Zhou Jin and Jiang Hansheng sat on a bamboo sofa, a glass coffee table before them with two disposable paper cups sitting on top, wisps of white steam curling upward.
Yu Liang’s gaze had a slightly distant quality. He lit a cigarette and began to speak, unhurried: “When I first met Zhenzhen, she had come to Huaisha alone, bringing her son to try to make a living. She was a woman with no resources — the only way she could keep herself and the child fed was to sell her body.”
“Qi Zhen was very beautiful. The moment she arrived, the girls under me lost all their business, so I went to give her trouble a few times, and that’s how we got to know each other.”
“After we got close, I gradually came to know a little about her past. The child she’d brought with her was her own — originally twins. The older one had died, leaving the younger behind. His formal name I never knew; his nickname was something like An’an, or Yan’yan — I can’t quite remember. Zhenzhen was very guarded about anyone asking after her son, because she was terrified someone would take him away from her.”
“I remember one night — it was raining — she came and knocked frantically at my door, crying, saying someone had stolen her son. She was so frantic I reached for my phone to call the police, and she snatched it right out of my hand and absolutely refused to let me. She said those people had informants inside the Public Security Bureau.”
Zhou Jin caught on the phrase immediately and cut in: “‘Those people’ — who were they?”
Yu Liang let out a bitter laugh. “There were no such people. No one wanted to take her son. She said he’d been stolen, but the truth was I found the child hidden in a cabinet in her home. My guess was that because she’d lost one son before, she’d become somewhat… unhinged when it came to watching over the other one.”
“A cabinet?”
“Yes, a cabinet.” Yu Liang paused, then said: “Qi Zhen wouldn’t let her son go to school, wouldn’t let him go outside. She kept him in the house at all times.”
Jiang Hansheng suspected the child was almost certainly Qi Yan — the one the police had searched for at great length without ever finding.
All these years, the police had been unable to establish Qi Yan’s true identity for one simple reason: there was no record of him anywhere. He was like a ghost moving through the living world. His mother had never allowed him to become a person with a place in society. Outside of Qi Zhen herself, no one could definitively prove the child had ever existed.
Yu Liang said: “The boy was well-behaved. He was kept inside day after day, and he never cried or made a fuss. He stayed home reading and watching television. He was especially fond of the piano — he taught himself to play a few pieces. Beyond that, he loved to sing. His dream was to become a great star someday. I thought at the time, a child this bright should be in school — but Qi Zhen simply wouldn’t hear of it. I asked the boy himself if he wanted to go to school, and he shook his head too, and held onto Qi Zhen saying, ‘As long as I have Mama, that’s enough’…”
Yu Liang smiled — as if moved by the child’s gentle obedience — but gradually, the smile shifted into something more unsettled.
He murmured: “Back then, Qi Zhen was always convinced there was a group of people out to steal her son from her. She didn’t dare let him stray too far. If — if Qi Zhen had a client at home, she would lock the child inside the cabinet…”
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…
A off-road vehicle made its way along a remote mountain path through the wilderness, flanked by six black cars — three ahead, three behind — encircling it like armored sentinels.
Qi Yan’s straight, prominent nose bridge sat behind a pair of dark sunglasses. He stretched one arm out of the window, letting the rushing wind pour freely through his fingers.
Qi Yan closed his eyes, drew in a long breath of fresh air, and began to whistle brightly — a nameless piano melody.
The sound of whistling echoed out along the rough and uneven road, striking a note that was jarring and strange against the surrounding silence.
His Uncle Seven sat upright beside him.
After a moment, Qi Yan asked: “Uncle Seven, do you know what it actually feels like to be locked inside a dark, sealed cabinet?”
Uncle Seven considered. “Fear. Wanting to get out?”
“Wrong.” Qi Yan shook his head, and smiled with a kind of casual ease. “You feel safe. Like an owl in the night — when you’re hidden inside, you can see and hear everything around you, but no one can see you.”
Hidden in the cabinet, he could see the vivid flash of a red skirt hem. He could hear a woman’s voice, sounds of pleasure and sounds of pain…
To watch Qi Zhen — who in his eyes was always a goddess — held and kissed by other men. Should he have felt revulsion?
No.
Not even a trace of it. What he felt was rage, and hatred — and alongside them, a secret, nameless desire stirring inside him, growing stronger and stronger.
Through the narrow gap in the cabinet door, he could watch that red-clad figure to his heart’s content.
He had come to believe it: from the very moment he was born, fate had already decreed that Qi Zhen could never leave him. It was destined. Qi Zhen could leave anyone in the world — but not him.
Qi Zhen belonged to him.
She was his, by right — and so was everything that came with her.