“Liu Baiyan and Sun Yue called him in after they found out that I lied about the Liu Xingyu imposter. That week that they—I imagine—kept telling you that I was on a business trip, he was holding me at one of the List’s free-use estates and interrogating me to find out whether I was a traitor. Don’t worry.” Xiaokai gave his older brother a sardonic smile. “I didn’t give up any names.”

Weiran was suddenly reminded of that conversation they’d had early on in their arrangement with Xiaokai—his clueless, anxious question; Xiaokai’s flat answer: We can handle whatever they give us. He didn’t know how many more times he would have to mess up before he finally learned how to stop hurting Xiaokai.

Xingyu looked like he’d just been shot, or perhaps like he’d seen a ghost. “What do you mean by interrogation?”

Xiaokai just looked at him. Xingyu, if it was possible, got even paler. This was the only way he ever genuinely showed interactions to anything—if it was Xiaokai. And Xiaokai, of course, had a lot of secrets that would cause emotional reactions in even the most disconnected of people.

“I’m going to kill him.”

Xiaokai made a face. “Is that really going to be your solution to everything?”

“I’m going to kill anyone who ever laid a hand on you.”

Weiran and Xiaokai looked at each other.

“What?” said Xingyu. “What now? Weiran.”

Weiran looked at his hands.

“Weiran, what the hell have you been keeping from me?”

As if Weiran was the only one keeping this secret. As if he had been keeping it for himself. As if it hadn’t been eating him from the inside from the moment Xiaokai had opened the bathroom door and Weiran had seen him in that robe. As if seeing him after the interrogation hadn’t made him stay up all night, desperately holding back tears and miserably failing. “It’s not for me to say,” he said. “I told him that it was his secret to tell.”

Xiaokai rolled his eyes. “It isn’t a secret,” he said.

“What isn’t a secret?”

Xiaokai laid it all out for Xingyu just as slowly and carelessly and flippantly as he had for Weiran. He told him about the clients, about the appointments, about the lessons. He didn’t tell him about what the clients were really doing to him in these appointments until Xingyu quietly said, “What did these appointments entail?” and he had to lay all of that out as well. All the while, Xingyu just sank further into his seat, his face growing paler and paler, his complexion ashen, his expression lurching sporadically. When Xiaokai finished, he didn’t speak for a long time. He steepled his hands in front of his mouth, closed his eyes for a long moment, and then let out his breath.