Weiran didn’t really know how to answer that. I want you to understand how being callous hurts the people who love you. I want you to understand that the way you view sex and these appointments and the fact that you were doing this as an actual child is not healthy. The fact that you think the only thing that is wrong about this is peoples’ reactions. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess—”

Xingyu opened the bathroom door and came out. He stood by the bathroom door for a minute, and then came back to his seat slowly and sat down.

“It’s too late to kill them all,” said Xiaokai again, because he didn’t have a sensitive bone in his body, apparently, and Xingyu shook his head.

“It isn’t too late to kill Bai Xue.”

Xiaokai rubbed his face. “No. We need to—”

“It’s the best solution.”

“No, it isn’t. You’re just upset because of the interrogation and the appointments.”

A muscle in Xingyu’s jaw jumped. “It’s not just that. If we can’t find the information to bring him down, we don’t have a choice. It’s too big of a risk to try to bring him down with insufficient information, and we don’t have any information at all.”

“If he finds out you’re even thinking about it, he’ll kill us all. He’ll kill us as soon as he finds out that we were the ones who brought down the List.”

“Then we find him sooner than he realizes what we’ve done.”

Xiaokai scoffed. “Are you that naïve? It’s never been as simple as that. How do you expect to find where he lives if we don’t know anything about him?”

“What about the location he took you to for that week?” It was honestly a little surprising that, so soon after Xingyu found out what had happened to Xiaokai, he was able to speak about such a location so calmly. But it was Xingyu, and Weiran understood by now that Xingyu had almost nothing in common with the person he pretended to be when they first met. In one moment, he was throwing up in the bathroom—in the next, he was talking about the place his younger brother got tortured in without batting an eye.

Xiaokai was shaking his head. “He won’t be there. It was just a warehouse, nothing inhabitable. Most of the locations that the List had for common use were either under Liu Baiyan’s name or Chen Jun’s name, and I can’t imagine he would trust you so fast after Liu Baiyan’s death, even if he has given you the presidency.”

“Then one of Chen Jun’s properties, then?”