Genius Little Genius: CEO Daddy, Bring It On

Chapter 4: Familiar Faces

The icy water pounded against Elena’s temples, and the scent of whiskey and disinfectant gave way to the fresh fragrance of tea leaves. She opened her eyes to find herself kneeling in the stream of the Moonlight Tea Garden, with a few withered Pu’er tea leaves drifting downstream. In the distance, Leo’s small figure stood on tiptoe, plucking the silvery tips from the tops of the tea bushes. The tender buds unfurled into emerald green at his fingertips, as if the earlier fracture had been nothing but an illusion. But the burning mark on her ring finger served as a reminder—that moonstone wedding ring had vanished during the spatial distortion.

“The model collapsed because the foundation was unstable,” the boy said, placing the freshly picked tea buds into a bamboo basket as droplets of water trickled down his eyelashes. “Just like the agreement between you and Uncle Seb.”

Elena waded toward him, the moss on the riverbed pebbles glowing faintly. She reached out to touch her son’s shoulder, but the tea tree suddenly rustled, its branches twining around her wrist into a gentle shackle. “Mommy needs time to explain,” she said, watching the vines loosen on their own, leaving a pale green circular mark. “Some shields are invisible.”

Leo tilted his head back to gaze at the moon, the paths of the stars tracing their course in his tea-colored pupils. “His heart rate hit 121 beats per minute on the cocktail party terrace,” he said suddenly, his fingertips unconsciously tracing ECG-like waves in the air. “That’s 17% higher than the peak when he saw the hostile takeover bid.”

On the other side of the city, Julian loosened his tie and stood before the floor-to-ceiling windows. The private safe lay open, and a dusty childhood photo album was spread out on the Persian rug. A five-year-old version of himself stood by the piano in a small tuxedo, the tight curve of his lips mirroring that of a full-page advertisement in a financial magazine. Just then, an encrypted email from his assistant popped up: “Elena Ren’s social media account located. Last updated three hours ago.”

He tapped on the photo of a picnic in the park. The wind had blown Elena’s scarf into a blurry blue silhouette, while the boy beside her—stacking a financial skyscraper out of Legos—had the exact same brow line beneath his chestnut curls as in his own childhood photo, even replicating the exact position of the small mole on his left earlobe. Fine cracks spread across the rim of the whiskey glass in his palm, and the amber liquid seeped into the cashmere carpet. Fragments of a memory from five years ago, by a hospital bed, suddenly pierced his mind: as the lawyer held up the equity agreement, the sound of a baby crying seemed to mingle with the beeping of the monitor.

“Get to the bottom of this.” Julian pressed the call button; the glass curtain wall reflected the dark currents churning in his eyes. “All public records regarding that child, especially the birth certificate.” Before hanging up, he added, “Use an unlinked account to commission this. The report is to be forwarded only to my personal terminal.”

The old apartment building was filled with a mingled scent of stew and disinfectant. As Elena knocked on the door of Room 307, her bamboo basket held soothing tea baked with morning dew from the Moonlight Tea Garden. “Rosa?” she called softly. The sound of a loud television shopping commercial seeped through the c***k in the door.

The elderly woman curled up in the rocking chair had a vacant look in her eyes; the remote control slipped from her lap and fell to the floor. “They forgot to turn off the stove again,” she muttered, staring at a water stain on the wall. “Just like that Tuesday when Joey forgot his lunchbox.”

Elena crouched down to pick up the remote; the celadon tea canister in her bag was still slightly warm. She took out a white porcelain cup, and the moment boiling water hit the leaves, a pale golden mist gathered at the rim, swirling like a nebula. Rosa’s unfocused gaze suddenly sharpened, and her gaunt fingers trembled as she cradled the cup: “This aroma... ...like the lemon groves back home in Sicily.”

As the old woman sipped her first mouthful of tea, a new shoot suddenly sprouted from the withered basil on the windowsill. Elena didn’t notice the vine-like mark on her wrist glowing, nor did she realize that from the black sedan on the street corner, a telephoto lens was trained on the scene inside the window.

Julian’s fingertips glided across the tablet. The scanned birth certificate listed Elena as Leo Ren’s mother, with the father’s column left blank. But the medical records held even more startling data—the boy had been hospitalized at age three with a high fever, and his blood type was the rare AB-negative, a perfect match for his own. He zoomed in on a close-up of the boy’s earlobe in the park photo; the old scar on his own left ear throbbed faintly, as if echoing in the reflection.

“The sample collection team is in position,” a voice over the intercom interrupted his gaze. “But the guardian is highly vigilant, and the private school the child attends has a military-grade security system in its biology lab.”

Julian’s eyes fell on the picture frame. It contained the gardenias Elena had placed on his hospital windowsill the night before he fell into a coma five years ago; they had long since dried into a specimen. “Start with signs of daily life.” He twirled the withered petals between his fingers, and the teacup the boy had played with in the terrace surveillance footage suddenly flashed through his mind. “Focus on collecting that child’s tableware, toothbrush, or...”

He paused. The video replay showed Leo lingering at the buffet table; clear fingerprints remained on the rim of a crystal glass. And at this very moment, that champagne glass, still speckled with crumbs from the lemon tart, lay quietly in the banquet caterer’s sterilization warehouse.

At Moonlight Tea Garden, the homemade cookies Rosa had sent were still warm from the oven. As Elena sliced into one, the blade accidentally grazed the web of her hand. The moment blood dripped onto the tea table, the raw Pu’er tea in the basket suddenly began to tremble. She instinctively grabbed a handful of tea leaves and pressed them against the wound, only to see the dark green leaves curl up as if alive, their veins oozing an amber-colored gel that enveloped the cut. When she opened her palm again, only pale pink new skin remained, and even the pain had vanished.

“Look, Mom!” Leo ran into the tea garden holding a tablet, its screen displaying real-time surveillance footage. Inside a black sedan, someone was using tweezers to retrieve a milk tea cup from a trash can; the straw opening on the cup’s side was smudged with a trace of lipstick. “They’re collecting my biometric data,” the boy tapped the DNA icon highlighted in red on the screen. “Should we activate the countermeasure protocol?”

Elena pressed her hand against her son’s shoulder, and the vine-like mark on her wrist began to burn. The stream reflected her suddenly pale face—that coral-colored smudge on the rim of the cup was the very lipstick she’d worn that morning.