For the past two days, I’ve seized every opportunity to conceive. This isn’t lovemaking—it’s a transaction. A contract sealed in flesh and fluid. I let him fill me, not out of desire, but to reach an objective.
Do I still find Jianhua good looking? Sure. But the magnetic pull I once felt toward his power and intensity has collapsed into revulsion. His touch, once imagined as electric, now lands like latex—cold, clinical, detached.
His assertiveness reveals itself for what it truly is: not confidence but compensation, not strength but brutality. The mask has slipped, and beneath it lies a hollow man desperate to prove his worth.
He doesn't even have the confidence to pleasure a woman. Instead, he parades women through the room—beautiful, trained, transactional. Merchandise. They do what we won’t do for each other. He watches, detached, as if outsourcing intimacy.
And yet, those nameless women cracked something open in me. They didn’t just touch me—they rewired me. Under their expert hands and mouths, I discovered a rawness I didn’t know I carried. I arched. I cried out. My body betrayed my mind, and I let it.
It helps that I don’t know their names. Their anonymity frees me. I can ejaculate on their faces without apology, without shame. It's as if a floodgate has opened. I learned my body could release in violent, unrelenting waves—surges that override thought, memory, restraint.
It makes me paranoid. I worry I’ll rinse out his sperm. So when he finishes inside me, I swing my legs against the wall, letting gravity assist biology. I stay there, suspended, inverted, like a woman caught between conception and rebellion.
That’s when the phone rings. Jianhua is still panting, his sweat cooling on my skin.
He straightens, recalibrates, then answers.
“Evangeline.” His voice slices through the air—surprised, alert. “You’re back.”
“Yes. I flew in this morning,” she replies, smooth and slow. “You’re the second person I called.”
The words could be innocent. But they land with flirtation—soft velvet wrapped around steel. In this world, power rarely announces itself. It seduces, insinuates, tests. I stay perfectly still, legs still raised against the wall, listening with the precision of prey.
"Who was first?" he asks, voice laced with manufactured jealousy.
“Lyra, of course.” The woman laughs—rich, unhurried, confident. “She thinks we should go to Wuhan. Immediately.”
At the mention of Lyra, Jianhua’s head snaps toward me. His eyes are knives. I know that look. My father spoke of Lyra’s death like it was inevitable. Jianhua believed it. We all did.
But now, his temper flares before discipline catches up.
“Is Lyra alright?” he asks. A fatal mistake.
“What do you mean? Shouldn’t she be?”
“Of course. I don’t know why I asked.” His recovery is clumsy. Uncharacteristic.
It’s making him nervous. He’s afraid of her.
Even Jianhua—who glides through rooms full of ruthless dictators like he was born among them—can’t hide it. He’s scared of a foreign woman with no roots.
And I remember that same warning in my own body: the prickle of hair rising when Lyra was near. Like the air had teeth.
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She isn’t just powerful.
She’s something else entirely.
“Never better,” Eangeline replies. “I was with her just minutes ago.”
His jaw tightens. Fury simmers. Jianhua doesn’t tolerate being misled. Doesn’t forgive being wrong. His pride is a blade—always drawn.
“So she’s coming to Wuhan?”
“Certainly. Bao Fang too. I want all the new shareholders present. A proper tour of what you’re investing in.”
“I’d like that,” he says, voice brittle as thin ice. “Are we reviewing anything new? Beyond the Bloodsteeds and the Celestial Dawn Tea?”
“Definitely,” she replies. “You’ll be excited.”
She sounds confident. Jianhua doesn’t bite. He doesn’t trust confidence unless it’s his own.
“Can’t wait to see it. When are we going?”
“Tomorrow. Let’s take the morning Ocean Airline flight.”
“Done. Meet you at the airport.”
He ends the call and turns to me. The transformation is instant. The businessman evaporates. What remains is feral.
His face contorts with volcanic rage. His finger stabs the air between us. "Get out!"
He snatches my clothes from the floor, storms to the door, wrenches it open, and hurls them into the hallway. “Get the hell out of my hotel!”
He’s a predator wounded by his own miscalculation, lashing out at the nearest target. Two weeks ago, I would’ve crumpled—begging, apologizing, shrinking into the girl the police tried to break.
But I am not that girl anymore.
I lower my legs from the wall with deliberate grace. Back straight. Chin lifted. I walk past him—naked, but armored in something he can’t touch anymore.
“You’re making a mistake,” I say, voice steady, eyes unflinching.
His female bodyguards watch impassively as I gather my scattered clothes, dress without haste, and stride to the elevator.
Sixty-six floors separate me from the ground. With each descending number, I feel myself rising.
… …
Xuetao pulls up in a Cayenne. I slide into the back seat and ask him to stop at the nearest drugstore. He parks at a mall without comment. I tell him to wait in the car.
Inside, the girl behind the counter recognises me instantly. She doesn’t say my name—she knows better. But when I quietly ask for Yuting, a morning-after pill, her eyebrows lift. Her lips curl into a smile that’s half gossip, half judgement. She’s already rehearsing the story she’ll tell her friends tonight.
I don’t care. The media has said enough. After the arrest, I learned the only lesson I needed: what people think of me is irrelevant. What I think of myself is the only truth that matters.
On second thought, I cooly ask her to add a pregnancy test to the order.
Back in the car, I hold the bag in my lap like it’s ticking.
By the time I reach the office, it’s five o’clock. In a state-run firm, people would be packing up. But in an internet company, where the founder openly promotes 996 workweek—nine to nine, six days a week, the day is still in full swing.
Meijuan, my secretary, meets me at the elevator. “The chairman is still in with the YouQu founders.”
I nod, half relieved. I don’t know what to say to my father right now.
“Bring me hot water,” I say.
She doesn’t ask why. She never does.
I step into my office, and it looks like a lie I once lived in. I need to gut it—rip out the pink, tear down the paintings, scrape away the curated softness. The framed calligraphy 静水流深—Still waters run deep—used to read like wisdom. Now it reads like a costume: depth, neatly packaged for display.
The shelf of business books I never read. The curated elegance. The second-generation gloss. I used to think that was all I amounted to.
Now I know better.
Junhang returns with the water. I take the cup, warm against my palms. She leaves without a word.
I place the Yuting on the walnut desk. The packaging stares back at me. I stare longer.
I’m ovulating. Jianhua didn’t hold back. If I don’t take the pill, pregnancy is almost certain.
But I hesitate.
A memory surfaces—faint, irrelevant, persistent. A pastor from a church I visited in college, back in the States. I wasn’t religious. I went for the social connection. He never preached against abortion. He spoke of the sacredness of life. Of divine purpose.
I don’t want Jianhua’s child. Not really. But something inside me—soft, irrational—clings to the concept. A child not yet real. A future not yet written.
I imagine him growing up. Taking Aladdin. Not as a legacy, but as a conquest. Something earned. Something inevitable.
My father was certain Lyra was finished. That was two days ago.
But I’m not Jianhua. I don’t act on impulse. He may read power plays better than I do—but I understand patience. And patience wins wars that politics only survive.
Time stretches as I stare at the pill—the small, clinical solution to a problem not yet confirmed. It could erase everything: the child, the complication, the future I haven’t dared to imagine.
I don’t move. I just watch it. Until I lift the cup one last time and realize it’s empty.
And still—I haven’t decided.
