chapter 2
“Miss, what are you doing?”
Qingtao cried out and lunged at me. Ignoring the hole the hairpin punctured through her hand, she tore it from my grasp.
She crouched over the man like a beast protecting her cub, shielding him with her body and glaring at me with open suspicion and hostility.
“Qingtao, move.”
My voice was cold.
She bit her lip and said nothing. The resolve in her eyes, however, was something I had never seen before.
“If you refuse to save him, so be it, Miss. Why must you resort to such cruelty?”
I let out a long breath.
Mother had expressly forbidden me from revealing the note to anyone.
And so, faced with Qingtao—a woman who had been as close to me as a sister, but now regarded me as an enemy for the sake of a stranger—I could only ask, “If only one of us can live, Qingtao, whom do you choose? Him or me?”
She did not answer.
Her eyes answered for her.
Good. Very good.
More than ten years together, and it could not compare to a single glimpse of a man.
Beneath the pain in my heart, another passage from the note surfaced in my memory.
[If someone close to you suddenly seems like a stranger and behaves in ways entirely unlike their usual self, distance yourself at once.
[This person has been contaminated by the protagonist halo and reduced to a puppet of the plot.]
I drew a deep breath. I was now more certain than ever that this man was the one Mother had warned me would “torment my body and break my heart.”
Qingtao had plainly lost her reason. She had become what the note called a puppet of the plot.
Reason told me to stay away from her, yet I still could not cast aside more than a decade of affection.
Steadying myself, I said, “If you insist upon saving him, take him home. He may stay only in the side courtyard, however. He is not to leave it without my permission.”
Qingtao’s face lit with joy.
I merely sneered inside.
Once he was in my hands, I could dispose of him however I pleased.
The best outcome would be for his wounds to kill him without any assistance. If he insisted on surviving, I would not mind having the estate physician add a little something to his medicine—enough to leave him witless, paralyzed below the waist, and twisted in the face.
Then I would like to see how he intended to torment my body or break my heart.
After Mother died, I inherited her vast enterprises.
A child carrying gold through a crowded market invites every thief to reach for it. Years of weathering open and hidden attacks had long since hardened my heart.
Why would I spare a man destined to kill me?
He and I could only be enemies until one of us was dead.