In truth, she had sensed quite early on that Zhongli Jing was the same person she had encountered at Yongye Temple that day — and with that recognition came a faint psychological preparation for the possibility that he already knew her identity. But knowing was one thing; saying it aloud was quite another. The man had now made it plainly clear he had hold of her by the tail, yet she had not gotten so much as a single hair off of him.
The jianghu is a treacherous place.
Xiao Nanhui shivered inwardly and turned over, quietly praying that this person was not an adversary of Qinghuai Marquis Mansion.
And if — if he truly were an adversary?
Then kill him?
The thought surfaced, and Xiao Nanhui was startled by it herself. She was no stranger to taking lives — but outside of a battlefield, she had never directed killing intent at any particular person. The man sharing this room with her had no martial ability to speak of; his personal guard was out and had no idea when he would return. If she wanted to act now, he would likely be entirely unable to resist.
And yet — for some reason — Xiao Nanhui still felt a quiet, creeping unease.
This unease came from a person’s instinctive sense of danger. Sometimes the most harmless-looking people are the most dangerous of all.
“You need not worry. You and I are travelers on the same road — we are not adversaries.”
Zhongli Jing’s voice startled her; the man had spoken as though he could see straight through her thoughts.
She rolled herself upright from the bench in a single motion, poured a cup of water from the teapot, and used the action to cover whatever might have showed on her face. “Empty words give me nothing to trust.”
A slender hand reached out and picked up the cup she had just filled. Its owner drank the water in a single draught, then set the cup back on the table.
“You have no other choice.”
I do.
Killing you is one such choice.
Xiao Nanhui stared at the empty cup and ran her tongue across the back of her teeth. Her fingers moved of their own accord toward the underside of the table’s edge — she had hidden a dagger there when she first moved in.
Should she stake the entire Marquis Mansion on this gamble?
Just then, a faint sound came from the ceiling.
A soft thud.
The gecko that had been clinging to the beam overhead dropped without warning — landing directly on the table between the two of them.
It scrabbled in frantic confusion among the teacup and teapot for a moment, then abruptly severed a section of its own tail, and fled.
This sudden, entirely unexpected scene broke Xiao Nanhui’s train of thought. She stared in somewhat stunned silence at the still-twitching half-tail on the table — and then, to her surprise, the person sitting across from her laughed.
“You see — even a small gecko knows to cut off its tail to survive. People are the same.”
Xiao Nanhui’s tone was not friendly. “What do you mean by that?”
The smile still lingered at the corners of Zhongli Jing’s mouth, making it impossible to tell how much of what he said next was sincere and how much was performance. “Naturally I mean the matter of Zou Sifang. What else did you think?”
Xiao Nanhui said nothing.
What had she thought? She would never admit it: for one brief moment just now, though her hand had clearly been on the blade, she’d had the uncanny sensation that it was she who was the fish on the cutting board.