Beijing Capital International Airport was busy at three in the afternoon.

Nobody paid attention to the man walking through arrivals.

Nobody, that was, except the twelve men in black who materialized around him the moment he cleared the gate, falling into formation with the quiet efficiency of people who had done this many times and required no instruction.

Xue ShangYan walked through the airport like it was a corridor in his own house.

He was in his early forties, slight in build, with the kind of face that people remembered as gentle because that was the first thing it offered. Soft features, quiet eyes, an unhurried quality to everything he did. When he spoke, which was always deliberately and never carelessly, his voice was the kind that made people lean in without knowing they were doing it.

Xue ShangYan had a face one would remember even if they had memory loss, and a presence that was hard to miss.

Beside him, a full head taller and considerably more visible, walked his right hand man.

Tao was twenty six, broad shouldered, with the sharp features of someone who had been called pretty his whole life and had long since stopped having feelings about it either way. He was a top class Alpha and moved like one, but around ShangYan he carried himself with the particular ease of someone in the presence of the one person they trusted completely.

He was reading from his tablet as they walked.

"The board meeting is confirmed for Monday morning," he said. "Nine am. Full attendance." He scrolled. "Your father will be present. Your older brother Xue Deyong as well. Along with his two sons, Xue Jiaming and Xue Bowen."

ShangYan walked.

"Aren’t there three?" he said.

Tao glanced at him. "The youngest ran away from home. Currently no confirmed location." He scrolled again. "From what we’ve gathered the family was planning to arrange his marriage to the Shen family’s son. But the Shen heir has a known history of bipolar disorder and violent episodes, so it appears the young man saw what was coming and removed himself before it could be finalized."

ShangYan said nothing.

"He’s an illegitimate child," Tao continued, "so it’s not surprising nobody looked very hard for him. He wasn’t particularly—"

"Little Tao."

Tao stopped talking.

ShangYan had not raised his voice. He never raised his voice. But something in the quality of it had shifted, the particular shift that meant the next words were going to be important and Tao would do well to receive them properly.

"I don’t like that word.." ShangYan said. "Don’t use it again."

Tao looked at him.

Then something crossed his face, quick and quiet, the particular expression of someone who had just remembered something they should not have forgotten.

"I apologize, Uncle Yan," he said. "It won’t happen again."

ShangYan nodded once and kept walking.

Tao fell back into step beside him, tablet lowered slightly, the easy rhythm of their movement restored.

ShangYan had spent forty three years being called that word in one form or another. In whispered conversations he was not supposed to hear. In the careful silences of people who stopped talking when he entered rooms. In the particular way his father’s legitimate family had always looked at him when they thought he was not paying attention.

He had built an empire on the back of that word.

He had absolutely no patience for anyone else being reduced to it.

Especially not this particular young man.

He had learned things recently.

Significant things.

Things that had shifted his peripheral interest in the Xue family into something considerably more focused and considerably more personal.

Xue Guiying was not simply a young man who had run from an arranged marriage.

ShangYan knew what he was.

And he had no intention of letting the Xue family find him first.

"What else?" he said.

Tao lifted the tablet again.

"Dinner has been arranged at Minghe Restaurant for seven this evening. Your usual private room." He paused. "And your father has requested a private meeting before Monday’s board session."

"Decline the private meeting, I’m a problem child after all. I don’t need to be told how to behave." ShangYan said.

"And the dinner?"

"I’ll attend."

Tao noted both without comment.

They walked through the sliding doors into the afternoon, the cars already waiting at the kerb, and ShangYan stepped into the first one without breaking stride.

He had things to do before Monday.

The car pulled into traffic smoothly.

ShangYan looked out the window at the city he had not visited in eight months. Beijing was the same as it always was, loud underneath its elegance, ambitious underneath its composure. He had never particularly liked it but he understood it, which was close enough.

Tao sat across from him, tablet put away, hands folded. He knew better than to fill silences that did not need filling.

After a while ShangYan said, "Pull up what we have on Liu Liuxian’s household."

Tao reached for his tablet without question. "We have confirmed that the partner, registered publicly as Tang XiaoYu, has been residing at the Liu family estate for approximately two weeks. Background profile is clean, almost suspiciously so. An Art collector, French Chinese heritage, orphaned young, no surviving family." He paused. "Our people flagged the profile as constructed rather than organic. The details are accurate but the architecture of it suggests professional assistance."

"Liu Liuxian built it for him..." ShangYan said.

"That would be our assessment as well."

ShangYan was quiet.

"And the Xue family’s search?"

"Still running. Currently chasing a trail that has gone Harbin to Chengdu to Kunming." Tao looked up from the tablet. "Someone is moving them deliberately. Whoever is managing the misdirection is good."

ShangYan looked out the window.

Guiying had been busy.

For a young man who had spent his entire life being told he was nothing, he had managed, in the span of two weeks, to disappear completely, construct an airtight identity, marry into the most powerful family in the country, while running circles around the Xue family’s private investigator without anyone knowing his name.

ShangYan found that, quietly and without particular surprise, impressive.

"Uncle Yan," Tao said.

Something in his voice made ShangYan look at him.

Tao was looking at the tablet with an expression he rarely wore. Not concern exactly. The expression of someone who had just read something and was deciding how to deliver it.

"What is it," ShangYan said.

Tao turned the tablet around.

ShangYan looked at the screen.

He read it once.

Then he was still for a moment in the way he was only still when something had genuinely landed.

"Are you certain?" he said.

"Verified this morning..." Tao said quietly. "From three separate sources."