Chapter 147
Chapter 147
Wen Tangtang had been locked up here for an entire night. She knew all too well the agony of going a whole day without food or even being able to use the bathroom, and naturally, she never wanted to experience that again.
So the moment she heard they had been discovered, she immediately panicked, losing all composure.
“What do we do? What do we do?”
Wen Xin tried to get up, but the handcuffs on his wrists still hadn’t been unlocked.
Nan Mu lifted his eyes and swept a glance around the room. His voice remained calm as he gave instructions, while his hands never stopped working on the lock.
He remembered that the person who had come here with him hadn’t brought any communication device. From outside the villa to this place, even at a full sprint, it would still take quite some time.
“Calm down. We still have time. Go check how many windows this room has, and whether any of them can be opened so we can get out.”
Nan Mu’s steadiness reassured Wen Tangtang. She calmed down a little, then ran off to check every door in the suite that could be opened.
After a while, Wen Tangtang came back, her voice tinged with frustration. “There are windows we can get out through, but… this is the third floor. If we jump and break our legs, we won’t be able to run far, right…?”
At that, Wen Xin’s gaze immediately landed on the bedsheets in the bedroom. “Can we use the sheets? Tie them into a rope, then slide down?”
“I’ll try.” The moment Wen Tangtang heard that, she ran to pull off the sheets.
Wen Xin looked at Nan Mu, who was focused on the handcuffs in front of him. “What do you think of that plan? Why aren’t you saying anything?”
Nan Mu listened intently to the sounds inside the cuffs, until a faint click finally reached his ears.
Only then did he let out a soft breath and toss the handcuffs onto the carpet beside Wen Xin. Rising from the floor, he looked down at him and answered, “It’s doable. Just too slow.”
The moment Wen Xin, still bound by handcuffs, witnessed his cuffs being opened, his anxious heart finally settled. He knew he finally had a chance to escape.
He had even considered that if there wasn’t enough time to unlock the handcuffs, he would simply tell Nan Mu to take Wen Tangtang and leave first.
Wen Xin got up from the floor and saw Nan Mu walk to the door first thing, locking it from the inside.
He was about to go help Wen Tangtang make the “rope,” but just then, a piercing alarm suddenly blared from every corner of the room, loud enough to shake their ears.
Wen Tangtang was badly startled by the sudden noise and rushed out of the room in a panic, asking what had happened.
“What’s going on?”
Nan Mu’s expression shifted slightly. A trace of coldness flashed through his dark eyes as he strode to the window and lifted the curtain to look outside. At the same time, he explained, “It should be a warning from the alarm system. The guards probably couldn’t get in touch with Old Cai, so they sent him a special alert.”
Sure enough, as soon as Nan Mu finished speaking, urgent knocking sounded from outside the door, accompanied by Old Cai’s shouts. “Open the door! Hurry!”
Nan Mu ignored the noise outside. He quickly checked every window that could be opened, and finally settled on the one in the side bedroom.
It was an ordinary sliding window. The widest it could open was only about eighty centimeters.
Nan Mu turned sideways and leaned out the window to observe the outside. Beneath the window was a stretch of green lawn. Other than the external air-conditioning units on each floor, there were no other footholds or places to brace themselves.
Nan Mu hesitated as he looked back at Wen Xin and Wen Tangtang, his gaze sweeping over their arms.
Needless to say, Nan Mu knew Wen Tangtang definitely didn’t have that kind of arm strength. Wen Xin might be able to try, but he had gone a full day without eating or resting properly, and there was a clot of dried blood on his forehead from some unknown injury.
However, the current situation left him with no other choice.
Wen Xin seemed to guess Nan Mu’s intention. He asked, “Are you planning to have us climb down from here?”
“That’s right,” Nan Mu replied. “This is the only way down.”
Hearing that, Wen Tangtang’s face crumpled as she kept twisting the bedsheet into a rope. “I can’t. It’s too high…”
“You can, and you will.”
Nan Mu strode over to her and picked up the sheet she had twisted into a bundle, giving it a quick look.
At most, the sheet was only about four meters long. The houses in Shanshui Villa were all self-built, with each floor roughly three point two meters high. From the window to the ground, the drop was about eight meters.
But given the current situation, they had no time left to hesitate.
“Will it work?” Wen Tangtang looked at Nan Mu uneasily.
Nan Mu didn’t answer directly. “Search the place. Bring every soft thing you can find in here-pillows, blankets, clothes… anything. Drag it all into this room.”
Though Wen Xin and Wen Tangtang were panicking, they moved without delay. In no time, they had gathered every soft item in the room, not even sparing the cushions from the sofa in the living room.
The noise outside the door was getting louder and louder. From the sound of it, the two men who had been standing guard outside had both come up and were now tearing at the door like madmen.
The pounding was like a death knell, each crash filling them with dread and unease.
Wen Tangtang felt her heart pounding like a battering ram against a city gate-erratic, and heavier with every beat. She could see that Wen Xin was drenched in cold sweat too, his expression tense.
Only Nan Mu stood calmly by the window, methodically stacking the things they had brought over one by one. He even took off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves before turning to look at the two of them. “Wen Xin, pile the tables and anything else you can move in front of the door. Buy us as much time as possible. Wen Tangtang, come here.”
Wen Tangtang immediately hurried over to him. “What do you need me to do?”
Nan Mu handed her the makeshift rope she had been working on. “Thread this under your armpits first, then tie a secure knot.”
Wen Tangtang didn’t waste a word. She grabbed one end of the rope without hesitation, wrapped it around her chest, and tied it in a dead knot.
Only after she finished did a question belatedly occur to her. “If I get down there, how am I supposed to untie it?”
Nan Mu picked up the suit jacket he had tossed aside and handed it to her. “There’s a lighter in the pocket. Once you’re down, use it to burn through the cloth.”
Wen Tangtang quickly fished the lighter out of the jacket pocket. “And then?”
“Throw all these quilts down. When you go down in a moment, once the rope reaches its limit, find a way to jump onto the quilts.”
Gritting her teeth, Wen Tangtang worked with Nan Mu to toss the quilts, pillows, sofa cushions, and everything else down below.
Just then, Wen Xin rushed in from outside and locked the bedroom door. “That door’s about to give. Once they clear away the stuff, they’ll be here. Hurry!”
As he spoke, he tried to drag the bedroom table and other furniture over to barricade the bedroom door.
Nan Mu tied the other end of the bedsheet rope around himself, then gripped the rope with both hands. “Wen Tangtang, you go first!”
Though Wen Tangtang was afraid, she knew this was no time to hesitate or act delicate. She climbed nimbly onto the window ledge and, under Nan Mu’s guidance, adjusted her position for the descent.
But just then, the situation below suddenly changed. At some point, a burly man had run underneath the window. He spotted what they were doing and shouted, “Old Cai! They’re trying to jump out the window and escape! Get over here! They’re escaping through the window!”
As he shouted, the burly man moved away everything they had just thrown down.