By the time lunch was finished and Wang Chengli had driven him back to the mansion, Guiying’s anger had cooled to something more manageable.

Not gone.

Just filed away in the particular compartment he reserved for things he intended to revisit at a more convenient time.

He sat in the back of the car and looked out the window.

He wondered how the Xue household was doing.

By now they would have noticed his phone was unreachable. His father would have tried the direct line, then the family group chat, then sent his half brothers to check his room. His stepmother would have escalated quickly, she always did when things did not go according to her plan.

And Shen Zihao would have come and gone by now, leaving whatever damage his presence always left behind.

He hoped they were having a terrible day.

He was fairly certain they were.

***************

The Xue family study had not seen this much chaos since the last time a business deal had collapsed entirely.

Xue Deyong sat behind his desk looking like a man who had aged ten years since yesterday morning. Across from him Zhou Meilan was pacing, which she only did when she was too angry to sit still and too aware of her surroundings to scream.

Xue Jiaming was on his phone in the corner, his third call in the last twenty minutes, each one more fruitless than the last. Xue Bowen sat in the chair by the window looking like he would very much like to be somewhere else entirely.

"Still nothing?" Xue Deyong asked.

Xue Bowen shook his head. "Number is dead. Not switched off. Dead. Sim is gone."

Zhou Meilan stopped pacing.

"He removed his sim," she said.

"Yes."

She laughed, a short and ugly sound. "That little rat. That ungrateful, conniving little rat." She turned on her husband, and whatever was in her expression made him lean back slightly in his chair. "I told you. I told you for years that you were too soft with that thing and you never listened. Look at us now. Look at what your softness has produced. Shen Zihao sat in our sitting room this morning and looked at you like you were incompetent and you know what? He was right!"

"Meilan—"

"Do not Meilan me!" Her voice cracked upward. "That illegitimate little wretch has embarrassed this family in front of the Shen family and you are sitting there like you have all the time in the world! He planned this! He did not just run, he planned it, he removed his sim, he cleared his documents, he is somewhere right now completely unreachable and laughing at us!"

"We don’t know that he—"

"His savings account has not been touched!" she snapped. "The one you so generously set up for him. He did not even need it. He had money somewhere else. Money we knew nothing about." She pointed a finger at her husband. "Your son, your blood, your mistake, has been planning this right under our noses and you had no idea. Neither did I." The last part came out like it physically pained her to admit. "Find him. I do not care what it costs, I do not care who you have to humiliate yourself in front of, find him and drag him back here before Shen Zihao walks away from this arrangement entirely and takes everything with him."

Xue Deyong said nothing.

"Do you understand what we stand to lose?" Her voice dropped to something low and dangerous. "Do you have any idea what Shen Zihao’s backing means for this family? And you are going to let that worthless little Omega throw it away because you never once put him in his place properly?" She stepped toward the desk. "Fix it. Now."

Xue Jiaming lowered his phone from his ear. "No one has seen him. None of his old classmates, none of the household contacts. It is like he disappeared into thin air."

"People do not disappear into thin air!" Zhou Meilan slammed her hand on the desk. "He is twenty three years old, where would he even go?! He has no friends, no family outside of this house, no connections worth anything! Someone is helping him. Someone has to be helping him."

Xue Bowen looked at his phone quietly.

He had a feeling, uncomfortable and growing, that whoever was helping Xue Guiying was not the kind of person this family was going to enjoy finding.

He kept that thought to himself. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

By the time Wang Chengli pulled up to the mansion Guiying was ready to be horizontal.

He went straight upstairs, peeled off the disguise layer by layer, and stepped into the shower. The blonde wig went back onto its stand. The makeup came off with cleanser and warm water, his own face reappearing in the mirror by degrees until Xue Guiying was looking back at him again instead of the unremarkable blonde stranger he had been all morning.

He dried off, changed into his indoor clothes, and stood in front of the mirror working the towel through his hair.

Then he remembered.

The suppressants.

He had thought about them yesterday morning, filed it away as urgent, and then proceeded to spend the rest of the day meeting an informant, visiting a corporate office, getting tricked into a kiss, and acquiring ten million yuan.

The suppressants had not made it into a single cart.

He could feel the early warmth of his heat still sitting at the edges of his awareness, not urgent yet but present. Patient in the way that things were patient when they knew they were coming regardless.

He really hoped this was not going to come back and bite him.

He sighed, tossed the towel over the back of the chair, and flopped face down onto the bed.

No Liuxian. No Zhang Wei. No Wang Chengli appearing at the doorway with something that needed his attention. Just the bed, which was genuinely the most comfortable thing he had ever laid down on, and the quiet of the afternoon, and absolutely nothing he needed to do for the next hour.

He closed his eyes.

Sleep came quickly, the deep and easy kind that had been finding him more readily since he arrived in this house, as though his body had decided that this was finally somewhere it was allowed to rest properly.

He did not know how long he had been asleep when it changed.