Chapter 35: I WILL MAKE SURE YOU SPEND A VERY LONG TIME LOCKED UP

Liuxian was standing in the balcony doorway.

He had not raised his voice. He had not moved from the doorway. But his pheromones had filled the balcony in the space of a breath, dominant, cold and entirely controlled, the kind of pheromone output that did not ask anything of the room but simply informed it of the facts.

Shen Zihao’s hand stopped.

He turned slowly to look at Liuxian.

The two men looked at each other across the balcony, and the air between them was the particular air of two people who had just established, without a single unnecessary word, exactly where they stood.

Liuxian’s eyes moved from Shen Zihao to Guiying. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

"Come here," he said quietly.

Guiying walked across the balcony toward him, the Louboutins steady and unhurried against the stone, and when he reached Liuxian’s side Liuxian’s hand came to rest at the small of his back with the calm, settled certainty of someone placing something back where it belonged.

Then he looked at Shen Zihao.

The pleasantness was gone from Liuxian’s face entirely.

What remained was something considerably quieter and considerably more dangerous, the expression of a man who had assessed the situation completely and had already decided every step of what came next if the wrong choice was made.

"I am going to say this once," Liuxian said. His voice was low and completely even. "I know everything about you, Shen Zihao. Every case your family has buried. Every person who signed an NDA because they had no other choice. Every judge that was paid, every officer that looked away."

He looked at him with the cold, unhurried certainty of someone holding a fully loaded gun and in no rush to release the trigger. "Touch him. Give me one reason. I have been patient long enough."

He let that sit for a moment.

"And when I am done with you," he said quietly, "I will make sure you spend a very long time locked up. With nothing left of everything you think protects you."

He held Shen Zihao’s gaze for exactly three seconds.

Then he turned his hand to the small of Guiying’s back, and walked them both inside.

The glass door closed behind them.

Liuxian walked them out of the ballroom without stopping, his hand at the small of Guiying’s back, his expression carrying the particular stillness of someone containing something that had not yet decided what form it wanted to take.

Guiying walked beside him and said nothing.

He knew this silence. He had seen enough versions of it in enough people to recognize what lived underneath it. Liuxian was angry. Not the cold, measured anger he had shown on the balcony, but something more personal than that, turned inward, working through itself.

Guiying hoped, quietly and without much conviction, that he was not going to be blamed for what had happened.

It was not his fault. He knew that. He had done nothing wrong. But knowing that and being certain of how someone else would receive it were two different things, and he had spent enough years in a household where fault found him regardless of where it actually lived to carry the reflex whether he wanted to or not.

Zhang Wei was already waiting at the entrance with the car pulled up, reading the atmosphere with the efficient accuracy of someone who had worked for Liuxian long enough to know what that expression meant.

Liuxian opened the rear door himself, waited for Guiying to get in, and got in after him.

"Take us home," he said. "And be deaf for the next thirty minutes."

Zhang Wei nodded, started the car, and became very interested in the road ahead.

Guiying opened his mouth.

Liuxian reached over and pulled him into his arms before a single word came out, the motion firm and immediate, his face pressing into Guiying’s hair.

"You reek of his pheromones," he said. His voice was low and tightly controlled. "You are my wife. You can only smell of me." A pause. "I am so angry right now. How dare someone look at you like that. How dare he." Another pause, quieter this time, something underneath the anger that was not entirely rational. "It is my fault. I should not have let you go out there alone. I should never have let them see you."

The pheromones came with it.

They filled the car rapidly, dominant and dense and entirely uncontrolled in the way that Liuxian’s pheromones never were, the weight of them pressing against the air until the car felt half the size it had been a moment ago. Guiying felt it in his chest first, then behind his eyes, the particular physical response of an Omega body to an Alpha’s unchecked output, his suppressants working but not working fast enough against this volume.

"Liuxian," he said.

Liuxian did not respond.

"Liuxian." He pressed a hand flat against his chest and pushed back enough to look at him. "You are making this uncomfortable. I cannot breathe properly with your pheromones doing that." He held his gaze. "I am sorry that another Alpha’s pheromones got on me."

"Do not apologize," Liuxian said immediately, his expression shifting. "You did nothing wrong. He approached you. He was the one coveting what is mine."

Guiying looked at him.

He felt it then, the particular discomfort that settled in him whenever the possessiveness came out, the instinctive resistance to being claimed in that specific way, the ownership of it. Being called a rose. Being referred to as something to be coveted and protected and kept. He understood where it came from.

But he did not entirely like what it did to the air between them.

He had a lot of things to say about it.

He decided not to say them. Not tonight. Not in a car with Zhang Wei being professionally deaf in the front seat.

"Keep your pheromones in line," he said instead, "before I smack you in the head." He turned to the front. "Zhang Wei, open the windows please. I feel like I am going to suffocate."

"Of course," Zhang Wei said immediately, and every window in the car dropped simultaneously.