Chapter 6

Qi Zizhi, working from the information he had, would rationally conclude that his little brother's allergy attack was a coincidence. Qi Shuang, on the other hand, as the person actually involved, wasn't going to see it that way—because he had a guilty conscience. His eldest brother had no idea that last night, like a complete idiot, he'd driven over to stake out Diye himself, hoping to run Wang Chuqiu down with his car. He hadn't lost his memory. He remembered with perfect clarity exactly how jealous and crazed he'd been in that stretch of time.

The moment Qi Shuang woke up in the hospital, he'd already worked it all out. He was certain Wang Chuqiu had come prepared—somehow the man had sensed his intent to lie in wait near Diye last night, and somehow he'd also learned about the yellow peach allergy, and used it to strike back while Qi Shuang slept.

Wang Chuqiu was a man who kept his cards close, all the mildness just an act. If he could know things the outside world didn't, that meant he was holding something.

Qi Shuang decided to sit tight for now and make no move.

But the second he laid eyes on Wang Chuqiu, he found himself instinctively picturing the man breathing into his mouth, and his stomach turned, his head went foggy, and his opening line went completely off the script he'd planned.

Then, later, he heard that name come out of Wang Chuqiu's mouth—and no matter how he turned it over, he couldn't fathom how something not even his own family knew could have been discovered by an outsider. The shock hit him like a blow, and he lost control completely.

He'd been led entirely by the other man's rhythm the whole time.

Qi Shuang screamed and wrenched free of Jiao Bai's hold, lunging up like a madman, his slightly overlong nails clawing for Jiao Bai's face.

Jiao Bai had been ready. It took barely any effort to pin him down again.

"Are you out of your mind?" Qi Shuang shook uncontrollably. "How dare you slander me and drag Young Master Shen into it—I'll tell Mr. Shen, you're finished, Wang Chuqiu, you're done for!"

Jiao Bai said, light as air, "Next time, don't sleep in the same bed as someone else. You talk in your sleep. On and on."

The color that anger had brought to Qi Shuang's cheeks drained out in an instant. He forced himself steady. "Bullshit. I never talk in my sleep."

The young master lowered his eyes, murder radiating off him, clearly turning some scheme over in his head.

Jiao Bai smiled at him. "I recorded it and sent it to a friend I trust. If anything happens to me, that recording lands in Shen Ji's hands, and the Old Madam's."

Qi Shuang's clenched fist twitched. "Liar. I don't believe you. If you've really got it, play it for me right now!"

Jiao Bai only had his cheat—there was no recording, not a syllable of one. He looked at Qi Shuang the way one looks at something pitiful. "That note you stuffed in the crack of Young Master Shen's desk—I wonder if it's still there. Should I find time to go take a look for you?"

Every drop of blood vanished from Qi Shuang's face. He really had talked in his sleep. Even the secret of the note...

Sunlight lay sprawled across the window glass, breaking into countless points of light, idly surveying the deathly stillness of the hospital room.

"What do you want..." Qi Shuang's voice returned to its usual soft, harmless register, his eyes reddening as he murmured, "Chuqiu, what exactly do you want..."

Jiao Bai answered a question no one had asked. "Shen Ji didn't touch me last night."

Qi Shuang's mouth fell open into an "O," every thought plain on his face.

Watching the young master's dumbstruck expression, Jiao Bai privately thanked Qi Zizhi—that unconditionally indulgent big brother of a family head—for raising such a brother.

Next, drawing on the original body's memories along with what he'd seen himself, Jiao Bai laid out for Qi Shuang the dirty-old-man side of Shen Ji.

"Shen Ji is quite taken with Jiang Yan," Jiao Bai said. "Qinxin Garden might have a new resident soon."

Qi Shuang sat cross-legged, unimpressed. "This deal you're talking about—you mean teaming up with me against him? With the Old Madam already moving, there's no room left for us."

The young master had his sharp moments.

"If Jiang Yan whispers a little something in his ear, doesn't that create a variable?" Jiao Bai settled into the chair by the bedside table. "Shen Ji never touched either of us, but he's touched him. That's already a win. A head start right out of the gate."

Qi Shuang wanted to say, could you please stop saying Shen Ji's name so casually—it sounded strange, unsettling.

Across all of South City, hardly anyone dared address Shen Ji by his given name outright.

Qi Shuang's nails dug at the blanket. Wang Chuqiu had changed. This was the real him.

The tiger had been let loose back into the mountains, and it had gotten a hold on him besides. Qi Shuang clawed the blanket tighter. If only he'd managed to run this bastard down last night. How had he gotten so damn lucky.

Even if it hadn't been Qi Yiliao that Wang Chuqiu had latched onto but merely his car, Qi Shuang still wouldn't have dared touch him.

Jiao Bai, seeming not to register the gloom radiating off Qi Shuang, went on. "My deal is this: I help you change your situation, help you become the one and only future Madam Shen. When the time comes, all you have to do is—"

Before he could finish, Qi Shuang cut him off, his tone gone sharp and thin, like a spoon scraping glass. "You back off? That's not something either of us gets to decide!"

Jiao Bai said nothing. He was busy recalling the plot. Qi Shuang genuinely believed himself to be Shen Er'an's salvation. He'd thrown himself, unasked, into helping Shen Er'an wrest power from Shen Ji, dragging both of his own brothers down with him and sinking the entire Qi family in the process—yet he himself hadn't died. He'd ended up a cripple, while someone who'd loved him for years died in pieces trying to save him.

"Broken Wings" wasn't content with just one scum-and-cheap couple as its official pairing—the whole thing was practically a scum-and-cheap concentration camp. That was exactly why Jiao Bai still remembered the plot at all; the melodrama had been free-flowing and shameless.

Jiao Bai said, meaningfully, "And what if my luck changed?"

Qi Shuang understood, and also felt like he didn't understand at all.

"Today's the Old Madam's birthday. Barring any surprises, she'll have Shen Ji drive me back to Qinxin Garden. If you hire someone to be on the road at the right moment..." Jiao Bai's voice dropped, and he said a few more words.

Qi Shuang's face went white with shock. "Are you out of your mind?!"

He met the young man's gaze—resolute, calm—and his throat went dry. "You'll be in that car yourself. Aren't you afraid..."

Jiao Bai said, "That's not your concern. Just make sure your people keep it under control."

Qi Shuang swallowed hard, a lump of saliva going down. A lunatic. This man was insane.

"Even if I do exactly what you're suggesting, and everything plays out exactly as you predict, the Old Madam still won't let you leave Qinxin Garden. She'll just chalk it up to an accident." Qi Shuang forced his racing heart to slow.

The sunlight had grown fiercer. Jiao Bai zipped his jacket up and pulled his hood over his head, hiding in shadow a face so pale he wouldn't even need makeup to play a vampire. "That's just the appetizer. The real feast is still coming."

A thought struck Qi Shuang. "You mean the Master?"

"Don't dream." His own heartbeat slowed. Two years ago, when he'd learned he had another rival, he'd cried and made scenes and threatened suicide until his brothers went and found the Master themselves, trying to force the man into serving the Qi family's interests. Threats, bribes—none of it had worked.

"Send your people to this address." Jiao Bai pulled a slip of paper from the pocket of his thin jacket.

Looking at the address written on the note, Qi Shuang felt like success was finally within reach.

"Young master, I hope you'll keep your hands clean this time, and not let anyone catch your tail again—it'd drag me down too. Also, do me a favor and spend a bit more money hiring people who actually know what they're doing, and don't have them go too hard. Otherwise, if it ends up wrecking the car and killing everyone in it, I'll be running into you down in hell." Jiao Bai's phone rang—Qinxin Garden's landline, the old butler calling. He hung up on it immediately.

Afraid the young man might change his mind, Qi Shuang snatched the note up fast. "Why are you doing this?"

Jiao Bai said, "I have no interest in an old man like Shen Ji. I'm done being kept like a dog, too. I'll lend you a hand, and you pay me for it."

Qi Shuang had, in some petty corner of his mind, been marveling that he'd lived long enough to hear someone call Shen Ji an old man and sound disgusted about it—but the second half of Jiao Bai's sentence snapped him back. "Money is all you want?"

"Just money." Jiao Bai paused. How much would be reasonable? Poverty had made him a saint; he thought it over. "Twenty million, then."

Qi Shuang was so furious he nearly coughed up blood. Twenty million—and he said it in the same tone he'd use for twenty cents. What a shameless demand. Why didn't he just stand somewhere windy with his mouth open and wait for money to blow in?

The young master had his pride, so he swallowed all of that back, and with the look of a man who'd just been clubbed in the head, he forced out, constipated, "What do you need that much money for?"

"Haven't decided. My pockets are just too empty." Jiao Bai meant to use a handful of details from the original plot, leveraging the Qi family's power through Qi Shuang, to break free of the Shen family. All this effort was really just an attempt to reclaim the right to be a person.

The original body's dog leash was in Old Madam Shen's hand; she'd have to be the one to let go of it before Jiao Bai could step out of the kennel.

Once he was out, he'd change his footing, and only then deal with the friends waiting on his list.

One step at a time.

Jiao Bai scratched at the back of his hand where the sunlight had hit it. Itched like hell. What a miserable life he had.

Seeing the young man about to leave, Qi Shuang hurried to ask, "How exactly did you make me have that allergy attack last night—was it mouth-to-mouth?"

Jiao Bai: "..."

Mouth-to-mouth? Disgusting who exactly. At most he'd torn open a bag of dried yellow peaches and cupped it over the young master's nose and mouth.

"Yeah. Mouth-to-mouth." Jiao Bai looked as if he were holding something back. "You don't mind, do you?"

Qi Shuang retched.

Jiao Bai grinned, waved, and left. The reason he hadn't waited around, and had rushed to lay his cards out for Qi Shuang so quickly, was that you eat shit while it's still hot—no, wrong saying—you strike while the man's down.

By every measure, this stage was when Qi Shuang was easiest to reel in, and he definitely wouldn't tell Qi Zizhi about any of this. Just as the rest of the Qi family still had no idea how bold the young master really was, or what exactly he was scheming.

There was risk in this move of Jiao Bai's, sure. But the card he'd shown Qi Shuang wasn't his last one. He had plenty more.

......

Not long after Jiao Bai left, Qi Zizhi came in. He asked question after question, but his little brother gave him nothing.

"Little Shuang?" Qi Zizhi pressed his brow tight.

Qi Shuang, dazed, said, "Big brother, do I talk in my sleep?"

Qi Zizhi shook his head.

Qi Shuang murmured to himself, "That's what I thought too..."

So how had Wang Chuqiu known? He shivered, shoulders shrinking down into the blanket, breaking out in a cold sweat.

Twenty million was nothing to the Qi family, but to him personally it was no small sum—he spent freely, blew through whatever he had, kept no savings. He'd have to find another way. Might as well ask his second brother for it—his second brother didn't have as much money as their eldest, but he lived overseas, out of reach of domestic affairs, and would be easier to fool.

Once he had a plan, Qi Shuang relaxed. Eating an orange his big brother had peeled for him, he said, mouth full, "Big brother, I want to marry into the Shen family. I want to marry Mr. Shen."

Qi Zizhi had heard this plenty of times before, and it still baffled him. "He's years older than even I am, and his private life is a mess. I really don't know what you see in him."

Qi Shuang's gaze drifted. What he saw in Shen Ji was a son named Shen Er'an.

Shen Er'an had grown up under Shen Ji's cold neglect. So pitiful.

If Qi Shuang married Shen Ji, he could become Shen Er'an's eyes, work together with him, help him claim the entire Shen Corporation. And when that day came, Shen Er'an would be grateful to him, would revere him, would treat him as his benefactor, his only family, the one light in his life. They would forge a bond nothing could ever sever.

Qi Shuang had long ago convinced himself he'd been born for the sole purpose of saving Shen Er'an.

"The Old Madam's birthday is being held at the Old Residence. If you're going, you need to leave now." Qi Zizhi checked his watch.

Qi Shuang said, "I'm not going."

Qi Zizhi was somewhat surprised—every year on this day his little brother was more eager than anyone, rushing off to the Shen household first thing in the morning, sickness be damned, nothing ever dampened his enthusiasm. Why this year... He stroked his brother's hair. "Then get some rest."

Qi Shuang nodded obediently, already calculating in his head who to hire to make sure nothing went wrong.

......

It wasn't even ten in the morning when Jiao Bai, fully armored for the occasion, headed to the Old Residence. His state of mind now was nothing like it had been last night, right after he'd first transmigrated in. Seeing Qi Yiliao and Shen Ji again, Jiao Bai found he could actually breathe normally.

Jiang Yan wasn't at Qi Yiliao's side, and Zhang Zhen wasn't around either. A cigarette was pinched between Qi Yiliao's fingers, and he wasn't smoking it hard.

Beside him, Shen Ji took several long drags for every one of Qi Yiliao's—Qi Yiliao clearly rationed his nicotine, and even smoking, he did it with an elegant restraint.

Jiao Bai's gaze, resting on Qi Yiliao, lingered without him quite meaning it to. Shen Ji beckoned to him coldly. "Come here."

Like summoning a puppy.

Jiao Bai spat a string of curses into his mask. Old bastard. Sooner or later, I'll bite you to death.