Maybe it bothered him that someone with Xingyu’s face didn’t like him. Maybe it bothered him more than it should. Maybe he was okay with distrusting someone with Xingyu’s face but not okay with the other way around because—because of the way everything had gone with Xingyu, probably. They started off as friends. Xingyu was friendly and nice and warm. He told Weiran about who his parents were—what his parents had done—and then he’d waited. He waited until Weiran came back to him and told him that he trusted him still, or trusted him again. It didn’t matter which.

But Xiaokai.

Liu Xiaokai was just as blunt to Weiran as Weiran was to him. He was probably worse when it was just him and Weiran, actually. Blunt enough to make fun of Weiran for his feelings for Xingyu. Shameless enough to joke about coming onto him.

Weiran tried to just focus on his work.

He had minimal contact with the outside world. Neither Xingyu nor Xiaokai contacted him unless it was to tell him news or updates, usually vague—“Check news channel 5” where there was a report on some tycoon or something like “meet @ 3.” If anyone got access to their messages, there wouldn’t be much to determine from them. Nothing incriminatory, certainly. Thankfully the hotel that Xiaokai was paying for had an incredible internet connection that was both private and fast, so Weiran could work as much as he pleased or distract himself as much as he pleased, though this latter one was less common now that he actually had something to do.

He missed Xingyu.

Hell, as Saturday came to an end and the only faces Weiran had seen were in articles about the people responsible for his parents’ deaths, or in the mirror—the face of the person who was responsible for getting revenge for those deaths—he was even starting to miss Xiaokai a little bit. The guy was infuriating on a lot of levels, but it wasn’t like he hated him anymore. He disliked him quite a bit; he resented him for how he’d treated Xingyu, but after learning about his past—

How could he hate him after that?

It was just…damn. Xiaokai didn’t go into very much detail, but what he had admitted, in that light, easy voice, was starting to keep Weiran up at night.

Sixteen?

And that was just the first appointment! The idea that all of this had started when Xiaokai was a child—that it had been decided before he was even born—horrified Weiran. It disgusted him. And maybe the worst part of it all was that Xiaokai seemed totally fine with all of it. None of it seemed to bother him at all. He didn’t even care whether Weiran told Xingyu about the appointments, not that Weiran knew how to even begin how to start that conversation. Not that he wanted to.