Chapter 10

Chapter 10

When the door to the third floor of the West Building was forced open, I followed them in.

Zhou Yan tried to stop me. “You’re hurt. Go to the hospital first.”

I shook my head.

“I want to see this through with my own eyes.”

He looked at me, then stopped trying to persuade me. He only had a female officer stay by my side.

The ward in the West Building was in chaos. The monitor was letting out a shrill alarm, and several private doctors were gathered around the bed, trying to resuscitate the patient. Shen Mingche’s heart rate was fluctuating violently, and his unconscious body even began to convulse for a brief moment.

Xu Lingyi threw herself beside the bed, her voice hoarse. “Save him! Save him!”

The doctor was drenched in sweat. “Ms. Xu, the patient is suffering from multiple organ failure. His condition was already at its absolute limit.”

“Impossible,” Xu Lingyi murmured. “The Marriage Contract was completed. It should have worked.”

She turned and saw me, her gaze vicious enough to tear me apart.

“It was you. You and your grandmother are the same. You stole Mingche’s life.”

I stood at the doorway without flinching.

“I didn’t steal his life,” I said. “You were the one who refused to let go eighteen years ago.”

Xu Lingyi lunged at me, only to be stopped by the police. She struggled, her hair disheveled. The elegant, composed Madam Shen from this morning seemed to have had a layer of skin stripped away, leaving only the terrifyingly stubborn mother underneath.

“What do you know? You don’t have children. You have no idea how far a mother can go for her child.”

I looked at her and suddenly found it both absurd and tragic.

“My mother was someone else’s child too.”

Xu Lingyi froze for a split second.

I went on. “So is Shen Jianwei.”

Her lips moved, but no sound came out.

The female officer collected evidence in the room while the legal team Zhou Yan had brought handed materials over to the police. Illegal detention, the use of suspected drugs, concealment of the fact that Shen Mingche was alive, falsification of death records, and long-term unauthorized medical care-any one of those would be enough to leave the Shen Family in disarray. As for the Life-Borrowing Marriage Contract, the law might not recognize its metaphysical components, but as evidence of threats and psychological control, it was already more than complete.

Not to mention that cup of black liquor.

The police had found the same liquid in the ancestral hall. Preliminary testing showed it contained sedatives. Last night, Xu Lingyi had not simply intended to scare me. She had planned to make me lose my ability to resist first, then force me to make the Blood Seal.

I stood in the corridor of the West Building, and as I listened to Zhou Yan say all this in a low voice, my fingers stayed cold.

If I hadn’t knocked over that cup of liquor last night, if I hadn’t smelled that bitterness, if Grandma hadn’t warned me about the second Marriage Contract, what would I be like now?

Maybe I would be wearing a wedding dress, smiling as I accepted everyone’s blessings, and then, under all those watching eyes, hand over my life.

The so-called fate arrangement might have been absurd, but the Shen Family’s malice was real.

They used metaphysics to package a crime, familial love to package sacrifice, and a wedding to package a murder.

That was the most terrifying part.

The ward suddenly fell silent.

The monitor’s shriek turned into one long, flat tone.

The doctors slowly stopped moving.

Xu Lingyi seemed to have had all the bones pulled out of her body, collapsing to her knees on the floor.

Shen Mingche was dead.

This man, whom she had hidden for eighteen years, saved for eighteen years, and imprisoned for eighteen years, had finally reached his end at the very moment all the truth was laid bare.

I felt no satisfaction.

He, too, had been a victim of this old scheme. The fire eighteen years ago had failed to kill him, but it had trapped him in a ward through his mother’s obsession, turning even death into a long imprisonment that had been endlessly postponed.

Xu Lingyi did not cry out loud.

She only looked at Shen Mingche on the bed and said softly, “I only wanted you to wake up.”

No one answered her.

I turned and left the West Building.

When I reached the stairwell, I saw Shen Jianwei being lifted onto a stretcher by medical staff. He had regained a little consciousness. His right hand was wrapped in thick gauze, and his complexion was still terrible.

When he saw me, he looked as if he wanted to speak.

I walked over.

People came and went around us. The clamor from the wedding venue drifted over from far away, like the lingering echo of another world.

Shen Jianwei asked, “Is it over?”

I said, “Shen Mingche is gone. Xu Lingyi will be taken away.”

He closed his eyes, his expression complicated. It was not simple relief, nor was it simple grief. It was the look of someone who had finally stepped out of a cage, only to discover rust staining his own hands.

After a long time, he said, “I’m sorry.”

I said, “You’ve already said that.”

“I know it’s not enough.”

“It really isn’t.”

He opened his eyes and looked at me. There was a sheen of tears in them, but he did not beg for my forgiveness.

“Mianmian, I’ll tell the police everything I know. The Shen Family’s old files, the records of my mother’s contact with Mr. Liu, and the backup of the recording I heard three months ago-I’ll hand all of it over.”

I nodded.

“Good.”

Before the stretcher was pushed away, he suddenly asked in a low voice, “What does that make our wedding?”

I thought about it.

“Evidence.”

He could not say another word.