The bartender watched him come in, a little open-mouthed—she’d not seen him come here before. There was a reason for that, something Liu Xiaokai had explained again and again on his television interviews, just as he’d explained all of the above: he’d long since abandoned the desire to “have fun” as fu’erdai youth; it was well within his capabilities and well within what society would accept for him to just mess around a bit, hang out with the other fu’erdai, drink until he regretted it, enjoy a few hook-ups—but Liu Xiaokai was looking toward the future. He was the heir, he explained. He didn’t want to become the beloved king and then have to deal with some social media post gossiping about his wild days. He especially didn’t want any of the people he would have this “fun” with revealing his embarrassing secrets as soon as they saw fit. No, he decided, he would have no embarrassing secrets. He would be perfect.

He didn’t order a drink. He bypassed the bar entirely, moving right into one of the more public seating rooms and dropping daintily into the cushioned seat, his ankles folding over each other, his hands settling in his lap. Even his posture was perfect, and his gaze was steady, moving slowly across the contents of what the window before him revealed. Liu Baiyan, the president of the company and his father, had given him an order early today, which he rarely did as Xiaokai got older: go to the airport and pick someone up. Xiaokai hadn’t complained then, of course, and even now as he was sitting and waiting instead of doing more important things—he had to reschedule a meeting with another company for this, which would have finalized a big real-estate project on the eastern border of the city—he would never admit that he found the president’s order, in any way, inconvenient. It was only deep down that he thought this whole thing unnecessary—the company had drivers, and a lot of them too, and even if the trustworthy ones were all busy, the airport had chauffeurs, all of whom the president had personally checked. He did allow himself to consciously wonder who he was picking up. On some occasions he came to pick up his father or his mother, and more rarely he would come to meet a business partner to show them around the city. His parents were both in the city already, so it couldn’t be them. And he wasn’t aware of any business partners flying in—if it was a business partner, he would already know about it, and he prepared for it. He always spent the night before a meeting reviewing notes about each partner so he wouldn’t say anything unsavory.