His legs felt like lead, his movements dictated by a fading neurological impulse. Then, a splash of elegant silver caught his eye. Bai Mingzhu was approaching, her face a portrait of maternal warmth.
Shu Yao instinctively straightened his spine, a final, desperate effort to maintain the "Saintly" mask.
"Oh, my dear! Finally, I've found you," Mingzhu exclaimed, her eyes glowing with genuine affection. She reached for him, her gloved hands radiating a warmth he felt he no longer deserved.
Shu Yao lowered his head, his voice a dry rasp. "Merry Christmas, Ma'am."
Mingzhu's brow furrowed into a gentle pout. "Stop that, dear. Didn't I tell you 'Auntie' is perfectly fine?"
Shu Yao forced a smile, though his facial muscles felt stiff and alien. "I am sorry... Auntie."
"That's better," she chirped, oblivious to the pallor of his skin. "I've brought you so many presents, Shu Yao! You've taken such wonderful care of Bai Qi. I'll let my husband know you're here so he can thank you personally."
"There is no need for that," Shu Yao whispered, his heart beginning to gallop with a terrifying, erratic rhythm. "It's fine, truly."
"Nonsense!" Mingzhu laughed, a sound of pure, unburdened joy. "I can't help myself. Stay right here, I'll find Niklas."
She vanished into the crowd, leaving Shu Yao standing in a vacuum of rising heat. The world was beginning to tilt. The cream-colored walls of the villa seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting with every thud of his heart.
"Shu Yao!"
George burst through a cluster of socialites, his expression a storm of irritation and relief. He was breathless, his coat flared open. "God, where were you? I told you to stay exactly where I left you."
Shu Yao looked at him, but George's face seemed to be melting at the edges. "I... I got distracted, Mr. George. I lost my way."
George's anger evaporated instantly, replaced by a cold, visceral dread. He stepped closer, his hand hovering near Shu Yao's shoulder. "Why are you so pale? You look like a specter, Shu Yao. Even for the cold, this isn't right."
Shu Yao clutched the edge of George's wool coat, his knuckles a ghostly white. "It's just the cold. I... I want to sit down."
George didn't argue. He felt the unnatural heat radiating from the boy's frame even through the thick fabric of his coat. He guided Shu Yao toward a secluded stone bench. Behind them, a trellis of winter roses—Shu Yao's favorites—clung to the stone, their deep red petals looking like drops of dried blood in the moonlight.
Across the lawn, Ming Su was a statue of crimson terror. Her eyes scanned the crowd with a frantic, jagged intensity.
Her plan had been a masterpiece of ruin: poison the Monarch, blame the Saint, But Shu Yao had upended the board. He had consumed the evidence. If he died here, in the middle of the gala, the investigation would be microscopic. The Belladonna was rare, traceable to her connections if the right people started digging.
She looked at Bai Qi, who was still laughing with a group of investors. He was safe. He was alive. But the "Saint" was a ticking bomb of biological failure, and if she didn't find him, his corpse would become her cage.
On the bench, Shu Yao was no longer in the garden.
"Are you sick? Let me take you home, Shu Yao. Right now," George urged, his voice cracking with a fear he couldn't hide.
George held his shoulders, his large hands trembling. George was saying something—his mouth was moving, his eyes were wide with a terror that Shu Yao couldn't quite understand—but the sound was muffled, as if they were both trapped underwater.
Shu Yao's gaze drifted to the winter roses behind them. In the dim light of the garden lanterns, the petals looked black.
Then, the world changed.
The pain in his chest didn't vanish, but it was pushed aside by a vision so bright it made his eyes ache. Through the blur of the crowd, he saw a figure approaching. It was Bai Qi.
In Shu Yao's mind, the Monarch wasn't wearing his obsidian mask. He wasn't the man who had crushed him in the office or the man who had coldly forced a cup of poison into his hands.
This Bai Qi was dressed in white. He was carrying a massive bouquet of red roses, and his face was soft—filled with the kind of love Shu Yao had only ever dared to dream about in his journal.
The vision of Bai Qi reached out a hand, his fingers ghosting over Shu Yao's burning cheek.
"Would you... would you forgive me now?" Shu Yao whispered. His voice was a thin, dry thread of sound. He wasn't talking to George. He was talking to the ghost in his mind. "I drank it all. I didn't let a single drop touch you."
"Shu Yao? Who are you talking to?" George's voice broke through the haze, sharp and frantic. "Look at me! What did you drank shu Yao!"
Shu Yao didn't look. He couldn't. He was watching the "good" Bai Qi smile at him. He felt a strange, delusional sense of victory. He had saved his King. He had proven that his love was more powerful than Ming Su's venom.
The first convulsion was small—a sharp, electric twitch in his stomach.
Shu Yao's smile didn't fade, but his eyes suddenly lost their focus. A deep, cold pressure began to build in his throat. It felt heavy and thick, like he had swallowed lead.
"Shu Yao?" George's voice was a plea now. He gripped Shu Yao's face, his thumb brushing against the boy's lower lip. "Your skin is like ice now. You're burning up and freezing at the same time. What is happening?"
Shu Yao's chest heaved. He tried to swallow, but his throat refused to work. The heat in his stomach surged upward, a violent, hot tide that he could no longer suppress.
He leaned forward, his body folding in half as if he had been struck.
A choked, wet sound came from his throat. It wasn't a cough; it was the sound of something tearing.
The first wave of blood hit the white snow at George's feet.
The winter air was a cruel conductor, turning the festive symphony into a discordant roar. On the cold stone bench, George looked down, his heart plummeting into an abyss of terror. At his feet, the pristine, crystalline snow was being defiled by a dark, viscous intrusion.
He looked up at Shu Yao, his voice trembling with a desperate, jagged edge. "Explain it to me! Shu Yao, what did you eat? What did you drink?"
But Shu Yao was deaf to the world of the living. His consciousness had already drifted into a feverish, gilded hallucination. In his fading vision, he saw only a man—his Prince—standing at the edge of a great darkness, preparing to leave him behind forever.
Shu Yao's hands, pale and skeletal, suddenly lunged forward. He clutched George's strong forearms, his fingernails digging deep into the expensive midnight wool of George's coat. Then, another convulsion hit.
A torrent of thick, dark blood erupted from Shu Yao's lips. It was relentless—a macabre passage of life-force that stained his chin, his shirt, and George's trembling hands. George didn't flinch from the mess; he didn't care about the ruin of his clothes. He was paralyzed by the sheer volume of the rejection.
"Shu Yao! What is happening? Why are you like this?" George tremble, his voice breaking under the weight of his helplessness.
Shu Yao let out a whimper—a sound of such profound, visceral desperation that it seemed to vibrate in the very marrow of George's bones. Another wave of dark fluid spilled out, trailing down the boy's neck like a shadow. His body was a paradox; he was shivering with a violent, glacial chill while his skin burned with a fire that was liquefying his insides.
Yet, through the gore and the pain, Shu Yao was smiling.
In his mind, he was looking at Bai Qi. His lover was standing there, holding a bouquet of roses, looking at him with a mixture of sadness and regret. "You shouldn't have done that, Shu Yao," the vision whispered.
"It's... it's nothing," Shu Yao wheezed. The sound was a cracking, hollow rattle—the sound of a soul preparing to vacate its broken house.
"I'll take you to the hospital," George gasped, his eyes wide and wild. "I'll save you. I swear it, Shu Yao. Just stay with me!"
At the edge of the garden, Bai Qi was navigating the crowd, his jaw set in a hard line. He had spotted them from a distance—his uncle hunched over Shu Yao. At first, his blood boiled with that familiar, possessive jealousy. He assumed uncle George was comforting him, playing the hero to Shu Yao's victim.
But as he drew closer, the music of the gala seemed to die. The laughter of the guests became a muffled, distant hum. The world stopped.
Bai Qi stopped dead.
He saw George's eyes—glassy and brimming with a grief so sharp it looked like madness. And then, he saw the boy.
Shu Yao was trembling in George's arms, a gruesome, dark trail seeping from his mouth, yet his face was alight with a haunting, ecstatic smile.
The realization hit Bai Qi like a physical blow to the solar plexus. The hot chocolate. The cup he had forced into the boy's hands. There had been something inside it—something lethal.
Bai Qi shook his head in a slow, horrified gesture of disbelief. He stepped back, his breath hitching. No. No way. He had watched him drink it. He had watched the boy sacrifice himself just to prove a point.
"Was it... was it really poison?" Bai Qi whispered, his voice failing him.
Shu Yao's hand suddenly spasmed, gripping George's hand with a final, frantic strength. He looked past George, his dilated, glassy pupils searching for the flowers he saw in his dream. He reached out into the empty air, his fingers grasping at ghosts.
George let out a sob he could no longer contain. He suddenly gathered the boy into his arms, lifting him with a protective ferocity. "Count on me, Shu Yao! I won't let anything happen to you. I'm sorry... I'm so sorry I failed to save you again. I always fail you!"
Shu Yao didn't hear the apology. He hovered his hand in the air, a tear tracking through the blood on his cheek. "Don't... don't leave me," he whispered to the vision of Bai Qi that was slowly dissolving into the dark. "I won't survive without you."
George didn't wait. He didn't even acknowledge Bai Qi's presence. He turned and sprinted toward a private exit, carrying the withering boy away.
Bai Qi stood alone in the shadows of the roses, his fists clenched so tight his knuckles threatened to burst through the skin. His jaw was a jagged line of agony.
"You'd rather drink poison than admit it?" Bai Qi hissed into the freezing wind, though his voice was thick with a burgeoning, suffocating guilt.
He wanted to scream. He wanted to run after them.
"Why are you always betraying me?" he whispered, his eyes burning. "Were you so tired of me that you wanted me dead? You took it yourself... you chose this."
He hid his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking. He told himself he felt no pity. He told himself he didn't want the boy anymore. But as the dark blood on the snow began to freeze.
While the garden was a theater of blood and shadows, the grand ballroom remained a golden bubble of ignorance. Charles, Niklas Rothenberg's head assistant, moved through the sea of tuxedoes with a restless, frantic energy
In his pocket, his hand was clamped around a small, velvet-wrapped box. He had spent weeks preparing it—a gift that was more than just a holiday gesture. It was a physical manifestation of a debt he didn't know how to repay.
It had been months since that afternoon in the office. Months since he had used his position to harass and belittle the fragile boy who had done nothing but work with a quiet, saintly diligence. Charles had seen the way Shu Yao looked at the floor after that—the way his spirit had dimmed. For months, the guilt had been a slow-acting poison in Charles's own conscience, and tonight, he had finally intended to purge it.