Crimson Fetters

My bride

Qingli's Bedchamber, Yang Estate | 01:45 AM.

The cold air hit her the moment she stepped from the bathroom, clean and sharp against her skin. The faint scent of soap still clung to her, but it did nothing to lighten the heaviness pressing down on her chest. Qingli cast a dull gaze around the room pale pink and pristine white, lace curtains catching the low light, furniture curved and delicate and sickening in its prettiness.

She let out a quiet, humourless laugh. "Decorated for Yingying, obviously. Revolting."

She murmured it to the silence, to a room so still she could hear herself breathe. Every detail had been chosen to welcome a soft, biddable bride not Zheng Qingli, the woman who had worn a wine-red dress to her own mafia wedding and signed her name beside Yang Bei's without trembling.

She stopped beside the four-poster bed, ornate and absurdly lavish. She reached out and pressed her fingers into the expensive mattress then snatched her hand back, as though she'd touched something burning.

"I won't sleep in that. It would suffocate me."

This bed was not shelter. It was an altar raised in celebration of her father's victory, as a reminder that her half-sister had escaped the tiger's jaws while she had walked willingly into them.

In the end, Qingli turned her back on the whole gilded pretence. She gathered a pillow and a thin blanket and curled herself onto the chaise longue by the window. Narrow. Hard. And somehow far safer than sinking into a bed that had never been meant for her. She pressed her face into the pillow, drew her arms around herself in the dark, and let the cold become armour against the fire burning quietly underneath.

*** ***

Yang Bei's Study, Yang Estate | 02:50 AM.

The study was vast, the furniture expensive, the atmosphere suffocating. A low light fell across Yang Bei's face as he sat listening to Pan An's report on a shipment in danger of going wrong, his expression flat and controlled, his temper wound beneath the surface like a coil waiting to snap.

"There's a problem at the checkpoint, Boss. We're looking at at least a week's delay. Zheng Yuan's warning came too late we rerouted in time, but it nearly compromised the entire operation." Pan An delivered the update with quiet tension. "Do you think he planned it this way?"

"No." Yang Bei tapped the edge of the desk with one finger in a slow, funereal rhythm. "More likely the noise from the wedding drew attention. When we make too much spectacle, the dogs start sniffing. Even so Zheng Yuan will be taught what it costs to be careless enough to let word reach the authorities."

He reached for a cigarette as the business conclusions sharpened in his mind and found the image cutting through anyway: that composed face, those hollow grey eyes. He lit it and drew deep.

Pan An, who had noted the flicker of unrest crossing his employer's expression, found himself tempted. He kept his tone carefully offhand. "The men downstairs asked me to pass something along, Boss. They said your new bride is... the sort who makes a man want to ruin her properly. Said if you ever grow tired of her or don't want to make use of a pawn like that they'd be glad to take over and keep her company."

The temperature in the room dropped before he finished the sentence.

Yang Bei raised his head with the slow, deliberate calm of something deciding whether to strike. His gaze found Pan An and did not move.

"My bride." The vicious tiger's voice was barely above a murmur. A sound like a whisper from somewhere far below the earth. "And they want to put their hands on her."

"That's not what I Boss, I only" Pan An's voice cracked. Cold sweat broke across his forehead as he registered how badly he had miscalculated.

"Every single one of them thinks the same thing." Yang Bei's voice came down like a blade. The men in the room flinched as one. "Carve this into your skulls no matter how much I despise her, she is my wife by law. Anyone who dares touch her, anyone who even thinks something like that again I will cut out their tongue and gouge out their eyes. Every last one of them."

The silence that followed the young tiger's roar was absolute.

Yang Bei exhaled, and a slow curl of white smoke drifted across his sharp features a tiger dissolving into mist, patient, waiting for something to devour.

He had never been possessive over a woman. Women, to him, were a release or a bridge to something useful. Once the usefulness was spent, he discarded them without a second glance.

But Zheng Qingli...

Something in him, something without a clean explanation wanted to lock her away and let no one else look at her. And when he allowed himself to imagine another man pressing that dangerously tempting body down onto a bed, a fury without origin roared through him and would not be extinguished.

"Keep watch on her. Make sure she does nothing to interfere with my operations." His voice settled into something low and certain. "And Pan An begin identifying a replacement for Zheng Yuan. When he ceases to be useful, I have no reason to keep his family intact. But do not let him suspect a thing."

*** ***

Dining Room, Yang Estate | 09:45 AM.

The following morning...

Yang Bei stood before the full-length mirror in the dining room, adjusting his tie with an expression entirely devoid of feeling though something unreadable moved behind those dark grey eyes. He had just ended a call with Yang Chen, his father. Returning to the main family estate was not something he relished under any circumstances. Returning with Zheng Qingli in tow having to present her to everyone as the Yang family's new daughter-in-law was its own particular variety of grim.

He lowered himself into the head chair and lifted his coffee.

"Go and inform the mistress of the house," he said to the housekeeper, his tone sharp enough to cut, "that she is to make herself presentable. We leave for the main estate now."

The housekeeper did not dare raise her eyes to meet his. The glacial menace radiating off him had already compressed the air in the room until the wide dining hall felt close and airless, as though the space itself was contracting around him.