When Qixian reached the police station, he immediately goes straight to the front desk, while he kept his expression neutral and polite, hiding the storm brewing beneath the surface.
"Excuse me," he began, catching the officer's attention. "Is it possible to request a visitor's meeting with someone currently in custody?"
The officer looked up from his paperwork, scanning Qixian's formal clothes. "It's possible. Who are you looking for?"
"Jun Xiang," Qixian replied, his voice measured and careful.
The officer's pen paused. He looked Qixian in the eye, his gaze turning probing. "And what is your relationship to the suspect?"
"I'm the victim from the clinic incident yesterday," Qixian lied smoothly, his tone laced with a feigned vulnerability. "I just… I need to understand why he did it. I need closure."
The officer's eyes widened in realization. "Of course! I knew you looked familiar!" He stood up immediately, his professional wall dropping into sympathy. "I'll take you to the visiting room right now. Stay here, and I'll have them bring him out." The police started to take Qixian on the visiting room and told someone to fetch Jun Xiang.
Before the officer turned the handle, he paused, his hand hovering over the lock. "I'll be right outside, but you should be careful," he warned, his eyes flicking toward the interior. "He's… unstable."
Qixian offered a silent, somber nod, his face a mask of perfect composure as the door clicked open.
A moment later, Jun Xiang was led in, his footsteps heavy and dragging. He slumped into the chair across from Qixian, his eyes bloodshot and full of venom. "What do you want?" he spat, the words rattling in his throat as he sat across Qixian.
Qixian didn't flinch. He leaned back, his gaze chilly and detached. "Still under investigation, I see? How remarkably lucky for you," he mocked, his voice dripping with a dark, refined sarcasm.
Jun Xiang let out a harsh, grating scoff. "Lucky?" he sneered, leaning forward until his face was inches from the glass. "Shouldn't you be telling yourself that? You're the one who crawled away from the clinic alive yesterday. You're the one who's cheating death for a second time."
Qixian leaned in, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous hiss. "Since we are on the topic. Tell me. Who gave you the order?"
"You really think I'd tell you?" Jun Xiang replied, a smug, crooked grin stretching across his face.
Qixian's expression darkened, his features hardening into a mask of cold fury. He stepped into the man's personal space, his presence towering and predatory. "Fine then, I'll ask you a different question. Where is she? Where is the nurse who helped me escape?"
"Oh, that Alpha?" Jun Xiang answered callously, as if he were talking about the weather. "She's dead."
Qixian froze, the air leaving his lungs in a shuddering breath.
"We buried her back at the lab," Jun Xiang continued, letting out a blood-chilling, menacing laugh. "Right where your organs were nearly shredded. Right where your pheromones almost bled out seven years ago. She's exactly where you should have been. She took your place."
Qixian's fist clenched with such violent force that his knuckles turned a ghastly white, the skin stretched tight to the breaking point.
"Oh, I almost forgot!" Jun Xiang crowed, his voice dripping with sadistic glee. "I destroyed her second gender, too. I told her if she let me strip her off of her Alpha status, I'd leave you alone. And the fool actually believed me!" He threw his head back in a rife, mocking laugh.
Qixian didn't flinch. Instead, a deadly, unnatural stillness settled over him. He slowly raised his hand, the air around him beginning to shimmer with the cloying, sickly-sweet scent of Spider Lilies.
"Should I do the same to you?" Qixian asked a rhetorical question, his voice void of emotion, like a blade hitting an ice.
Jun Xiang's laugh faltered, but he pushed back with vicious desperation. "Why the long face? It was your fault! If you hadn't run and hid like a coward, she wouldn't have had to die in your place!" He spat the words, hoping the crushing weight of guilt would break Qixian's resolve.
But Qixian only looked at him with eyes like frozen obsidian.
"Then," Qixian whispered, the toxic, lethal essence of his pheromones surging forward in a suffocating wave. "You should learn what it means to suffer before you take your last breath."
With one final, predatory look, Qixian allowed his poisonous pheromones to sink into the man's skin, leaving him to wither in the wake of the deadly lily's bloom.
Qixian's pheromones began to invade Jun Xiang's organ. "You killed my grandson, and now you're killing me?!" Jun Xiang shrieked, his voice thin with rising panic.
Qixian lunged forward, his fingers hooking into Jun Xiang's collar like iron talons. "Don't you dare pin your sins on me!" he snarled, his face inches from the older man's. "You were the one who pulled that trigger. You were the one who are so blinded by your bloodlust for me that you didn't even see your own grandson in your sights!"
Qixian shoved him back violently, sending the man sprawling onto the cold floor. "Don't blame me for something you had done. You were the one who shot him thinking it was me." He coldly said. "It was your hand on the gun, Jun Xiang. Don't blame the world just because you can't look in the mirror and see a murderer!"
Qixian turned toward the door, but stopped as he remembers something, his voice dropping to a chilling, quiet hum. "And that Alpha who helped me escape? The one you said you had killed and buried disrespectfully?" Qixian asked. "She left me with a secret. One that left me so speechless."
He glanced back over his shoulder, his eyes devoid of pity. "Her name was Bo Wenxian. You know her, don't you?"
Jun Xiang's breath hitched. "How did you know that name?!" Jun Xiang trembled, surprised to hear the name. "That name..."
"Was your daughter's." Qixian continued.
"No...no...no!" Jun Xiang repeatedly tried to deny. "Don't you dare lie to me!" Jun Xiang refused to believe Qixian's words.
"She even told me that she couldn't reconcile with the man who raised her, because she couldn't believe that the man standing before her is so different, because the man she saw is now a monster standing in that lab, she told me she couldn't recognize the person who raised her. That is why she chose to stay silent, she chose not to tell you, and only stayed to protect her son—to get him away from you. But I guess your hunger for death is stronger than your love for your own flesh and blood. That you even killed both of them. And I don't even think they'll ever wanted to see you in the afterlife."
With those final, poisonous words, Qixian stepped out and closed the door.
Behind him, the silence was shattered by a scream. Jun Xiang began to wail like a wounded animal, a chorus of "I'm sorry" and "I didn't mean it" echoing off the walls. But the damage was absolute. Time couldn't be reversed, and the dead stayed dead.
Qixian didn't slow his pace, his footsteps echoing with a hollow, rhythmic finality through the police station hallway. His thoughts keeps repeating the same sentence, 'I'm sorry I couldn't remember you sooner, my older sister.'
Behind him, the sound of Jun Xiang scrambling to his feet was frantic. The man threw himself forward, skidding across the linoleum until he was kneeling in Qixian's path, his fingers clawing at the air.
"I'll tell you! I'll tell you everything!" Jun Xiang shrieked, his face a mask of desperation. "The order—it came from the Zhou family! I don't have a name, I swear! We were just tools working for someone deep under the shadows of the Zhou family!"
The officers moved in, their hands grappling with his shoulders to drag him back toward his cell, but Jun Xiang fought them, his eyes locked on Qixian's retreating back.
"Please!" he wailed, his voice cracking with a father's belated grief. "Just… bury my daughter somewhere better! Give her a real grave! Please!"
Qixian didn't stop. He didn't even look back as the man's pathetic pleas were swallowed by the closing heavy metal doors. Because he knew himself that without Jun Xiang telling him that, he would still do it.