“I never wanted any of it for him.” Sun Yue’s voice was painfully soft and weaker than Weiran could have ever imagined it in his wildest dreams. “I loved him. I loved both of them. But if you’re born into my family, or if you’re born into the Liu family, you don’t have a choice in these things. If I had tried to escape too early, if I had treated him or Xiao-yu any differently than I was supposed to, we would have been punished for it.”

“Do you really think any punishment could have been worse than what Xiaokai had to experience?”

Sun Yue looked like something in her chest was shattering.

“He’s hurt him twice now like this, Sun Yue. I know you don’t want that to happen ever again.”

“Xingyu is—”

“He’s getting changed. He needs to know too. Which location is it?”

“If he’s waiting for you, if he has a plan—”

“Which location, Sun Yue?”

She shut her eyes tight. “He’s never liked the sea,” she said. “He thought it was too open, too exposed. Anything on the sea is visible by plane. It wasn’t a viable means for escape.”

Weiran was already standing up, but Sun Yue was adding something else—her voice faster than normal, desperate, almost a whine—

“Can you talk to him? Ask him if it’s alright for me to—for me to talk to him, apologize—”

Weiran wanted to smack her across the face.

“I just—I can’t bring myself to go out there and see his condition. Or his face.”

“I’ll see what he wants to do,” Weiran said, but he knew damn well he wasn’t going to say a word to Xiaokai.

HE WASN’T SURE what it would feel like. When he’d heard that Xingyu killed Liu Baiyan, he’d thought that he would see a sort of fundamental, undeniable change in his friend—he would see it in his eyes, a switch would be flipped, he wouldn’t be able to see Xingyu as anything but a killer after that, and Xingyu wouldn’t be able to exist as anything but a killer after that. But of course Xingyu had killed before, and killing Liu Baiyan was something he’d wanted to do for years anyway, and so there wasn’t any change that Weiran could really see other than Xingyu’s mask slipping down a little further. He wasn’t a good point of comparison.

So what about Weiran?