Shen Wu was a man who kept his word. He had carried out that promise—“I won’t leave you, no matter where we are”—with astonishing thoroughness.
One moment, his strength had nearly spiraled out of control; the next, he was soothing her with such gentleness.
Her senses overloaded, Jiang Nuan could no longer tell whether she was melting or falling endlessly into an abyss.
Half-conscious, she had no idea how many times those cool lips had passed wine into her mouth.
All she knew was that the red wine slid slowly over her tongue, numb from kissing, trickled down her parched throat, and was then swept away by an even deeper kiss.
A long while passed after that.
At last, the swaying whiteness came to a stop.
She was so utterly drained that she couldn’t lift even a finger, leaving Shen Wu to clean up the mess they had made.
Warm water and his fingers alternated against her skin. She didn’t even have the strength to lift her eyelids.
Dimly, she felt that she ought to say something—“That’s enough,” perhaps, or “I can do it myself.”
But every word that struggled up to her throat was pressed back down by the overwhelming exhaustion flooding her body.
…Forget it. Half-asleep, she thought, he’d stuck to that ridiculous line of his all night. There was no way to push him away.
And, honestly… it had felt pretty good.
*
Snow was still falling outside the window.
Under the moonlight, the glow of the snow faintly outlined the disordered edge of the bed, as well as the clothes scattered across the floor.
Jiang Nuan leaned against Shen Wu’s chest. Her body was exhausted to the extreme, yet her eyes stubbornly refused to close.
There was a string in her mind that remained taut, impossible to loosen.
Shen Wu, that fox…
But it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say he had seduced her.
Physically, she had long since stopped resisting him—or any of them. That was nothing new.
But what did this count as?
…Fine. Suppose she treated it as hiring male escorts.
In theory, when you hired male escorts, you were supposed to be the one calling the shots. You could even switch between them.
But if she dared to hire anyone outside those six, she didn’t need to think very hard to know that it would be a one-way trip to the grave.
Forget it. Her life was more important.
She stared out at the snowy night with wide-awake eyes for a long time.
Shen Wu clearly knew she wasn’t asleep either. His cool fingers slipped from her shoulder, tracing the curve of her back all the way to the ends of her hair. He wound a strand around his index finger and toyed with it.
“Jiang Nuan, those things I said while we were watching the movie…”
His fingers stilled, the strand of hair still tightly wound around his finger.
“About my mother, about myself—do you think I was trying to win your sympathy?”
Jiang Nuan didn’t answer at once.
It would have been a lie to say the thought had never crossed her mind.
For a fleeting moment, she had wondered whether this man had too many schemes up his sleeve to be trusted. Could he have been deliberately putting on an act, trying to make her soften toward him?
After thinking it over, she asked in return, “Why are you asking?”
Shen Wu didn’t answer. He merely tightened his arms around her.
Slowly, Jiang Nuan turned around and studied him in the darkness diffused with snowlight.
His face, usually marked by mockery and indifference, looked somewhat pale beneath the night.
Those amber eyes, capable of seeing through every lie in the world, were fixed on her without blinking.
But Jiang Nuan knew he wasn’t reading her. Shen Wu had given his word, and she had chosen to believe him.
“If I thought you were acting, then you’d become the kind of person you despise most.”
Jiang Nuan raised her hand and gently brushed his forehead before pressing her palm to his cheek.
“That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it?”
Shen Wu was silent for a moment, then nodded.
“For a brief moment, I did think that,” Jiang Nuan answered honestly. “But the very next second, I realized that you hate hypocrisy more than anyone.”
“There’s no way you’d do something like this to me just to win my sympathy,” she said. “So no, I don’t think that.”
Shen Wu finally lifted his lowered eyes.
The amber irises reflected the snowlight outside, startlingly clear. “Thank you.”
After a pause, he asked another question.
Unlike the first, this one was not asked calmly. It sounded as though he had held it in for a long time and had only just managed to force it out.
“Will you hate me?” After asking, he let out a self-mocking laugh. “Forget it. That question isn’t fair to you. Whether you hate me or not, the outcome won’t change.”
Jiang Nuan’s hand remained against his cheek.
She could clearly feel his whole body tense for an instant when he said those words.
…A question like that.
If Lu Shiyan had been the one asking, she would have answered without hesitation: “Yes! I hate you so much I could kill you!’
That damn tyrant with his suffocating need for control. Damn Lu Shiyan!
But did she really hate Shen Wu? Did she hate Qinian, Ye Que, Jiang Ce, or Qi Sui?
It seemed… not entirely.
Then what was it she hated?
Was it the apocalypse? The supernatural abilities? This wretched world that had thrown her into it without even giving her room to catch her breath? Or…
Images flashed through her mind.
The moment she had been taken to the base and told she had no choice.
The first time she had undergone purification, biting down hard and repeatedly reminding herself that it was only a mission.
And now, when her body had already stopped resisting before her heart could catch up, while that feeling of “I’m not ready to accept this yet” still clung to her like a garment she could neither put on nor take off.
It wasn’t any one particular person she hated.
“What I hate is that, from the very beginning, I never had the right to say no.” Jiang Nuan bit her lower lip. “If I had chosen all of this myself, if I had been the one to walk into it willingly… maybe I would feel a little more at ease.”
After she said those words, the knot that had weighed on her chest for so long seemed to find an outlet, loosening by the smallest degree.
Shen Wu said nothing.
He only held her a little tighter.
The room fell silent for a long time.
So long that Jiang Nuan’s eyelids grew heavier and heavier, and she was just about to fall asleep in his arms.
Then Shen Wu’s hand slowly covered hers.
He guided her hand downward and gently placed it over his heart.
Thump. Thump.
The violent pounding traveled through his skin into her palm.
“If one day the forbidden zone is destroyed and the apocalypse comes to an end, and you return to an ordinary life with no one forcing you to do anything…”
He lowered his head and kissed her forehead.
“Would you be willing to stay by my side?”
His voice was so soft, so soft that it seemed meant only for the white snow beneath the night sky outside the window.
By the time the question drifted to her, she was already nearly asleep. She tried to open her eyes in her daze, but her eyelids refused to cooperate.
…You really picked the perfect time to ask.
But this was a question she couldn’t answer.
If she had been an ordinary girl from the start, and had met Shen Wu—or any of the others—in a peaceful era, with none of this twisted, complicated relationship between them…
They all possessed faces capable of bringing ruin to a kingdom, and they were powerful and exceptional enough that falling for them might have been the most natural thing in the world.
But now, everything had already happened.
If the world truly returned to normal someday, then she…
Jiang Nuan’s thoughts finally broke apart, and her breathing gradually steadied.
*
Shen Wu lowered his head and looked at the woman asleep in his arms.
When she slept, her lashes no longer trembled, and the crease between her brows had smoothed away. She no longer looked as tightly wound as she did when awake.
He waited a while, making sure she had fallen completely asleep.
Then he lowered his head, ever so gently.
His lips brushed her brow, the ridge of her eyebrow, and the tip of her nose before finally coming to rest on her soft lips.
It was only a light kiss, without the slightest hint of desire.
Even in her sleep, she wrinkled her nose and nuzzled toward his chest. Once she found a comfortable position, she became completely still again.
The corners of Shen Wu’s lips curved faintly as he deliberately softened his breathing.
He did not pull out the arm that had already begun to go numb. He merely shifted it slightly, letting her head tilt a little farther so that she could rest more securely.
Suddenly, he remembered how, many years ago, his mother had waited for that man’s phone call in much the same posture.
Careful and full of tenderness, as though afraid that the other person might be startled away.
Back then, he hadn’t understood.
Now he did.
