Her smile widened.
"That’s the mont everything begins to fall."
She’d just completed the sentence when a sound echoed through the study.
A cough.
Wet. Rough. Human.
Both Shuyin and Lu Yuze froze.
The sound hadn’t co from the hallway outside. It had co from inside the study itself.
Without speaking, they moved in perfect synchronization, backing toward the wall behind the door, pressing themselves into the shadows. If soone opened the door from outside, they wouldn’t be seen imdiately.
They waited.
Seconds stretched into minutes.
Shuyin’s breathing was shallow, controlled. Lu Yuze’s hand had moved to his phone, ready to call Ting Fei if needed.
But the door didn’t open.
No footsteps approached from the hallway.
The cough sounded again. Weaker this ti. Definitely from inside the study.
But there was no one else in the room.
Shuyin activated her jade eyes.
The world shifted into translucent shades of green and gold. Through the x-ray vision, she could see through the walls, through the furniture, through the very structure of the study itself.
And what she saw made her breath catch.
Behind the bookshelf on the far wall, the one that had always seed purely decorative, filled with leather-bound volus that no one ever read, there was a space.
A hidden room.
And inside it...
"There are people in there," Shuyin whispered, her voice tight with shock.
Lu Yuze looked at her sharply. "What?"
"This place has a secret compartnt," Shuyin said, moving away from the door. Her jade eyes were still active, still seeing through the wall. "And there are two people inside it. Won. They’re..."
She stopped.
Chained.
The won were chained.
"We need light," she said, her voice harder now. Urgent.
She moved to the wall switch and flipped it on.
The study flooded with light, bright, harsh, revealing.
Shuyin’s eyes swept the bookshelf, searching for the chanism. There had to be a trigger. A switch. Sothing.
Her gaze landed on a large wall lamp mounted beside the bookshelf, ornate, brass, positioned at an odd angle that didn’t quite make sense for illumination purposes.
She reached up and turned it.
*Click.*
For a mont, nothing happened.
Then.....
The bookshelf began to move.
It slid sideways with a low grinding sound, revealing a dark space behind it. A hidden room, barely six feet wide, with no windows and no ventilation except for a small grate near the ceiling.
The light from the study spilled into the darkness, illuminating what lay within.
Two won.
Huddled against the far wall.
Chained.
Shuyin’s breath stopped entirely.
She knew those faces.
The first woman was older, maybe in her late forties, though it was hard to tell. Her hair was gray and matted, hanging in clumps past her shoulders. Her clothes were torn and filthy, barely more than rags. Her skin was pale, almost translucent from years without sunlight. She was dangerously thin, her wrists like bird bones where the heavy iron manacles dug into her flesh, the skin around them raw and scarred from fifteen years of constant wear.
But her face.
Even wasted. Even destroyed.
Shuyin knew that face.
It was her mother’s face.
Original Lin Shuyin’s mother. The woman who had built the company from nothing. The woman who had supposedly died fifteen years ago in a car accident when Shuyin was just nine years old.
Except she hadn’t died.
She was here.
Alive.
Chained in a hidden room in her own husband’s study.
The second woman was younger, perhaps in her early thirties. Professional-looking, even through the gri and exhaustion. Her face was gaunt, her eyes hollow, but still sharp. Still aware. Her clothes were in slightly better condition, maybe two weeks old, maybe three. Not fifteen years.
Shuyin recognized her too.
Qiao.
The original Shuyin’s secretary. The woman who had been with her the night before the wedding. The last person she’d trusted before everything fell apart.
"Aaaahhh," Lu Yuze breathed from behind Shuyin. He’d moved to her side, staring into the hidden room with undisguised horror.
The older woman, Shuyin’s mother, raised her head slowly. The movent seed to cost her everything, as if her neck could barely support the weight. Her eyes, once bright and intelligent according to mories, were now dull and exhausted.
But when she saw Shuyin standing in the doorway, sothing flickered in them.
Recognition.
Then.....
Confusion.
Her cracked lips parted. Her voice ca out as barely more than a wheeze, destroyed by years of disuse, by screaming that no one had ever answered.
"Shuyin?"
The word was a question. Uncertain.
Because the last ti this woman had seen her daughter, Shuyin had been nine years old. Small. Fragile. With brown eyes.
And the woman standing before her now was twenty-four. Grown. Beautiful.
With jade green eyes that seed to glow in the study’s light.
"Your... your eyes..." The mother’s voice cracked completely. "Your eyes are... they’re not..."
Shuyin couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.
The original Shuyin’s mories were flooding through her, not just images, but the feelings too. Overwhelming, and devastating feelings.
The mory of being nine years old. Of her mother kissing her forehead before leaving for a business trip. "I’ll be back in three days, baby. Be good for your father."
But she hadn’t co back.
They’d said there was an accident. A car crash. The body was too burned to identify. The funeral had been a closed-casket.
And nine-year-old Shuyin had stood at that funeral holding her father’s hand, crying until she couldn’t breathe, while her father stood stone-faced and dry-eyed.
Because he’d known.
He’d known his wife wasn’t dead.
He’d known exactly where she was.
The emotions hit Shuyin like a physical blow. Grief. Rage. A desperate, childish love that the original Shuyin had never been able to let go of. Fifteen years of mourning a mother who wasn’t actually dead.
Fifteen years of being alone with the man who’d imprisoned her.
"Mother," Shuyin heard herself say, and the word ca out broken. Shattered.
Tears were streaming down her face before she’d even realized she was crying.
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