"How can you sit there and tell me that pain means nothing to you?"

Guiying looked at him.

And something shifted.

Something that had been sitting quietly underneath the composure, underneath the calm and the strategy and the careful, methodical construction of a new life, came loose.

"Because of who I am, Liuxian," he said. His voice was still even. "Look at who I am. I’m nobody. An illegitimate child. Trash, by the accounting of the family I was born into." He turned back to the window. "You don’t know me well enough to judge what I think or feel or say."

"Guiying—"

"Twenty three years of being an illegitimate child teaches you a lot of things." Guiying continued, his voice quiet and entirely without self pity, which somehow made it worse.

"My family hates me. My father is disgusted by my existence. Me being alive brings him shame. My stepmother despises me. My brothers see me as a burden that should have been dealt with before it became their problem." He paused.

"I have been flogged. Burned. Pushed down the stairs more times than I can count. I have been assaulted in ways that I will not describe in a moving vehicle." He looked at his hands in his lap. "I know pain, Liuxian. I have eaten it for breakfast my entire life. Two slaps from a grieving old couple is not going to move me."

The car was very quiet.

Zhang Wei had found something extremely interesting to look at approximately two meters ahead of the car at all times.

"I have never been loved," Guiying said, and his voice was still even, still controlled, which was the most devastating thing about it. "I have never been cared for in any way that wasn’t conditional or transactional or designed to get something out of me. My whole life I have been in survival mode. I don’t know how to be anything else."

He paused.

"What you did today," he said, quieter now.

"Standing there and saying what you said to those people." He stopped. "No one has ever gotten angry on my behalf because I was hurt. No one has ever shown up like that for me. It made me feel—"

He stopped again.

"It made me feel like I mattered to someone," he said. "And I know that’s pathetic. I know that. But it’s the truth."

Liuxian had not moved.

He was watching him with an expression that Guiying could not look at directly.

"But you need to understand something," Guiying said. His voice had steadied again, pulling itself back from the edge it had been approaching. "I know you don’t love me. I understand what this is. I am something that piqued your interest. Something that entertains you. Something you’re possessive about the way you’re possessive about things that belong to you."

He turned to look out the window again. "But your possessiveness suffocates me sometimes. When an Alpha approaches me and I’ve done nothing to invite it, you get angry. I get hurt and instead of just being there you redirect that anger and suddenly I’m the one managing your feelings about something that happened to my face."

He exhaled. "I’m not as weak as I look. I have survived things that would have broken most people twice over. You don’t need to treat me like something that shatters. I’m not made of glass, I won’t break."

He looked at his reflection in the dark window glass.

"You’re ten years older than me," he said. "I’m wired to respect that. I do respect that. But I’m not going to pretend that everything is fine when it isn’t, just because you’re older, richer and more powerful than I am."

These were the last things he wanted to say and hoped Liuxian would not take it to heart and even if he did. He wasn’t going to take what he said back.

Guiying sat in the silence they left behind and felt, immediately and with great clarity, that he had said more than he meant to and could not take any of it back.

The car slowed.

Liuxian had reached forward and touched Zhang Wei’s shoulder. Zhang Wei pulled over without a word, put the car in park, and got out.

They were parked on a quiet street somewhere close to home, and the city moved around them like it always did, indifferent and unhurried.

Liuxian turned in his seat to face him properly.

Guiying did not turn.

He looked at the window and waited for whatever was coming and tried to prepare himself for it and found he could not.

"Look at me." Liuxian said.

Guiying looked at him. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Liuxian’s expression wasn’t full of rage. It was something considerably harder to manage than anger.

Solemnity.

It was the expression of a man who had just been handed a full and honest account of another person’s interior life and was sitting with the weight of every word of it.

He opened his mouth.

Guiying looked away first.

"Don’t," he said quietly. "Not right now. Please."

A long silence.

"Okay," Liuxian said.

He reached forward and touched Zhang Wei’s shoulder through the window.

Zhang Wei got back in without comment, started the car, and pulled back onto the road.

They drove the rest of the way home without speaking.

The mansion was quiet when they arrived.

Wang Chengli opened the door.

He looked at both of them, at the silence between them, and said nothing beyond the customary greeting.

Guiying went straight upstairs.

He did not look back at the bottom of the stairs. He did not pause at the top.

He walked to his room, closed the door behind him, and sat on the edge of the bed.

He looked at his hands.

He had said too much.

He knew that.

He had opened a door that had been closed for a reason, and now everything he said, he couldn’t take them back.

He pressed his hands flat against his knees and breathed.

He did not regret the truth of it.

He only regretted that it had come out now, like that.

Downstairs, he heard Liuxian’s footsteps cross the entrance hall.

Then the sound of his own door, further down the corridor, opening and closing.

Separate rooms.

Guiying looked at the wall between them.

Then he lay down on the bed, fully dressed, and stared at the ceiling, and did not sleep for a very long time.