The words hung in the marble hallway, cold and precise as a surgeon's scalpel.
"Who. Did. This."
They were not a question. They were a command for a name to be attached to the crime. His thumbs stroked my cheeks, a gesture of tenderness that clashed violently with the blizzard in his eyes. The touch was an anchor, but his gaze was a promise of shipwrecks.
I opened my mouth. Before I could say the name, his eyes flickered past me, to the faint, echoing music of the ballroom. The truth was there in my silence, in the fresh, darkening bracelet of bruises around my wrist, in the empty space at my throat where his emeralds now lay scattered on a bathroom floor.
He understood.
The storm in his eyes didn't break. It crystallized. It turned into something hard, focused, and infinitely more dangerous.
"No," I whispered, pressing my hands against his chest. "Yichen, don't. It's what he wants. It's a scene."
He caught my injured wrist, his touch feather-light over the bruises. He brought it to his lips and pressed a kiss to the center of the discoloration. A seal. A vow.
"It's not a scene," he said, his voice low and final. "It's a lesson."
He turned, his hand sliding from my face to capture mine. His grip was not to be broken. He didn't drag me; he simply began walking, and I was pulled in his wake, a satellite caught in a new, furious orbit. We were going back.
The grand ballroom doors loomed. The music swelled as we approached, a foolish, genteel waltz. Yichen didn't pause. He pushed through.
The atmosphere hit us like a wall—thick with perfume, champagne bubbles, and the humid heat of a hundred whispered conjectures. Heads swiveled. Conversations stuttered into silence for the second time that night. We were a spectacle returning for an encore.
Yichen didn't stop at the edge of the dance floor.
He walked straight to the small, raised platform where the string quartet played. He moved with a terrifying, calm purpose. The cellist saw him first, her bow faltering. Yichen didn't ask. He took the microphone from its stand.
The music died with a squeal of feedback.
A sea of upturned faces stared, a fresco of shock and delight. Scandal was the best entertainment money couldn't buy.
He found me with his eyes, standing frozen a few steps behind him in the aisle. He held my gaze for a long second, a silent apology and a promise. Then he turned to the room.
"It appears," he began, his voice amplified, cool, and razor-sharp in the silence, "that some among us have forgotten the basic rules of civility."
A ripple went through the crowd. I saw my supervisor's hand fly to his mouth. I saw Zhang Wei, a statue by the champagne fountain, his face carefully blank.
"We gather here to celebrate achievement," Yichen continued. He didn't raise his voice. He lowered it, forcing the room to lean in. "To honor professionalism. To respect one another." His eyes began a slow, deliberate sweep. They traveled over the crowd, bypassing his father's table for now, a predator making his prey wait. "Yet tonight, my wife was accosted. Cornered. Her property destroyed."
He lifted my wrist then, gently, so the lights caught the livid marks. A collective, sharp inhale echoed in the room. The bruise looked even darker under the chandeliers, a violent stain on the pristine page of the evening.
His gaze finally landed. It pinned Yiran, who sat slumped in his chair, face ashen, a glass of amber liquid clutched in a white-knuckled hand.
"Let this be the only warning," Yichen said, the words dropping like stones into the silent pool of the ballroom. "She is not a subject for your drunkenness. She is not a toy for your bitterness. You will not look at her. You will not speak to her. You will not breathe in her direction."
He paused. The silence was absolute, quivering.
"If you do," he said, and now his voice was so quiet the microphone barely caught it, a deadly whisper shared with hundreds, "you will answer to me. Not as your brother. But as the man who will ensure you have nothing left to lose."
A phone rose in the crowd, its screen a glowing, impertinent eye. Then another. Tiny red recording dots appeared like malevolent fireflies. They were capturing this. For gossip, for leverage, for blackmail. The modern-day version of drawing and quartering.
Yiran moved.
He shoved back from the table, his chair screeching against the marble. He stood, swaying, his expression twisting from shock to raw, drunken fury. "You self-righteous bastard!" he slurred, the words too loud in the hush. "You think you can—"
"Sit. Down."
The voice was not loud. It was not Yichen's. It came from the center of the high table.
Mr. Liang, Yichen's and Yiran's father, had not moved from his seat. He hadn't even turned his head. He simply spoke the two words into the space in front of him, as if ordering a disobedient dog. But the authority in them was absolute, forged in decades of unchallenged command.
Yiran froze, the fight draining from him, replaced by a humiliation so profound it was almost childlike. He looked from his brother at the microphone to his father's stony profile. His jaw worked. For a terrifying second, I thought he would defy them both.
Then, with a sound that was half sob, half snarl, he collapsed back into his chair, looking at the ruin of his own hands on the tablecloth.
The father's eyes lifted. They did not go to Yiran. They went to Yichen on the dais. There was no approval there. No anger. There was only a deep, analytical assessment.
He was observing a variable in his equation behave unpredictably, powerfully. He gave a single, slow nod. An acknowledgment of a move played.
It was more chilling than any rage.
Yichen placed the microphone back in its stand. The sound of the click was monstrously loud. He stepped down from the platform, the crowd parting for him as if he were radiating a dangerous heat.
He came to me. He didn't speak. He simply offered his arm. I took it, my fingers numb. We turned and walked, once more, through the gawping silence, out of the ballroom, out of the cathedral of judgment. This time, we did not stop in the hallway. We walked to the elevators, to the private car Zhang Wei had waiting, and into the cooling night.
The hotel suite was a vault of silence. The city lights outside were the only witnesses. Yichen shrugged off his tuxedo jacket, tossed it over a chair. He went to the minibar, poured two glasses of water, and brought one to me.
"Drink," he said.
I obeyed. The water was tasteless, a dull contrast to the metallic fear still on my tongue.
He stood before me, studying my face in the dim light. The public fury was gone, replaced by a weary tension that lined his mouth. "I'm sorry," he said finally.
"For what?"
"For using you as a prop in there. For making it a spectacle."
"You didn't," I said. "He did. You just… changed the narrative."
A faint, tired smile touched his lips. He reached out and traced the line of my jaw where his father's emeralds had lain. "The narrative is that you're mine," he murmured. "And no one touches what's mine."
The words should have felt possessive, archaic. In the echo of the ballroom, with the ghost of Yiran's grip on my wrist, they felt like a shelter. A dangerous, complicated shelter.
My phone, abandoned on the bedside table, buzzed.
Once.
Twice.
A cold premonition slithered down my spine. Yichen's eyes flicked toward the sound.
I walked over and picked it up. An unknown number. The message was brief.
Unknown: The Tulipe Bar. 30 minutes. Come alone. Discretion is not a suggestion.
A second message followed, a heartbeat later.
Unknown: If you tell him, it is he who will pay the price. Not you. We will see how protective he truly is when his board votes.
The blood drained from my face. I looked up and met Yichen's eyes. He was already reading the dread in my expression.
"Hua?"
I swallowed, my mouth dry. "It's… it's nothing. A colleague. About tomorrow's agenda." The lie tasted like ash.
His gaze was a laser. He saw everything—the slight tremor in my hand, the way my eyes wouldn't quite hold his. He took a step forward. "Give me the phone."
"Yichen, please. It's nothing."
"Give it to me."
The quiet command was worse than a shout. I clutched the phone to my chest, a pathetic shield. Telling him would trigger the threat. But not telling him felt like a betrayal deeper than any contract.
He closed the distance, his hand coming up. He didn't grab. He simply covered my hand, the one holding the phone. He waited.
Torn in two, I let my fingers go slack.
He took the phone. His eyes scanned the screen. I watched his face. Saw the cold recognition dawn. It wasn't surprise. It was the grim confirmation of a suspicion.
"He doesn't wait, does he?" Yichen said softly, almost to himself. He handed the phone back to me. "The Tulipe Bar is the private lounge off the main lobby. Access is by keycard only. For the penthouse and… the owner's suite."
Mr. Liang.
"You can't come," I whispered, the threat screaming in my head. He will pay the price.
Yichen's smile was razor-thin. "I know." He lifted his hand and cupped the back of my neck, pulling my forehead to rest against his. It was a gesture of shocking intimacy, of connection. "Listen to me. You go. You listen. You say nothing you don't mean. You promise nothing he asks for."
"What if he—"
"He won't harm you. Not here. Not physically." He pulled back, his eyes searching mine. "This is a different kind of fight. He's testing your mettle. And mine. Go. Show him you're not afraid."
"I am afraid."
"I know," he said again, his thumb stroking my cheek. "That's why you have to go."
Twenty-nine minutes later, I stood outside the discreet, paneled door of The Tulipe Bar. My green dress felt like a costume. My wrist throbbed. I had no necklace, no armor, only the echoing feel of Yichen's forehead against mine.
I took a breath that did not steady a single thing inside me, and pushed the door open.
The bar was all dark wood and low, green-glass lamps. It was empty save for one figure seated at the far end of the polished mahogany, a crystal tumbler of something clear in front of him.
Mr. Liang did not look up as I entered. He swirled his drink, watching the ice cubes catch the light.
"Close the door, Ms. Hua," he said, his voice as dry and smooth as the expensive whiskey he wasn't drinking. "Let's have a conversation about the cost of emeralds."
To be continued...
Author's Note
Well, that escalated. ₍ᐢ. .ᐢ₎ ₊˚⊹♡
If this chapter felt like a breath held for four thousand words, that's because it was. We've been building toward this confrontation in the gilded cage of the Liang empire, and the door has finally been blown off its hinges.
This chapter was a fascinating tightrope to walk—the clash between brutal, public power plays and the terrifying intimacy of a private war.
Yichen's transformation from a man of controlled silence to one of devastating public declaration was a pivotal moment. It's more than defending his wife; it's a unilateral declaration of war on the unspoken rules of his family's world. He didn't just call out Yiran; he weaponized the crowd's love of scandal and reframed the narrative in real-time.
But as we see, in this world, every power move is chess, not checkers. Mr. Liang's chilling, analytical nod was perhaps the most dangerous reaction of all. He isn't angry at the disruption. He's assessing a newly revealed strength in his heir. That silent acknowledgment terrifies me more than any shouted threat.
And Hua…
my heart broke for her in that hallway. She is the catalyst and the casualty, the prize and the pawn, all at once. Her strength here isn't in grand speeches, but in the quiet resilience of surviving the impossible tension between two men—one who declares "she is mine" as a shield, and another who sees her as a key asset and a point of leverage.
The moment she chose to lie to Yichen to protect him, even for a second, marked a profound shift. Their alliance is deepening into something real and desperately fragile, precisely because it's becoming a vulnerability their enemies can exploit.
Which brings us to the serpent in the garden: Mr. Liang.
The true master has entered the game directly. His summons isn't about jewels; it's a audit. He's testing her worth, her loyalty, her fear. He's probing the strength of the bond Yichen just paraded before the world. The Tulipe Bar isn't just a setting; it's his inner sanctum, a stage designed for maximum psychological pressure. Hua walking in, stripped of her emerald armor, is one of the bravest things she's done.
As we step into the quiet, wood-paneled tension of that bar, the game changes entirely. The public spectacle is over. Now comes the private, precise dissection. The cost of the emeralds isn't monetary—it's the price of belonging, the cost of defiance, and the value of a person in a world that trades in both.
Thank you, as always, for reading. Your theories and reactions are the fuel for this story. Buckle up; the real game is just beginning. ₍^ >⩊< ^₎Ⳋ