Chapter 16 - ​Chapter 16: The Hallucination of Betrayal

​The silence of the soundproofed vault was suddenly broken by a low hum—the internal intercom system had been hacked. A voice, distorted but recognizable as Wei Chen's, bled into the room. "Ning? Are you there? We're coming for you. Don't be afraid of him anymore." Xuan froze, his entire body turning to stone. The jealousy hit him like a physical blow, a surge of adrenaline that made his vision blur. He turned to Ning, who was looking at the speaker with wide, terrified eyes. "Did you hear that?" Xuan hissed, his voice a low, lethal growl. "He calls you 'Ning'. Not 'Miss Ning'. Not 'The Heiress'. Just 'Ning'." The extreme level of his jealousy transformed the simple address into a confirmation of an affair. "He's mocking me!" Xuan roared, lunging for the intercom and ripping it from the wall, wires sparking in the dim red light. Ning scrambled toward him, her hands outstretched. "Xuan, he's doing it on purpose! He knows you're listening! He wants you to snap!" But the misunderstanding was complete. Xuan looked at her, and for the first time, there was a flash of genuine hatred in his eyes—the kind of hatred only born from a love that has gone insane. "You're making excuses for him again," he whispered, his voice trembling with a terrifying calm. "You want me to believe it's a trick so I'll let my guard down." He grabbed her hair gently, tilting her head back to look into her weeping eyes. "Tell me the truth, Ning. Did he touch you in the hospital? When I was barred from the room, did he hold your hand?" Ning's breath hitched, her chest heaving with extreme sobs. "No! Never! I was calling for you the whole time!" But the images in Xuan's mind were too vivid to be erased by words. He saw Wei Chen leaning over her, whispering the same promises he had whispered. He saw Ning smiling back, out of a sense of "duty" that felt like a knife in Xuan's gut. "You're lying," he choked out, his own tears finally falling, hot and bitter, onto her forehead. "You're lying to save him, or to save us, or because you don't know your own heart." He pushed her away and slumped against the door, the weight of his own possessiveness crushing his lungs. "I love you so much it's making me a ghost," he whispered to the darkness. "And you're the one who killed me." Ning reached for him in the dark, her fingers brushing his sleeve, but he pulled away. The extreme level of their misunderstanding had created a chasm between them that no amount of crying or lovingness could bridge. They were two stars colliding, destined to turn into a black hole that would swallow everything they had ever built.