“There’s no advantage to overworking ourselves.” Xingyu, who had otherwise seemed like he was totally engrossed in their work, finally joined the conversation. “If we miss something because we’re too tired to pay attention, we’ll only have ourselves to blame.”

Well, that did make sense—but Weiran had also conjured up this image of the three of them working deep into the night, of falling asleep on one of their shoulders. “Fine. We can go to bed in an hour or so. Xiaokai, how long are you—”

“I won’t be gone long. Just keep going without me.”

It wasn’t that he was totally confident that Sun Yue wouldn’t say anything. After all, it wasn’t until recently that he knew where he truly stood in the List, so who’s to say he knew anything about the woman?

After a long silence after her reveal, Xiaokai had eventually mustered the courage to ask: “If that’s true, then why did you never tell me? Any of you?”

Sun Yue had replied: “We decided it would be best if you didn’t know. Liu Baiyan especially—he thought that you would be more cunning if you didn’t have the guarantee of a position, that you would be more driven, determined. Once he’d made that point, Bai Xue agreed with him. There was nothing that I could have done to change that.”

“Did you want to change it?” Xiaokai had asked, and the look Sun Yue had given him was only a heavy reminder that she had gone through the exact same things that Xiaokai did—that she’d done the training, the appointments, that she’d had to have children with the enemy; she hadn’t just needed to sleep with them. And then, after all that—after she’d lived for so long under the impression that she would finally have power and never have to bow her head to anyone ever again—she had to learn that the position would be given to her son instead.

And maybe that meant that Sun Yue would be bitter about Xiaokai. Maybe that meant she would want some form of revenge for taking that last chance at power from her. But Xiaokai understood her perhaps more than anyone else on the planet understood her, and he knew who she would feel betrayed more by—not him, but Bai Xue and Liu Baiyan. The ones who had done the taking, not the one who had done the receiving. If she truly wanted to protect the List, she would have never handed over the Files to Xiaokai, especially while someone she didn’t know was in the house. She wouldn’t hand over the Files, wait for the betrayal, and then expose Xiaokai.

He sighed and pulled out his phone. “Hey. I need you to prepare a house for me.”

“Where?”