered. He’d been reckless. He wanted her in that moment. He’d done the very thing he’d been schooled not to do for his entire life, and lived according to his present desires, rather than keeping his future in mind.
She seemed like a stranger to him, distant and unreadable. Kris ran a hand back through his hair and tried to think. He had to think. He couldn’t be a father. He couldn’t be a father because-because absolutely nothing in his life prepared him-because he and Jia weren’t even that serious-because his mother would never forgive-because he wasn’t even-because he couldn’t. Looking down that road, all he could see was an impenetrable darkness.
“You can’t-” he said, faltered, and started over. “You aren’t planning to have it, are you?”
Jia’s eyes shifted very slowly from the point behind Kris’s head to meet his again. But she didn’t say anything. The look in her eyes was as dark and unfathomable as the road he imagined leading toward their future if the two of them brought a child into the world.
“Jia,” he said, “We-we can’t. We can’t have a kid. There’s no-we just-we can’t. You know we can’t.”
Jia closed her eyes for a second. He couldn’t guess at what she was thinking. His skin prickled with heat and he felt bile rising in his throat. His heart thumped hard. He ran his hand back through his hair again and realized he’d done the same motion only a few seconds before. Pregnant. If he could go back in time he would.
“Why not?” Jia asked so softly he could almost pretend she hadn’t asked something so obviously absurd.
His throat felt like it was closing up and his heartbeat ran wild. “We can’t,” he repeated. “Jia-” He almost reached out for her, but stopped himself. She still looked so distant, like someone he didn’t know. Like she hated him. Did she hate him? It took two people to make a child, after all, it wasn’t like he was solely responsible but-god, they could not have a child.
“Why not?” she asked again, her voice stronger this time.
Kris felt his heart slow and his resolve become firm. He had answers if she wanted them. He had reason on his side, not only reason but wisdom, really. He took several breaths before he spoke, wary of saying the wrong thing when she seemed to already be considering the impossible option.
“Jia, how? How the hell would we go about this?” He rubbed his palm against his neck and watched her eyes shift to that place behind his head again. “You think, what? We get married, play house? We’d hate each other. You know we would hate each other.”
In some space in his head he knew exactly what he wasn’t saying. He wasn’t mentioning the gossip that would follow them for months, even years. It wasn’t that a mistake had landed them in an inconvenient marriage-Kris had seen that played out at plenty of weddings-but that Jia was relatively poor, and hadn’t done much to endear herself within their circles. Kris didn’t think she’d be able to do endear herself elsewhere, either. Starting with his mother, who would despise her. Kris could hear his mother’s voice in his imagination, how she’d call Jia a whore behind closed doors and scold her to her face, how she’d never forgive Kris for putting such a shameful blot on their rise back to their proper place in society. If Kris’s father were to find out, Kris was sure he would laugh.
“We don’t have to get married,” Jia said. “I never said anything about that.”
“Then why the hell are you here?” The words came out before Kris had thought about them, bypassing consideration and leaping out of his mouth. But he couldn’t fathom what she was doing here if she didn’t plan to ask him to do something, whatever that something was.
Her eyes met his again. Every time this happened Kris felt as though she was more distant and more cold, which made him even more frightened. They couldn’t have a child but he couldn’t lose her, either. He needed her but without the problem in the mix. He needed her the way things were supposed to be and not the way everything was happening right now.
“You fathered a child,” she said. “You should know.”
“There’s no child yet!” Kris cried out. “You can undo this mistake, okay, there’s no reason for either of us to ruin our lives when you have a million options and Jia, no one will ever know, we can move on with our lives and-and we’ll be okay. That’s the only way we’ll be okay.”
Jia blinked. Every time she fell silent Kris felt a deep shiver rattle him all the way into his bones. Shaking, he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her. She didn’t return the hug but maybe if he held onto her tight enough he could bring her back from whatever land of fear and delusion she’d fallen into, return her to reality with him.
“Look,” Kris said, resting his cheek against the top of her head, breathing in the scent of her shampoo that was so familiar to him now. “I’ll pay for everything, okay? If you-if you need support I’ll go with you and I’ll be right beside you the whole time but-but Jia, you can’t go through with this. Don’t do that me. Don’t do that to yourself.”
She still hadn’t moved and stood stiffly in his arms. When he first saw her sitting beside his car, he thought she was going to dump him. She wasn’t, but he still might lose her. He couldn’t be a father and he also couldn’t bear to lose her. He stepped back and cupped her cheeks in his hands, lifting her head until their eyes met. He’d kiss her if he thought she’d kiss him back, if he thought the real Jia was in there.
“Jia,” he pleaded. He couldn’t be the failure his mother feared he’d be, the one his father expected him to be. And she shouldn’t ruin her life over a mistake, either. She had to know this. She had to.
She reached up and wrapped her hands around his, pulling them away from her cheeks and holding them loosely in her own. Her gaze fell away from his and dropped to the ground.
“I need time to think through everything,” she said to the concrete. Kris moved his hands to grip hers.
“Jia,” he said again, empty of words. Terror filled the cavity in his chest.
“I’ll consider it,” she said, her eyes never leaving the ground. She stepped away and her hands slid away from his. He watched as she walked away, taking in the slump of her thin shoulders. She never looked back at him, not even once.
Kris climbed into his car, slammed the door shut, and rested his head on the steering wheel. He remained very still until he conquered the urge to cry. Jia would understand. He had to make sure she understood him. She had to.
__________
She’d asked for time to think over everything, but Jia’s mind was quiet.
As she climbed the steps of the parking garage to the upper level where her own used Honda was parked, she pondered her emotions, like she was examining herself in a petri dish, pulling apart the thin and sticky specimen but reaching no conclusions. Even fear seemed like a distant, unrecognizable feeling, though on some level she knew she was scared.
After her conversation with Yixing a week earlier, she’d gone to a drugstore and purchased a pregnancy test, already half-certain of what it would say. When it turned positive, she’d sat on the tile of her bathroom floor for a long time, staring at nothing. Even now as she turned her keys in the lock of her car door, all her decisions were only partially formed, and she lived each day mechanically following her routine, unable to piece out what steps to take next. She dreamed of home, frequently-of the house in the countryside where her grandparents lived, of the carelessness and ease she enjoyed as a little girl. But even these daydreams she struggled to understand in the context of her situation.
She started the car and sat for a moment, her hands gripping the steering wheel, trying to put a name to the feeling pressing heavily on her chest. But she couldn’t find one. It was as though her feelings now transcended description, and as much as she wanted things to be fixed as simply as Kris insisted they could be, it wasn’t possible. The very thought of an abortion left her trembling, fear clawing at her throat.
She pulled out of the parking garage, forcing herself to keep a careful eye on the road as she drove. It wasn’t as though abortion was taboo to her. One of her high school best friends had gotten one, and Jia had gone to the clinic with her, waiting there until it was over and walking home together arm-in-arm. That friend never regretted it. As Kris had said, Jia’s friend knew better than to ruin her life over a mistake.
But Jia wasn’t Kris and she wasn’t her high school friend, and she knew that it wasn’t so simple for her. When her parents first found out they were expecting a child, they’d gone to a fortune teller who informed them the child would be a girl. Jia’s grandparents urged them to get an abortion, reminding them that they had one shot at this, and should try again for a boy. But her parents adamantly refused, instead bringing Jia into the world, female and thus unwanted. Except her parents always wanted her. Jia couldn’t remember a single time over the years when her parents hadn’t been quick to remind her how much they cherished her, their only daughter, their only child. Jia first found out about the fortune teller and the advised abortion when she was fifteen and her grandmother, spiraling into dementia, told her the whole story in great detail, finishing with a short “And they should have listened to me!” Jia hadn’t been able to hold back her tears later when she happened to be alone with her father. Teenage angst already made her feel worthless, and maybe she was as unwanted as she felt. Her father-a gruff man of few words-held her close to him and told her, “Sometimes there is grace in doing the thing everyone else thinks is foolish.”
Her current situation was undoubtedly foolish, from start to finish. Jia should not have let herself end up here, pulling into the parking lot of her apartment in America and considering bringing an illegitimate child into the world. Kris would, she was certain, pay for everything and go with her to the clinic and support her. But only if she chose to erase their mistake. If she chose not to, she doubted he would be able to do much of anything for her. Terror shrouded his eyes when he spoke and shook in his voice.
Jia got out of the car and climbed the stairs up to the apartment. Inside, the small rooms were cool and dusky. Hyerim wasn’t home, then. Jia still hadn’t told her roommate that she was pregnant-hadn’t told anyone but Kris. She glanced at the clock on her way back to her bedroom and saw that her parents would be awake now. She should call them. She should tell them. They would be disappointed and worried, but they would know what to do.
Her hand shook as she pulled up WeChat and dialed her mother. She left the video call off-her mother said it was cumbersome anyway, but Jia was sure that if she saw her mother’s face, she would start crying and wouldn’t be able to stop. The thought of telling her made Jia’s heart pound rapidly in her chest. She sat down on the floor by her bed and waited for her mother to pick up.
“Hello?” Her mother’s voice came clearly over the phone. Jia was on the opposite side of the globe, a massive ocean between them. The distance, which seemed so insignificant when Jia was happy and busy with school, seemed vast now.
“Hey, ma,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.
Nevertheless, her mother noted Jia’s tone immediately and asked, “What’s wrong?”
Jia brushed away the tear that slipped out and down her cheek. Her mother had such a brisk, harsh way of talking, but it was all bark and no bite. No one cared as deeply as her mother. Although Jia teased her mother often with gushy “I love you’s” that were met with an eye roll, Jia knew how deeply her mother loved her. She knew it when she was planning to come to America and her mother saved money for a whole year, unknown to either Jia or her father, bargaining vendors down and charming visitors to their restaurant into buying the highest-priced dishes. Then she gave all the money to Jia and walked away without a word, careful to hide her tears.
How could Jia tell her the truth?
“I think,” Jia said as carefully as she could, afraid of betraying anything, “I think I want to come home after I graduate.”
Her mother’s silence filled up the line for a long moment and Jia held her breath and waited.
“Did something happen?” her mother demanded. “I thought you were going to stay on with your internship? What happened?”
Jia counted to ten before she answered. “It’s-it’s nothing, Ma, I’m just not cut out for the business world. They’re really cutthroat, you know? I’m not mean enough.”
Her mother made a soft mm of understanding. “I always thought it was strange, you being friends with that socialite. She was in the paper the other day. It was very strange.”
Jia thought about Feifei, and imagined telling her about the pregnancy. She could almost laugh, imagining Feifei’s outrage. But underneath that would be a deep disappointment, even contempt. Jia couldn’t tell Feifei. She adored her friend, but she couldn’t tell her this.
“Yeah, it’s different being her friend and being her employee,” Jia said with a laugh, wiping another tear away. “I got to thinking, you know, you all are expanding the restaurants and what if I came and worked for you? Put my fancy American PR degree to good use.”
Her mother was silent again. Jia’s tears were coming faster, now, but she managed not to make any noise that would be heard over the phone. She thought about telling her mother the truth. Opened her mouth to do it. But the words I’m pregnant lodged in her throat. Oh, her mother would be so disappointed. Jia should have known better and kept her legs together instead of climbing into bed with a boy for the euphoric intimacy that never did last. Jia always wanted it to last. That was her problem. She wasn’t the girl she pretended to be, that was clear to her now. Even with Kris, she’d only gone home with him that first night because she had a feeling it would turn into something more. Unfortunately, it had.
“Jia,” her mother said finally, “sweetheart, what’s wrong?”
The uncharacteristic term of endearment forced Jia to hold the phone away from her and bite hard on her thumb so she wouldn’t start sobbing. Kris was right. This mistake could be undone. No one would know what kind of situation Jia had gotten herself into. She’d never have to tell.
But she couldn’t do it. She didn’t think she could do it.
Finally she put her phone back to her ear and squeezed out some normal-sounding words. “I’m just homesick,” she said.
Her mother took a deep breath, like she wasn’t sure what to do. “Well,” she said, “If you want to come home, your father and I will be happier than I can say. We miss you.”
“I miss you too,” Jia said. She looked up at the ceiling and felt her tears run down her temples, back into her hair and around her ears. What would her parents say, when she came home pregnant? Depending on when she bought her plane ticket, she would be three or four months by then. The night before she looked up a little chart on the internet to see if she could get away with hiding her pregnancy until she graduated. She looked at the curved stomach of the pregnant woman in the drawing and took in shallow, nervous breaths-but she could get away with it. Apparently women didn’t show much for a long time. After she looked up the drawing she went through her closet and picked out all her loosest clothing. But even if no one else noticed, Jia’s mother would know the second Jia got off the plane. What a way to come home.
“Talk to your father,” Jia’s mother said, and there was the rustling as the phone was handed over. Jia listened to the silence that followed that meant her father was waiting for Jia to speak first.
“Hi,” Jia said. She wiped her tears away with the palm of her hand. “I think I’m going to come home after I graduate.”
Her father made a gruff sound in his throat as a reply. Jia grinned up at the ceiling, imagining his somber face, the lines around his eyes, his strong arms and the scent of his favorite tea.
“Ba,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. “You know that thing you told me a long time ago? About how there is grace in doing the thing everyone else thinks is foolish?” She paused and drew in a deep breath. “Is that true?”
She listened to the sound of him breathing. Even though she was scared out of her mind, she wanted him to say that it was true. She needed him to say that it was true.
“In my life, it has been,” he said finally. “There were lots of things. The restaurant. You. Especially you. If I relived my life a thousand times I would always choose to have you.”
Jia barely managed to hold back her tears. She got out, “Thanks. I have to go.”
As soon as her father said goodbye, she hung up the phone. She wrapped her arms around her knees and sank down to the floor, lying there curled around herself, and sobbed.
__________
Yixing had an ongoing habit of having weekly dinners with Liyin, one that had been cut off in the past few weeks because he was so busy with trying to fix everything that was going wrong in everyone’s lives but his. But Liyin called the night before, and from the tone of her voice Yixing could tell that his cousin meant it when she said she wanted to see him. Liyin was a wonderful older sister, definitely, but she could deliver a mean smackdown if needed. So he was here, pulling up outside the lobby of Kim Jongdae’s posh apartment complex in his black, slightly battered BMW. Yixing didn’t enjoy collecting cars as much as his friends did.
He watched as Liyin appeared in the lobby through the glass doors, holding hands with Jongdae. She always looked wonderfully happy whenever she was around him, Yixing thought absentmindedly. It was a side of her that their employees never got to see much. Liyin believed in being a stern but benevolent boss. Jongdae kissed her before he let go of her hand. Liyin smiled at him, before pushing the door open and walking towards his car. Yixing let out a small laugh as Jongdae watched all the way until Liyin had gotten into the BMW, and then turning around to take the elevator back up.
“Hello, Mr. Busy.” Liyin said as she buckled up. Yixing made a face and turned the car out. “Would you have remembered to, you know, actually have dinner with me if I hadn’t called yesterday?”
“Yes, jie.” He said and it wasn’t that much of a lie. If Yixing had looked at his calendar he would have remembered, but it was now filled with the colour code that belonged to Jia. So maybe Liyin was right, but he wasn’t going to admit that in her face. “I’m sorry, please allow me to pay for your steak tonight.”
Liyin scrunched up her nose. “I don’t want steak. We’re Sichuanese, it’s hot pot or nothing else.”
“Does Jongdae indulge this habit?” He teased, and Liyin hit him on the shoulder. “It’s still so weird to be picking up your cousin from her boyfriend’s place.”
“Only if you’re imagining weird things,” Liyin said and rolled her eyes. Yixing laughed again. He felt more relaxed than he had been in weeks. Being around his family helped, he thought, because they were so tightly-knit. Yixing had grown up in a household that prized being together above anything else, which was apparently weird to everyone else around them.
They stopped at a red light after a few minutes, and Liyin took the chance to glance at her phone. Yixing thought it was business-related, because she was such a workaholic, but realised that Liyin was smiling to herself. Again, this was a sight that her subordinates would never get to witness, and it occurred to him that she was actually truly in love. It was a funny realisation.
“Jie,” he said and Liyin looked up, “how are you so happy?”
“What do you mean?” Liyin asked as they turned out onto another street. Yixing mused for a moment. It was just so disconcerting for him, to see her bask in happiness while everyone else around him seem to sink deeper and deeper in a desperation that he couldn’t seem to hold off for them. Lu Han was drowning but Yixing couldn’t pull him up. He didn’t want to be pulled up.
“I mean…” They were approaching Chinatown now, and Yixing glanced at his rear mirror. Traffic was heavy, as always. Life was going on as usual, but the normality was what struck him the most. That while everyone else was going about their lives, they were wallowing in a set of problems that didn’t seem resolvable. “Have you heard about Lu Han?”
Liyin’s face fell. Yixing pressed his lips together and turned into a private, quiet alley where their restaurant was located. They were old customers now, so exclusive that they didn’t need a reservation for a table. Liyin put down her phone, and took a while before she spoke again.
“All employees talk,” she said, like she was choosing her words carefully, “and those who work in Lu Han’s house are not otherwise.”
So she had, Yixing thought. Liyin looked him in the eyes, and he blinked back. His cousin was always one step ahead of everyone else, intuitive and perceptive enough to hold the fort on her own. But could she help him? Could she help Lu Han, when she already didn’t like him by sheer virtue of his surname?
“Then you should know that he’s this close to wasting himself away. He’s not telling me anything, and I don’t know if I’m going to go home tonight and see him dead on his bedroom floor because he overdosed on something.”
Yixing said it very quietly but he was sure that Liyin heard every single word. Her face was still expressionless, and she looked at him again for a while more, before she let out a small sigh and closed her eyes. She opened them again, and Yixing wanted her to say that she would help. Tell him something. Anything.
“He won’t kill himself.” Liyin said finally, and Yixing pulled up to the restaurant. The valet waited outside, but he wasn’t in a hurry to open the doors yet. “The Lu pride is strong. They would never die the death of a coward.”
She smiled sardonically, and Yixing knew that he was now even further away from an answer-if she was even going to give him one in the first place.
The valet took his keys as Yixing trailed Liyin into the restaurant. Their server was speaking to her in the front, and he watched as his cousin nodded elegantly at whatever suggestions the server was making for their dinner. He wondered, suddenly, if Lu Han was refusing to eat again. He had been leaving his dinners untouched outside his room door for a few weeks now.
“Yixing.” Liyin called when they had been seated and their server had retreated out of the room. He looked up at her and nodded silently. “I know this isn’t what you want me to say to you, but keep your distance. If you want to help Lu Han, stay away from him.”
“You keep saying that, but I don’t see how that works.” Yixing closed his eyes in frustration and took a deep breath. “If he can’t help himself, and nobody’s telling me anything, how is that going to be of any use to him? I can’t pretend not to see how much pain he is in.”
Liyin’s expression shifted but soon enough she was stoic again. Yixing couldn’t understand how she could compartmentalise everything that wasn’t about their family and the people she loved. He hadn’t thought about it before, but now as he sat here in a very expensive hot pot restaurant, in a private room lined with mahogany and oak, he realised that even Liyin was the same. All of them, inhabitants of a world padded with the weight of money, were exactly the same.
“I don’t want you to be hurt.” She said, almost robotically, but Yixing was having none of it.
“And you think it’s okay if Lu Han is? He’s someone’s son too, he’s human as well!” He tried not to yell, but it was the loudest he’d ever spoken to Liyin. She looked at him, eyes unreadable.
“Yixing. Nobody’s obliged to help anybody, especially not if you’re going in blind with no idea what’s going on.” Liyin said, her voice hard, and Yixing wanted to tell her that she was wrong. He was obliged to help, because Lu Han was his friend and that was friendship for him. Yixing gave because he wanted to, and only because he wanted to.
“Then tell me! You can’t keep saying things like that and then expect me not to help.” Yixing’s voice was rising with every word, but he tried his best to keep a hold on it. Liyin looked at him, her mouth set in a severe line, and suddenly he realised that she was looking at him like she would a rogue employee. She stared at him for a while more, before her gaze dropped to her plate.
“Lu Han’s father is-” she paused, and Yixing’s heart remained strung in the air for a moment more, “-he’s dirty.”
Yixing gaped. “What?”
He repeated that dumbly for a moment. Liyin was about to say something more when the doors opened and their server came in with their soup bases. They remained quiet as their table was set up. The server nodded at them to enjoy their meal, and Yixing watched as he left the room quietly again. The pot was silent, not yet bubbling, but Yixing knew it would soon. Apt.
“Your best friend’s money comes from people who give it to them.” Liyin said as she stared at her chopsticks. She sounded casual, almost. Yixing didn’t say anything, because he didn’t know what to. When the truth he wanted was presented in front of him, he didn’t have any other option but to become mute.
“Are we-” He asked, finally, but didn’t have the heart to carry on. But Liyin knew what he was trying to ask, and shook her head.
“No. But only because our contracts are personally approved by someone in the Politburo. Grandfather always worries about how their dinners together aren’t enough to keep us in his good books, but I guess we’re better than the people paying the Procurator-General off, aren’t we? At least we’re only dealing with the Politburo.”
She laughed mirthlessly, and Yixing swallowed, the lump in his throat still not willing to go away. Did Lu Han know about this? He had to, or else he wouldn’t be allowing himself to waste away, life slowly draining out of his too-thin body. Yixing knew that Liyin was right about the strange strain of pride that the Lu family seemed to possess.
“So why stay away, Yixing? This is why. You and I aren’t big enough for the likes of this. We can’t do anything to help when Lu Han’s family goes down. If you want to be there for him when everything goes into flames, then stay away now. If you’re not implicated, then can you offer him shelter when he actually needs it.”
Liyin’s eyes burned as she spoke, and Yixing’s chest constricted. He opened his mouth and tried to say something, but nothing came out. Liyin looked at him, and then turned away to tend to the hot pot. It was already boiling over, large bubbles heaving in the soup. Yixing remained quiet as she added the ingredients in.
“I know I’m heartless, Yixing, but I only want my family to be safe.” Liyin stirred the soup with a ladle and said, her tone self-facetious. “The people who run in our circles won’t ever be nice to you, because they’re stupid enough to only look on the surface, but if I can keep danger away from you, I will. You should understand-you want to do the same for Meng Jia, don’t you?”
Yixing blinked at her. For a moment he foolishly wondered how she even knew about Jia, but then he quickly realised that she was Zhang Liyin. If she wanted to know anything, she would have it at her fingertips within half an hour. Of course she knew about Jia.
“I don’t-” He began, but she merely raised an eyebrow. “We’re friends. Lu Han and I are also friends. I mean-”
“Sure.” Liyin reached for his bowl and ladled some soup in. “I like her, anyway. But what I’m saying is, if you want to protect someone, you have to learn how to do it within your means. Maximise what you have, then use it for or against them. That’s how you do business, Yixing. You’re next-in-line, you have to learn.”
“Your kid is next-in-line, jie.” Yixing wasn’t bothered that he would never inherit the main business. It didn’t matter to him, but Liyin clicked her chopsticks at him crossly. “It’s not a big deal.”
“So you think you can do things your way just because you’re not the heir? Yixing, if you want to make it out clean, listen to me.” Liyin put her chopsticks down and ran a hand through her hair. “Look. There are people out there who want to bring the Lus down. That’s fine by me, they’re a despicable family that I don’t care about, but if you’re going to stick your neck in there and think that you’re going to help matters by doing that then that’s not fine. I’m not going to let you do anything stupid.”
Yixing sat very upright in his seat stoically. Liyin was staring at the boiling pot, frothing over. It looked completely uncontrollable, much like the situation Yixing now found himself in. Liyin picked up her chopsticks for a moment, before she put them down again. The china clinked against each other, a sharp, ringing sound.
“When a praying mantis is hunting, there’s always going to be a sparrow behind it.” Liyin began, her voice wavering only in the slightest. It was an old Chinese proverb, one that their grandfather favoured. He was well-versed in the acumen of business, and while their grandfather had never thought to put Yixing before Liyin in the line of succession, he was always disappointed that Yixing couldn’t play politics as well as Liyin could. Yixing continued to listen without a word.
“Be that sparrow, Yixing.” She urged. “If you want to protect the people you love, be that sparrow. Stay hidden, and strike only when the time is right.”
__________
Sohee frowned as she watched Sehun’s Lamborghini peel into view in front of her. When Sehun had offered to pick her up from class so that he could share what his older brother had discovered for her, Sohee had nearly rejected him and told him to just email the files to her. Something she’d rather not acknowledge made her hold her tongue and agree instead. Now she regretted it. People coming out of the business college’s building behind her kept turning to stare. Sehun just had to put on a show.
The window on the passenger’s side rolled down and Sehun leaned over, pushing his sunglasses down and looking at her over the top of them. “Miss me?” he asked, with all the practiced charm of Seoul’s favorite playboy. Sohee rolled her eyes and made sure to slam the car door as hard as she could when she climbed into the passenger’s seat.
“Do you know where I live?” she asked.
“I have a vague idea,” Sehun said as he pulled out to the main road. He waved at some people on the street corner staring at his car, a smug little smile twisting his lips. “Minseok-hyung doesn’t hold parties there, so I don’t know exactly, but I know the area.”
Sohee kept silent as Sehun drove. It was late afternoon and she pulled out a pair of Ray-Bans to keep the light from blinding her eyes.
“How much information did your brother send you?” Sohee asked. “Did you look at it already?”
She watched Sehun’s expression slide from neutral into a small frown. She didn’t like where this was going already, and she’d only asked one question.
“He didn’t, you know, actually send me any evidence yet,” Sehun said. He flashed a boyish grin her way and Sohee closed her eyes. It just had to be Oh Sehun who found her when her car broke down.
“Then why are we on the way to my house right now?” Sohee asked, working hard to keep her tone level.
“I thought we could discuss all the hard work my brother is going through to break your brother’s will,” Sehun said brightly. Sohee snorted. “Hey,” Sehun shot back, “It’s pretty impressive, okay? Totally worth discussing.”
Sohee rolled her eyes. “You tricked me,” she informed him.
“Come on, Sohee,” he said, leaving off the nuna. Oh, she did notice, and his death was imminent.
“You should drop me off and then leave,” she said. “I could have had someone else pick me up if I’d known you were lying to me.”
“What’s a guy gotta do to spend time with you?” he asked.
“Be useful.”
He didn’t have a retort to that. She watched the street rolling by outside as they lapsed into silence. If Segyun couldn’t break down Minseok, she didn’t know what she’d do. Have to go back to her initial plan of getting information out of Chanyeol, probably.
That gave her an idea. She shouldn’t let leads go just because Sehun offered her an all-access pass to the information she really needed.
“If you really want to help, I do have another idea,” Sohee said.
Sehun’s scowl faded into a smile. “What sort of idea? I like playing spy with you, you know.”
Sohee thought about responding to his last comment, but decided to ignore it. “You can help me track down Chanyeol and see what he knows. My brother has probably gotten to everyone by now and told them to shut up. He thinks I’m meddling.”
Sehun glanced over at her. “You kind of-no, you absolutely are meddling.”
“Whatever. Are you going to help me find Chanyeol?”
Sehun sighed a little and then he glanced at her a second time. They were close to her house, now, and she had the strangest feeling of regret that the drive wouldn’t last longer. Realizing this, she huffed and glared out the window, irritated with herself.
“Sure. Anything you need. I’m your guy.” He smiled and then turned into the driveway when she pointed him toward her house. “Can I use your bathroom?” he asked next.
Sohee couldn’t very well tell him no. “Fine,” she said.
At this hour, she doubted anyone would be home, except maybe some of the cleaning staff. Minseok had his own places and only came to the family home when their parents were in town. Faced with the prospect of being very alone in a very large house with Oh Sehun, Sohee felt a little queasy. Today he was dressed in a t-shirt and some very tight jeans, and she absolutely did not check out his ass as he climbed out of the car. She did not. Frustrated, she hustled out of the car and sped past him, unlocking the garage with the keypad and rushing toward the door before Sehun could catch up.
She strode into the house, her heels clicking on the tiles, and for a distraction to her thoughts, pulled out her phone and scrolled through her emails. Because of this, she didn’t notice her brother until she was already in the kitchen.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” Minseok said.
Sohee looked up, wide-eyed. Her brother casually leaned against the kitchen counter, a box of crackers open beside him and his phone out as well. What the hell was he doing here? He never came here.
“Mom called,” Minseok continued. “She and Dad-”
He stopped abruptly.
Sohee knew without turning around that Sehun had entered the room. Her brother was looking past Sohee’s head, one of the worst scowls she had ever seen growing on his face.
His eyes shifted and they looked at each other. She could see the wheels clicking in his head. A red flush was starting to grow on his neck.
“Oh Sehun,” Minseok said, not taking his eyes away from Sohee. “What are you doing sneaking around with Oh Sehun, little sis?”
They kept staring each other down. She could see her brother connecting all the dots in his head, from Segyun’s request for information to Sehun and now back to Sohee. If Minseok realized that Sohee was the one probing into the Wang family’s accounts, he would shut the whole thing down and Sohee would be back where she started, on a sinking ship and helpless to stop it.
“Well,” Sohee said tentatively.
Her brother couldn’t find out she was behind this. Sehun promised that Segyun was close and Sohee would not, would not give in this easily. She had to do something. But she was going to regret this.
She cleared her throat. “We’re dating?”
All three of them froze. Sohee winced internally but kept her face impassive, willing Sehun not to say anything idiotic. She was going to regret this so much.
“Dating?” Minseok asked, his voice dripping with skepticism. “Him?”
Her brother would. “Well, you can see why I had to keep it a secret,” Sohee said with a roll of her eyes. “I knew you wouldn’t approve.”
Minseok slowly shifted to cross his arms over his chest. Sohee knew exactly why he did it, too-their parents had put the both of them in martial arts as children, but Minseok continued training even now. He was giving Sehun a good look at his built biceps. It was such a stupid assertion of power that Sohee had to stop herself before she rolled her eyes. Were all brothers this ridiculous, or just hers?
“It’s not so much that I don’t approve,” Minseok said. “Although I don’t. I’m just wondering what the hell you see in him.”
Sohee could almost hate her brother. He always had to be so skeptical, so cynical, so doubtful of his little sister-of course, she was lying to his face, but still. She raked a hand through her hair and reminded herself to stay calm.
“Sehun is,” she said, her mind tumbling forward, searching for something she could say with a shred of honesty. “Charismatic?”
She didn’t have to turn around to imagine Sehun’s smile going up about a billion watts. She wasn’t at all surprised when his arm landed heavily around her shoulders. It took all her willpower not to punch him in the stomach and shove him aside.
“Charismatic,” Minseok repeated. His eyes flicked to Sehun’s for a moment. Sohee refused to look at Sehun, but he was definitely far, far too pleased with this situation. Her brother’s eyebrow arched. “So, you don’t have any problems with him?”
Sohee gave one scoffing laugh. “Of course I have problems with him! He’s Oh Sehun.”
Her brother’s eyebrow arched higher and Sohee pedaled backwards.
“But,” she continued, “I find all the problems-” She mentally heaved a huge sigh. She was going to regret all of this so, so much. “-a turn on.”
A beat while Sehun radiated silent glee and Minseok’s other eyebrow lifted.
“So,” Minseok said, “You’re telling me that you don’t care that he used to date Krystal Jung, the girl who beat you in every single club you joined from ages five to fifteen.”
Sehun cut in then. “Krystal and I really weren’t that serious,” he said quickly. Oh, he was enjoying this too much. Sohee made a mental note to murder him.
“I’m an adult now, oppa,” Sohee said, mustering as scathing a tone as she could. “The blatant favoritism everyone showed toward Krystal Jung doesn’t bother me anymore”
“Uh-huh.” Minseok folded his arms across his chest and leaned back against the counter again. “And it doesn’t bother you that last week I was at a party where Sehun here was offering kissing technique evaluations to anyone as drunk as he was.”
“That was a public service,” Sehun interjected. “People can’t improve their technique without critique.”
Sohee closed her eyes briefly and opened them again. Yep, she was still here. Lying to her brother and dating Oh Sehun.
“No,” she managed to get out. “Doesn’t bother me.”
“It doesn’t bother you that your mouth has been in the same place as Jackson Wang’s?” Minseok’s eyebrow arched again as he nodded his head toward Sehun. Oh, Sohee was going to kill them both.
“It was a public service!” Sehun cried out. “I can’t turn anyone away! And, god, he is a terrible kisser.”
Sohee couldn’t restrain herself, and leaned back to get a look at Sehun. “Maybe because you were both drunk?”
“You know I am always a great kisser, drunk or not-baby.”
Sohee wondered how much a medieval torture machine would cost and whether or not she could use it to successfully torture Oh Sehun or if he would ruin the experience by finding it sexy. At any rate, she was going to kill him, and it was going to hurt very, very badly.
“I do not want to hear anything,” Minseok’s voice rose steadily into a roar, “About you kissing my baby sister.”
Cowed, Sehun let his arm drop from around Sohee’s shoulders and took a step backwards. Even Sohee quivered a little, though her brother did not scare her in the least. She was just a teensy bit intimidated. She was still going to kill them both, though.
Minseok turned back to her. “Can I just remind you that you dated an actual prince?” he asked. “And now you’re dating him?” He shoved a finger in Sehun’s direction. Sohee looked over at Sehun. He looked terrified and a little crumpled, like a marionette without anything holding up its strings.
Sohee let out a short laugh. “Okay, let’s get one thing straight-Nichkhun is not a prince. You have to make some really big leaps in the lineage to even call him royal. He just tells people that to make himself more impressive!”
Minseok glared at her. “Doesn’t change my question.”
“You dated him?” Sehun asked, forgetting to be intimidated.
Sohee ignored Sehun. “He’s your best friend’s brother!” she yelled at Minseok. “And I can date whoever I want!”
She grabbed Sehun by the wrist and marched out of the room. Her brother was so infuriating, always trying to tell her what to do. He and everyone else saw her as a china doll who belonged inside a glass cabinet, looking pretty and gathering dust. She wasn’t that, didn’t want to be that. And now Minseok was not only determined to keep the sinking trajectory of their business a secret from her, but he also immediately criticized her dating choices, and brought up Nichkhun? As if their mother didn’t do that enough?
It was only when she reached the upstairs hallway leading to her bedroom that Sohee realized she was still dragging Sehun along by the wrist.
“Sorry,” she said, letting go of him. He reeled and balanced himself, rubbing his wrist.
She looked up. He was smiling.
“Don’t you dare,” she said.
He kept smiling. “You need me.” He looked at her with glee.
Sohee couldn’t even say anything. He was right. She needed him to get information out of her brother. Now she needed him to lie for her. Why was she so stupid? Couldn’t she have come up with a better excuse for Sehun’s presence at her house?
“Okay, Oh Sehun, I need you,” she grumbled. “Are you going to help me or what?”
“I’ll help you,” he said. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”
Sohee groaned and Sehun grinned down at her. So that was that. Sohee and Sehun were now an item. It sucked.
“I’m coming up there in one minute!” Minseok yelled from down the stairs. “And Sehun you had better not even be looking at her or I will throttle you!”
Sehun shook his head, his smile never leaving his face. “Oh, man. You owe me.”
“Stuff it,” Sohee said.
__________
Feifei arrived at the office earlier than usual because Syopin Online ate up more and more of her time every day, and she was actually still enrolled in (and, somehow, attending) her graduate classes, and every spare minute of her time had to be filled with keeping the business running. She had less and less time to devote to finding evidence, and as much as she hated to admit it, her run-in with Victoria Song unnerved her. She still intended to complete her mission, but she had to be more careful now, cover her tracks and not appear too suspicious. She had no idea how Victoria knew about her plans, but someone was talking.
Her thoughts preoccupied as she strode quickly through the nearly-empty office, she almost didn’t notice her secretary flagging her down. Her thoughts clicked together slowly-first realizing that her secretary was here, then remembering that her secretary always arrived a half hour before the rest of her staff, and finally recognizing that her secretary wanted her attention. “What is it?” she asked when she’d finally processed the situation. She had too much on her plate.
“Your brother is waiting for you in your office,” the woman said meekly. It occurred to Feifei that maybe her tone of voice hadn’t been all that pleasant.
“Thank you for letting me know,” Feifei told her as kindly as she could. A difficult feat, because she had no interest in talking to her “brother” at any hour, much less before eight in the morning. Gritting her teeth, Feifei went into her office, expecting to see Kris looking up at her with a smarmy smile.
Instead he had his head resting in his hands, hunched over with his elbows on his knees. He barely looked up when she entered the room. “You have to sign off on all this,” he said, gesturing to a stack of files on her desk without lifting his head.
“Bad hangover?” she asked.
Kris just shook his head. That was odd. Feifei set her coffee down on her desk and reached for the files. Since the launch of Syopin Online, many of her old projects had been shuffled over to Kris, for him to prove himself in the same way she’d done. He worked with her old team as well, so she didn’t worry too much about him ruining anything. But she still had to sign off on everything that went through his division before it went into practice.
Kris had apparently just finished going through the files on their trans-Pacific shipping routes, a job Feifei had handled so many times she could complete every stage by rote memory. It involved handling the large number of sub-contracts involved in these routes, allocating the finances to the right places, dealing with different countries’ import and export taxes, and a huge variety of other minutia. Lower-level employees handled each stage, but someone in a senior role needed to oversee the project as a whole. Although Feifei didn’t want Kris anywhere near her inheritance, the business side of her kicked in quickly. It was a good position for Kris to start in as it required him to see the whole of their enterprise from the ground up. When she first started she’d actually insisted on a trip to go see it for herself, starting in the exit port in Hong Kong and talking with the manager of the company they contracted at the shipping docks there, and following a shipment through every stage until it arrived in the US. It was a trip she should encourage Kris to take, too. Would mention it now, if he didn’t look like he was about to vomit on the carpet.
She flipped through the files absently, pondering Kris’s demeanor. It wasn’t like him to be so unguarded and-miserable. Not in front of her, at least. He truly looked ill, and Feifei felt a twinge of pity. She should tell him to take a sick day.
She was about to open her mouth and tell him to go home when one of the numbers caught her eye. She looked at it again, scanning through the page to make sure she was looking at what she thought she was.
“You made a mistake,” she said. She turned the file around and pushed it toward him. “You’re a hundred thousand dollars short on our payment to these contractors.”
While Kris slowly raised himself into a sitting position, Feifei read the paper upside down. She frowned. Kris reached for the file, but Feifei grabbed it first and flipped it back around, looking at the characters printed for the sub-contractor of the shipping port they used in Guangdong.
“This isn’t even the right contract,” she said. She looked up at him. “How on earth did this get screwed up?”
Kris snatched the pages back from her and scowled at them, his eyes moving back and forth as he read. “No, this is right,” he said. He tossed the file back onto the desk.
“No, it’s not,” she shot back. “Think about it-the number of employees they have to have at the dock just to get this shipment loaded? This could not cover their wages. And it’s not the right contractor.”
Kris shot up out of his chair. “It’s the right fucking contractor!” he yelled. He shoved a finger at the files. “I went over this shit a hundred times! It’s right and you know it!”
Feifei gaped at him. He was shaking with rage, but as his rage cooled, he still shook a little. He looked around as though he was not quite certain where he was. His eyes roamed the files again, met hers briefly, and then he slumped back into the chair.
“Kris,” she said carefully, “Don’t take this the wrong way, okay? But-did someone give you something at a party, something hard? You’re not acting normal.”
He glared at her, his brow furrowed, and then he covered his face with his hands. “I’m fine,” he groaned, sounding anything but. “But I know I didn’t do anything wrong on these files. Okay? I am absolutely certain. I went over all the paperwork I got like, a million times.”
Feifei picked up the file again. This one definitely had the wrong contractor, and at any port, the amount allocated would be far too little to compensate the number of employees required for the job.
She picked up another file and flipped through it. Sure enough, anomalies started to appear on this route, too. Different contractors than the ones they’d used for years. Payments changed that were normally only adjusted for the volume of the shipment, the tax rates, and exchange rates.
In the third file she finally found a sign of the change-a contract with the actual shipment company who brought their goods over in boats. A different shipment company than the one Feifei knew and trusted. At the bottom of the page was her father’s signature and seal.
Feifei grew very still.
“Kris,” she said in a low voice, “Did you oversee any of these changes to contracts, or did they all come to you this way?”
He rubbed his fingers into his eyes and shrugged. “You told me not to change any of that. So I didn’t.”
Feifei saw now what this meant. When her father handed her responsibility in the company, he’d limited the kinds of executive decisions he could make simply because it would mean getting into a very public argument with his daughter. That had happened once, at a board meeting-and although Feifei had been publicly scorned for her disrespect, in private nearly everyone in the company had sided with her wisdom, because her father sought to cut corners where they simply couldn’t be cut. Recognizing a seismic shift in the sentiments of his company, her father had been more careful. In the transition from her to Kris, he’d slipped in and made the changes he wanted to.
“You should go home,” she said to Kris. “You don’t look well at all.”
Their eyes met and she had the strangest feeling that he was about to confide in her. He opened his mouth, fear darkening his eyes, but then he closed it again, and stood up. Without another word he left the office and Feifei was left staring at the files he’d brought.
She’d have to research these contractors, but the numbers indicated they underpaid their workers. Feifei was no fool and she knew that many sub-contractors, even the ones she’d worked with for years, could be less than ethical in their hiring practices, promising migrant workers a far better salary and working conditions than what they would really deliver. But she’d stuck with her old sub-contractors because they were always very nearly ethical; she knew the men in charge and never worried about them hiring on crews with what amounted to a slave contract, or doubling up their shipments with human trafficking, things she’d heard whispers about but avoided asking too many questions. These new sub-contractors, with their low payment demands, could be anything.
Feifei rubbed her temples. She could not wait any longer. She could not wait for her father to descend farther into immorality in pursuit of riches. She could not wait for Victoria Song to arrange her murder. She could not wait while the Procurator-General turned a blind eye at his country's decay.
She could not, and would not wait.
__________
Zitao gasped as he broke the surface of the water and clung onto the platform. He turned around immediately to look at the timer, its red LED pixels glowing fiercely in the harsh light of the swimming center. His family made those, and so it turned out he’d broken his personal record again. The Olympics were within sight. He grinned and inclined his chin at his coach. Coach Li merely gave him a lopsided smirk and scribbled away at his clipboard.
“Shaved two seconds off,” Coach Li tapped his pen on the clipboard as Zitao bobbed up and down near the edge, “but you need to get another two off if you want to get into the Olympics, kid.”
Zitao scowled. “I’m trying.”
“Trying is never fucking enough. Why do you think there are so many rejects floating around in Chinese pools?” Coach Li narrowed his eyes at him. Zitao resisted the urge to roll his eyes, and was about to retort something in response when one of the junior collegiate coaches ran up and whispered something in Coach Li’s ear. His face relaxed, and he turned to Zitao. “Your sponsor’s here.”
Zitao quirked an eyebrow as he turned towards the direction of the pool entrance. Kris was walking over in what looked like a bespoke suit, except that he had two buttons undone at the top, which was totally not acceptable in any formal setting, as Zitao had so been taught. But whatever, he thought as he heaved himself out of the pool. Kris was paying him to train, so it didn’t matter if he couldn’t dress respectably.
“What’s up.” Zitao raised a hand in greeting, and Kris stopped in front of him, surveying him with an interested expression. Coach Li immediately half-bowed in greeting. Zitao wanted to laugh at the old man, who was obviously in reverence of the Wang fortune but yet still proud enough to not bow all the way. What a dick.
“I heard you’ve been breaking records.” Kris said and Zitao ran a hand through his wet hair nonchalantly. They walked to the lowest row of seats by the side, where Coach Li busied himself talking about statistics and timings and probabilities of him getting into the Olympic team. The junior coach handed Zitao a bottle of isotonic beverage before scurrying away. Coach Li never liked it when the junior coaches tried to listen in. Zitao swigged a long mouthful. He really was a major dick.
“Thanks, Coach Li. I have something to discuss with Zitao in private, so if you would just let us be for a moment?” Kris nodded somewhat patronisingly at Coach Li, and Zitao watched with amusement as his coach all but crawled out of the way. He finished the bottle as Coach Li exited the pool complex, and it was just him and Kris left.
“He’s pushing you hard.” Kris said casually, like he was making an observation. Zitao snorted.
“You think?” He tossed the bottle upwards and caught it. “We fly back to China for that national competition next week. He’s so taking the chance to possibly work me to death.”
Kris laughed and Zitao frowned. The steroids regime he was on was gradually taking its course, but he wanted results faster. So he’d been pushing as hard as he could, but clearly Coach Li determined that the combined effect of the drugs and his training wasn’t going to be enough just yet. That pissed Zitao off, together with the fact that he’d been a teetotaler for months now and hadn’t seen any of his friends in weeks. Sehun had gone MIA, as had Jia.
“Where’s Jia?” He turned to Kris and asked abruptly. Kris’s expression didn’t change, but Zitao caught something shift in his eyes. “I haven’t seen her in such a fucking long time.”
“In school. Where else could she be?” Kris said smoothly, and Zitao rolled his eyes. “I’m not here to talk about her. Coach Li and I have been talking about getting you on a new regime cycle.”
Zitao stared at him. “But this one’s working.”
“Not quickly enough.” Kris replied briskly. “You said it yourself, you have a competition next week. We know you’re good enough to win that one, but what about the regionals next month? It’s you against the rest of Asia.”
“You cannot possibly be asking me to switch now.” Zitao said incredulously. This was insane. “The first thing I have to do when I get off that plane is go straight to doping.”
Kris gave him a look. “Don’t be stupid. I’m saying that we’re going to switch you out after next week.”
An insult rose in Zitao’s throat but he clamped it down. Kris wasn’t wrong, and he was merely offering what he’d been thinking of just before. There was no reason to turn him down. But as Zitao sat, still sopping wet in his jammers, and listened to Kris go on about the advantages of the new drug, it all seemed a little ridiculous to him. Then he realised that he already was on a monthly cycle of injecting himself with a serum to heighten his swim performance. Zitao wanted to laugh at that.
“You’ll be fine,” Kris had apparently finished extolling the benefits of the new steroid regime, and now had a hand on his shoulder, “we’re counting on you for our new image, future Olympian.”
Zitao tried not to make a face, and ended up frowning at the floor instead. Kris rambled on a bit more about how his entry into the Olympic team would help promote their company image as socially responsible for talent development, and how he would be perfect because he was talented. It all sounded a bit ironic, really, but Zitao listened without a word. Kris talked until he picked up a call and had to leave, and Zitao watched him go without too much regret. He stared at the empty bottle and wondered how vodka would taste like right now. He’d almost forgotten the taste of it, after too many months of almost-habitual abstinence.
He sat on the empty row of seats for a while more, before slowly making his way into the locker rooms. His phone only showed notifications of messages from his mom, and Zitao wondered what he was even waiting for. His life was consumed with the single thought of making it into the Olympics, and his friends had so helpfully cooperated by completely disappearing. He threw his phone back into his backpack, and stepped into an empty shower cubicle. When Zitao was done showering and slouched out with his backpack slung over a shoulder, he stopped in his tracks to find Sehun standing on an empty seat and waving his arms.
“What,” he began and Sehun put down his arms with a huge grin, “the fuck are you doing?”
chapter 9b