Oh. Xiaokai swore. “This was Weiran?”

“I’ll handle it,” said Xingyu again instead of answering.

“Handle it how? What kind of mess is this?”

“It was—” Xingyu seemed to be considering his words carefully. “We can probably frame it as a burglary gone wrong.”

That meant that it was violent, messy. The only kind of murder that Weiran would be able to pull off, really—nothing that had any thought put into it whatsoever. Xiaokai felt dizzy.

“I’ll do whatever needs to be done,” Xingyu continued. “Don’t make a big deal out of it.”

“You’ll do…whatever you need to do,” Xiaokai repeated. “Isn’t that exactly what Liu Baiyan would say?”

“You don’t need to resort to petty insults.”

“It isn’t petty. If your solution to the problems in your life is to continue the corruption, then we haven’t brought down the List at all. We’ve just restarted it under a different name.”

A muscle worked in Xingyu’s jaw. He said, “It isn’t like that.”

“Then stop defaulting to what he taught you.”

“What else am I supposed to do?”

“You weren’t supposed kill anyone else!”

Weiran was still hiding behind Xingyu, clutching at Xingyu’s sleeve. It seemed he’d given up after his one attempt on trying to interfere with the conversation, but Xiaokai wasn’t about to let him back out.

“And you! What the hell were you thinking?”

Weiran blinked and shrank further into Xingyu’s back.

“The only role you were supposed to have in this was to hack into their systems, gather information, and compile everything! Why the hell would you do this?”

“I—”

“And don’t say you did it for me.”

“Well…it was for you.”

Xiaokai groaned.

“I didn’t want you to get hurt again! I was so angry, I just—”

“You think I’m just going to magically never get hurt again if Bai Xue is dead?”

Weiran winced, chewed on his lip. “He hurt you the most.”