Chapter 1

I froze.

Just as I was about to turn and retreat to my room, Jiang Tingche’s strained voice came from behind me again.

“Did I scare you today?”

“Baby, will you pick up?”

“You promised to stay on the phone with me for an hour tonight. Our time isn’t up yet.”

My phone began vibrating beneath the covers in my bedroom.

Afraid Jiang Tingche might hear someone outside the bathroom, I tiptoed back to my room and fished my phone out from under the quilt. The screen showed an incoming voice call from him.

While I hesitated, the comment feed returned.

[Pick up already!]

[She’s the one who asked the yandere male lead to call her.]

[How can she leave him hanging halfway through?]

[To be fair, the male lead did get a little too excited tonight.]

[He’s never usually like this.]

[Maybe she flirted with him too aggressively.]

I thought back to an hour earlier.

After my shower, with nothing better to do, I had sent my online boyfriend two messages.

[Baby, pop quiz. The hottest guy at school is called the campus heartthrob.]

[So what do you call the hottest guy in the whole world?]

The words typing… had appeared in his chat window. Then they vanished, and he fell silent for a long time. He had clearly left the app to search for the punch line.

At last, he replied with a row of dots.

[…]

I had been doing my nighttime skincare and hadn’t answered right away. During that time, I heard Jiang Tingche go into the bathroom.

Three minutes later, my online boyfriend sent me a flurry of messages.

[Baby, do you really want it?]

[Isn’t this a little fast?]

[How about a voice call first?]

[You love my voice more than anything, don’t you?]

[Stay on the phone with me for an hour tonight, okay?]

So I had crawled beneath my covers and accepted his call.

He knew exactly how to flirt. In that devastating voice of his, he acted out all the intimate little moments between a couple. His voice was so good I felt like it could get me pregnant, and I twisted myself into knots beneath the quilt.

Then the comment feed appeared.

That was how I learned that my possessive, yandere online boyfriend was actually the man who shared my apartment.

I could hardly believe it.

In my mind, Jiang Tingche was aloof and taciturn, the sort of man who seemed impossibly out of reach. We had lived together for a year and rarely exchanged more than three sentences a day.

In real life, I was the picture of a good girl. After graduating from college, I took a job at a bank. With my thin-framed glasses and quiet manner, I looked gentle and reserved.

Truthfully, I was every bit as well-behaved as I looked.

The online romance had only begun because I was chatting in someone else’s place.

Xia Yu, the bank president’s daughter, came from a wealthy family. Working at the bank was little more than a taste of ordinary life for her, and her desk was right beside mine.

Six months ago, she had hired me to conduct an online romance for her.

“Sheng Ning, flirt with someone for me.”

I rejected her immediately. “Why should I do it? I’m not even good at flirting.”

Xia Yu was bold and fiery. Every evening after work, she went clubbing with her friends, and she treated life like one long game.

“That man is incredibly guarded,” she said. “He blocked me after two messages. I’m impatient. I don’t have the time or the patience to coax a man into an online relationship. Besides, I have more parties than I can count every night. When am I supposed to find time to date him?”

“I’ll register a new account. You chat with him and hand him over once you’ve won him. I won’t make you work for nothing, of course. Aren’t you short on money? I’ll pay you fifty thousand up front and another fifty thousand when it’s done.”

I really had needed money at the time, so I agreed.

The account was registered using Xia Yu’s identity. Its profile picture was a side view of her at a bar. In the photo, she wore a skin-tight camisole and absurdly short denim shorts. A baseball cap shaded her face as she leaned against the bar, gazing idly down at the drink in her hand.

Her face wasn’t visible, but the feather tattoo on the back of her shoulder was. Her username was A Feather.

I logged into her account and added the man she wanted. His username was Crystal Clear.

Xia Yu had specifically warned me to flirt in her voice. Otherwise, the difference in personality would expose us when I eventually handed the boyfriend back to her.

So I put away my good-girl nature and deliberately pretended to be bold and provocative.

It took me three months to persuade him to become my boyfriend.

Three months ago, I had planned to return the account to Xia Yu. She claimed she was too busy and asked me to keep chatting with him for another three months.

During those months, my once-distant online boyfriend became clingy and intensely possessive.

After learning that I had a weakness for voices, he sent me a voice message late one night.

“Baby, do you like my voice?”

There was something clear and cool beneath the huskiness of his voice, and it was impossibly seductive. I immediately burrowed beneath my covers and called him.

At first, our conversations were perfectly normal.

Gradually, normal conversations stopped being enough for me. He never refused me anything.

If the comment feed hadn’t spoiled the truth, I never would have recognized Jiang Tingche as my online boyfriend.

Jiang Tingche’s everyday voice was cold and distant. My online boyfriend, on the other hand, was clingy, obsessive, and a little unhinged.

It was almost impossible to connect the two.