“Are you having insecurities now that he’s back in town? Scared that he’ll want to take over the company again?” Weiran was sure he was right, but Liu Xiaokai wasn’t reacting at all; he was just giving him that same impassive expression, like he was listening to Weiran talk about the weather.

Then Liu Xiaokai said: “I wasn’t aware you were so involved in our family’s business.”

Weiran said, proudly: “Xingyu tells me everything.”

Liu Xiaokai got an expression on his face that Weiran couldn’t read. Almost pained. “If he told you everything,” he said, “you wouldn’t be talking to me like this.”

HE KEPT THINKING about everything Liu Xiaokai had said to him as he waited to meet Xingyu. If he told you everything, you wouldn’t be talking to me like this. Did that mean that Xingyu had hidden things about himself? Did it mean that Xingyu had hidden things about Xiaokai? Or was Liu Xiaokai just full of shit? He wanted to lean toward the second option, as he’d judged Liu Xiaokai as a secretive person who never said what he really meant, and he hadn’t seen any evidence to support the contrary yet. But if Liu Xingyu had hidden something from him—

No. No, once Xingyu decided he trusted Weiran, he’d told him everything—about how he’d been abused as a child to become the perfect businessman, about how Xiaokai had gotten none of that treatment (thankfully, he said), about what monsters his parents were and how close he was to becoming one as well. He’s said all of this matter-of-factly, his hands folded neatly in front of him, and after Weiran’s anger that this beautiful man in front of him was related to the monsters who killed Weiran’s parents had subsided, he’d realized how powerful it was that Xingyu had said anything at all. If he had been with his parents, he could have silenced Weiran without Weiran being any wiser. If he hadn’t been with his parents and hadn’t wanted Weiran to ever find out his connection to the List, he could have slowly eased away from Weiran, refused to meet him…. But he hadn’t done any of that. He had told him everything just a single day after Weiran told him what had happened to his parents.

That meant that he was good. Right? Xingyu had taken his parents’ legacy and he’d bared it all to Weiran without Weiran ever knowing that he should have pried.

“Have you been here long?” Xingyu had appeared just as silently and suddenly as his brother had; he slid into the seat across Weiran before he’d even realized he’d arrived.