—
Yunting sat at the head of the formal sitting room and looked at Liang Boshen across the tea table and felt nothing in particular.
This was, for Yunting, a completely normal state of being.
Liang Boshen was not a man he liked. He didn't need to like him. Liking people was a personal luxury that had no place in a boardroom and this — regardless of the comfortable sofas and the white orchids and his wife's gracious smile — was a boardroom.
Numbers. Assets. Outcomes.
Simple.
Liang Boshen had money. Connections. The kind of reach that could pull a failing company back from the edge in six months.
Yunting had a daughter he'd never met who had shown up two days ago and who he had agreed, in a signed document, to deliver.Transaction complete.
He picked up his tea.
Drank.
Across from him Liang Boshen was talking — something about timelines, something about arrangements — and Yunting listened with exactly thirty percent of his attention, which was all the man deserved.The other seventy percent was running numbers in his head.
Q3 projections. The Shenzhen deal. The board meeting next week.
He had not lost one minute of sleep over any of this.
He never did.
——
Ruan Suyin sat beside her husband and smiled and poured tea and said all the right things at all the right moments and was, if she said so herself, doing an absolutely flawless job.
Liang Boshen was pleased.You could always tell with men like him — the way they sat back, the way their eyes moved around a room like they were already calculating what belonged to them.
His eyes kept going to the girl in the corner.
Ruan Suyin had positioned Yun Jiao carefully. Third seat. Slightly back. Visible but not prominent. The presentation of something valuable that wasn't being shown off — because showing off made men suspicious. You had to let them discover it themselves.
Liang Boshen had discovered it in approximately four seconds.
Good.
She refilled his tea.
Kept smiling.
Two more days and this was done.
She'd been carrying this plan for months. The careful maneuvering, the search for the biological daughter, the paperwork, the timing.
Almost there.
She just needed everything to hold together for two more days.
She glanced at Yun Jiao.
The girl was sitting with her hands in her lap looking soft and quiet and slightly overwhelmed by the formality of the room.
Ruan Suyin looked away
Good, she thought.
Stay exactly like that.
——
Yunjiao so bored.
Not visibly.
Visibly she was the picture of a well-behaved girl sitting quietly while the adults talked, hands folded, expression attentive, occasionally glancing down at her lap like she was slightly too shy for this much formal energy.
Inside she was cataloguing everything.
Liang Boshen: wider than his photographs. The suit was expensive but the fit was wrong — a man with new money who hadn't yet learned that tailoring mattered. Three rings on his right hand. A tell. Men who wore that many rings were compensating for something.
His security detail: two inside the room trying to look like they weren't security. Failing. Their eyes moved too systematically. Two more outside the door. One by the gate.
Five total.
She'd dealt with six last night.
She wasn't worried.
Yunting: sitting at the head of the arrangement drinking his tea and running numbers in his head.
She could tell because his eyes had that very specific quality of someone whose body was present and whose mind was elsewhere. He hadn't looked at her once since the meeting started.
She was a line item to him.
She had understood that before she arrived.
None of them even told her why she was there, none asked for her permission before selling her off to marry. Since they didn't ask for her opinion, she remained blissfully ignorant and a little too happy sitting there.
No one should blame her for what happens next.
_
Liang Boshen was looking at her again.
He'd been doing it every forty seconds since he sat down. Trying to be subtle about it. Not succeeding.
She kept her eyes slightly down.
Fine, Let him look.
Let him feel comfortable.
Let him think he already knew exactly what this was.
Liang Boshen put his teacup down.
"She's quiet," he said to Yunting.
Like she wasn't in the room. Like she was a piece of furniture that had been described to him as quiet and he was confirming the specification.
Yunting glanced at her briefly. "She's very well-mannered, doesn't speak unless spoken to".
Yunjiao rolled her eyes inwardly.
"Mn."
Liang Boshen looked at her directly now. "Girl. How old are you."
Not what's your name. Not nice to meet you.
How old are you.
Yun Jiao looked up.
Met his eyes.
Smiled sweetly.
"Seventeen, Mr. Liang," she said. Sweet. Clear. The voice of a girl with absolutely nothing going on behind her eyes.
He nodded slowly. Like she'd confirmed something satisfactory.
"You grew up in an orphanage," he said.
"Yes."
"Mm." He looked her over once, the way you looked over something you were considering purchasing. "That must have been difficult."
"It built character," she said.
Something moved in his expression. Mild surprise. He'd expected something more — uncertain, maybe. Apologetic.
He smiled. "Good answer."
She smiled back.
I have broken men twice your size in rooms twice as dark as this one. You are not the most dangerous thing I have ever smiled at. You are not even close.
While she thought that, she mainained her soft eyes, folded hands, the picture of a girl who was trying very hard to make a good impression.
Liang Boshen looked satisfied.
He looked back at Yunting and laughed heartily.
"She'll do, I Like her" he said.
Yunting nodded once.
Transaction confirmed.
Yun Jiao looked down at her lap.
Kept smiling.
and thought enjoy this moment, Mr. Liang.
You won't have many more of them.
——
Yunjinna was not in the formal sitting room.
She had not been invited to the formal sitting room.
Her mother had told her — gently, firmly, with that particular smile that meant the conversation was over — that it was better if she wasn't present for this meeting, she has no business there. Less complicated.
So she sat in her bedroom.
Chu Jintan was beside her on the bed, scrolling through his phone, one hand absentmindedly rubbing her shoulder.
She was staring at the wall.
"Stop thinking about it," he said without looking up.
"I'm not thinking about anything."
"You've been staring at that wall for twenty minutes."
She looked at him.
He looked up from his phone.
"The meeting is happening right now," she said. "Downstairs. My mother is sitting there handing her over to that man and in two days she'll be gone and everything goes back to normal."
"Right."
"So I should be happy."
"Are you not?"
She looked back at the wall.
Was she happy?
She should be. This was exactly what she'd wanted since the moment that girl walked up the front steps two days ago looking like that.Gone. Out of this house. Out of her life.
Handled.
"She won't go quietly," Yunjinna said.
Chu Jintan put his phone down. "What?"
"That girl." She turned to look at him. "She won't just — accept it. She's not the type."
He looked at her for a moment.Then he did something that made something cold move through her chest.
He smiled.
Not a worried smile. Not a concerned one.
A dismissive one.The kind that said: you're overthinking a small problem.
"Jinna," he said. "She's seventeen. She just came out of an orphanage. What is she going to do?"
Yunjinna looked at his face.That easy confidence.That complete, comfortable certainty.
She thought about the footage in the sitting room yesterday. The camera setup. The way that girl had sat there and taken the whole thing apart in four minutes without raising her voice.
She thought about the men who'd gone back on their deal, the recordings, the men who'd come back last night.
She thought about the way Yun Jiao had looked at Chu Jintan in the hallway this morning.
Like he was furniture.
Like he was nothing."You're right," she said.
She looked back at the wall.
She didn't mean it.