Pei Yan left while the sky was still dark.
She left behind a single line—“I’m going to see an old friend. I’ll be back before noon”—and hurried out of The Curio House without even having breakfast.
Through the surveillance feed, Xie Qingqiu watched her figure disappear into the thin mist at the end of the alley. Only after that familiar, lean, upright silhouette had vanished completely did she slowly withdraw her gaze and lower her eyes to the silver suppressor ring around her wrist.
This was the longest Pei Yan had ever been away from the basement.
Xie Qingqiu’s heartbeat quickened against her will.
She remembered last night’s confrontation. When she had said, “I didn’t ask you to do this,” the guilt in her tone had been so obvious that even she had noticed it. And Pei Yan’s reply—“It has nothing to do with your cooperation. It only has to do with my own decision”—had been like a fine needle, piercing precisely into a softness buried in her heart that she refused to acknowledge.
She hated this feeling. She hated being so decisively “chosen” to stay by someone else, while not even being able to find solid ground from which to argue back.
If she could still be called the Xie Qingqiu who had once carved her own path through a hail of bullets, then this was the moment when she ought to make a choice.
She rose and walked to the control panel of the glass room.
During these past few days, while Pei Yan changed her medication and explained the shop’s various security measures, Xie Qingqiu had never been idle. Though the silver ring restrained her hands, her eyes had constantly watched from the shadows, studying the rhythm of every password entry and memorizing where Pei Yan’s fingers landed on the panel and how long they paused.
Her memory had always been excellent. It was one of the reasons she had managed to survive three months on the run.
She drew a deep breath and, relying on memory, reconstructed the password one digit at a time.
The panel lit up with a barely audible hiss of compressed air.
The door opened.
Xie Qingqiu stood frozen in place, hardly daring to believe that she had actually succeeded.
Her palms were slick with sweat, and her heart pounded so hard it seemed ready to burst through her chest. Yet the exhilaration of escape was nowhere near as pure as she had imagined. Something bordering on absurd, mixed with guilt and unease, quietly seeped into it.
She viciously cast the thought aside. This was the freedom she deserved. She owed no one an explanation.
She strode out of the secret room and crossed the front hall, crowded with dolls and antiques. Those glass eyes stared at her in perfect unison, as though silently witnessing her escape.
Behind the bookshelves, she felt around until she found the passageway Pei Yan had mentioned. She hurried through the damp, gloomy underground tunnels and finally pushed open the manhole cover leading to the surface before full daylight arrived.
The air outside was bone-chilling, carrying the dampness peculiar to early morning. Xie Qingqiu stood in the shadow of the peeling walls of an abandoned warehouse and gulped down this long-lost air of “freedom,” dazed for a moment by the sensation.
During her three months on the run, she had never stayed anywhere for more than three days. Yet now, she had spent nearly two full weeks in Pei Yan’s basement.
That unusual “stability” had once made her mistakenly believe she had found somewhere to catch her breath. But only now, stepping once more into this wide-open world that belonged to her alone, did she belatedly realize how deeply she had been tamed during that time.
Even running away itself had begun to feel like a “necessary act” she had to persuade herself to undertake, rather than the instinctive struggle for survival it had once been.
She couldn’t go on like this.
Following the direction of the old station in her memory, she hurried along the base of the walls, doing her best to avoid intersections thick with surveillance. The city had not yet fully awakened, and there were few pedestrians on the streets. Though her injuries kept her stride from opening fully, her movements still carried the near-instinctive vigilance unique to prey.
When she turned the third corner, a sudden sense of wrongness swept over her.
Xie Qingqiu stopped dead, every hair on her body standing on end. At the mouth of the alley ahead, a familiar black van was pulling to a slow stop. Though it had no license plate on its side, its outline and wear marks were nearly identical to those of the van parked outside Pei Yan’s shop five days ago.
Her heart sank.
She swiftly retreated into the shadows at the corner and held her breath as she watched the doors slide open. Several men in plainclothes climbed out one after another. Their movements were unusually sharp, and each man discreetly pressed a hand against the bulge at his waist—the posture of someone carrying a weapon.
The man in the lead was the same one who had come by several days earlier under the pretense of a “routine inspection.”
“Search separately according to the original plan.” His voice was lowered nearly to a murmur, yet the silence of early morning carried it clearly into Xie Qingqiu’s ears. “The higher-ups said there’s no need to put on another show of ‘registration reinspection.’ The target is probably hiding somewhere within these few blocks. If you see her, subdue her first, then verify her identity.”
Xie Qingqiu’s blood nearly froze in her veins.
At last, she understood how foolish the exhilaration she had felt at escaping really was. So Pei Yan’s security measures and cover had not been excessive caution or needless trouble. This city had long since woven a vast net from which she could never have broken free alone.
She forced down the panic surging toward her eyes and backed away step by step along the wall, trying to circle around the alley. But the instant she turned, a sharp whistle suddenly sounded not far behind her—a warning signal exchanged between partners.
“Over there!”
Xie Qingqiu had no time to think. She bolted.
Her injuries had not yet healed. The old wound in her shoulder throbbed with every violent stride, nearly blacking out her vision. Behind her, footsteps drew closer and closer, mixed with rough shouts and the metallic clatter of equipment colliding.
She darted into a narrow alley and vaulted a low wall. Her shoe slipped, and she crashed heavily onto the gravel-strewn ground. A piercing pain shot through her palms and knees.
She gritted her teeth and pulled herself up. Her pheromones stirred restlessly under the extremes of fear and exhilaration, that familiar scent of rust and ice nearly flaring out of control.
She bit down hard on her lower lip and forcibly suppressed the scent that was about to break loose. If she exposed her pheromone signature now, it would be no different from courting death.
She had no idea how long she wandered through the tangled alleys. Only when the footsteps of the pursuers gradually faded did she finally dare to stop, leaning against a mottled brick wall and gasping for breath.
Cold sweat soaked through her clothes. She lowered her head to look at her scraped and battered hands, then remembered the man’s words—“If you see her, subdue her first.” Belated terror surged through her, nearly making her legs give out.
She realized that her lucky escape had not only nearly sent her straight back to a dead end, but might also have inadvertently exposed the movement patterns around Pei Yan’s antique shop. If she were captured today, following the trail back, all of Pei Yan’s painstaking arrangements over these days could be destroyed overnight.
The thought tightened her chest. She could not tell whether it was regret or something else.
She forced herself upright, found her bearings again, and made her disheveled way back through the shadows to the underground tunnel connected to the warehouse.
When she finally pushed open the manhole cover and crawled back into the familiar passage, exhaustion had hollowed out her entire body, and fresh blood had already seeped through the wound in her shoulder.
She staggered through the passage and pushed open the hidden door behind the bookshelves. She nearly stumbled headlong into the familiar light outside the glass room—then froze abruptly.
Pei Yan was already back. She stood at the entrance to the secret room, her expression filled with a grave coldness Xie Qingqiu had never seen before.
“You went outside.” Her voice was very soft, devoid of any discernible emotion, yet it made Xie Qingqiu go rigid.
“...Yeah.” Xie Qingqiu panted, unable to think of how to defend herself. She simply lifted her chin and assumed an utterly unyielding posture. “It was my choice. I don’t have to explain myself to you.”
Pei Yan’s gaze slowly swept over her battered appearance—the scraped palms, the bleeding shoulder wound, the clothes covered in dust.
Emotion churned in Pei Yan’s deep-set eyes, almost impossible to conceal.
“The Northern District Dispatch Unit has already expanded the search radius to three blocks out.” She spoke one word at a time, her tone controlled to the extreme. “Do you know what you nearly sacrificed by going out this time?”
Xie Qingqiu opened her mouth. The words I know caught in her throat and ultimately never came out.
“I know what I’m doing.” She turned her face away, her tone still stubborn. “I have no obligation to stay trapped in your glass room forever and let you decide whether I stay or go.”
Pei Yan looked at her in silence. That silence unsettled Xie Qingqiu more than any reprimand could have.
After a long while, she finally spoke, her voice hoarse. “Think whatever you want about my motives.”
She continued, “But next time, if you still want to test the password to this door, at least think first about whether your life is worth gambling for a moment of wounded pride.”
She turned toward the medicine cabinet, moving with a forcefulness she made no attempt to hide. Clearly, she was suppressing some emotion that had yet to settle.
Xie Qingqiu remained where she was, watching her rigid back. For a moment, she could not tell whether the turmoil inside her was anger at having her disguise exposed or some other sourness, like the aftershock of surviving disaster, that she was unwilling even to examine.
Outside the window, daylight had fully arrived. Yet inside this glass room that never saw the sky, the icy tension remained drawn tight, not dissipating in the slightest.
Pei Yan carried the medicine cabinet over. Her movements were more forceful than usual, as if she were desperately suppressing an emotion on the verge of breaking through.
She crouched and seized Xie Qingqiu’s scraped palm without a word. The disinfectant-soaked cotton in her fingers scrubbed across the wound with near brutality, and Xie Qingqiu sucked in a sharp breath.
“Easy.” Xie Qingqiu frowned and tried to pull her hand back, but Pei Yan gripped it even tighter.
“If you knew how to care about yourself,” Pei Yan said without looking up, her tone carrying a rare sharpness, “you wouldn’t have used these hands to pry open a door that was never meant to belong to you.”
“You’re the one who let me see the password.” Xie Qingqiu let out a cold laugh. “You can’t blame me for that.”
Pei Yan’s hand stopped abruptly. She looked up at her, complex and unreadable emotions surging in those deep eyes—anger, lingering fear, and a trace of wavering so close to hurt that Pei Yan herself might not even have noticed it.
“It was my oversight,” she finally said quietly. The edge in her voice had receded somewhat, replaced by a cool composure bordering on self-mockery. “From now on, I’ll change the password regularly. I won’t leave you any opportunity to take advantage of it again.”
For some reason, those words left Xie Qingqiu feeling stifled.
She had thought her escape would at least earn her a dismissive “Suit yourself” from Pei Yan. Instead, it had only brought even greater caution and wariness, as though her desperate attempt, made at the risk of her life, had ultimately been futile—without even the right to shake this cage in the slightest.
“Are you really that certain I can’t get away?” she asked hoarsely.
Pei Yan finished wrapping the last loop of gauze around her hand. Her fingers paused for a moment before she slowly raised her eyes. There was not the slightest hint of mockery in her gaze, only a seriousness bordering on cruelty.
“No,” she said. “I’ve never been certain of that. If you truly set your mind to leaving, someday I won’t be able to stop you.”
Xie Qingqiu froze.
“But until that day comes...” Pei Yan rose and looked down at her, her tone carrying an unshakable certainty. “I’ll use every method I know to make you stay one more day at a time. How you hate me and how you guard against me—that’s your freedom. But Ms. Xie, if you truly want to leave, next time at least choose a moment that won’t drag both you and me into a dead end.”
Xie Qingqiu stared at her, unable to find a single retort.
She lowered her head to look at her tightly bandaged palm and remembered the terror in the alley, the suffocating fear that came after narrowly surviving. It was not only fear for her own fate. Tangled within it was a thread of concern for Pei Yan’s situation that she refused to examine too closely.
“As for what happened today...” Pei Yan closed the medicine cabinet, her tone returning to its usual calm. “I don’t intend to pursue it. But I need you to understand that the world outside this glass room is a hundred times more dangerous for you than this place. If you still want to live long enough to uncover the secrets in your own body, to live until the day those people are brought to justice, then endure it for now. There’s no shame in that.”
Xie Qingqiu did not answer. She merely turned her face away and gazed at the dim yellow floor lamp beyond the glass wall. At some point, the resolve that had once seemed so firm—that she had to leave, no matter what—had quietly cracked open, leaving a fissure even she had failed to notice.
Pei Yan turned and walked out of the secret room. The silent door slowly closed behind her.
Xie Qingqiu sat alone on the edge of the bed, staring at her bandaged hands. Suddenly, she remembered how Pei Yan had cleaned her wounds. Though those hands had been nearly rough in their force, the movements of her fingertips had remained precise, never adding the slightest unnecessary pain.
It was a tenderness so contradictory it bordered on absurd, hidden beneath anger that made no attempt to conceal itself.
She closed her eyes and forced herself to stop thinking about it. No matter how much sincerity was mixed into Pei Yan’s gravity and concern, she knew perfectly well that she could never let down her guard completely.
This glass room was still a prison in the end, and she would still be the one who would eventually push it open herself and walk out without looking back.
Only this time, when she opened her eyes again and looked toward the tightly sealed door, the thought that she would leave sooner or later sounded strangely less certain than it had before her escape.
She could not say whether it was the exhaustion of wounds that had yet to heal, or whether those hands that had gripped her wrist so tightly—rough yet precise—had left behind something in her heart that she was not yet ready to face.