Chapter 2 Disowned

The interrogation room smelled of cold tea and old fear.

Lin Qingyue sat on a metal chair with a police blanket around her shoulders, her ivory gown stiff with her grandfather's blood. Her hands lay in her lap, still trembling, still stained. Every few seconds her mind replayed the same moment, the weight of his head in her arms, the way his fingers had slid from her wrist, and every time her chest folded in on itself as if someone had kicked it.

"Ms. Lin."

Detective Han Bo sat across from her, a lean man in his fifties with tired eyes and a crooked tie. He slid a paper cup of hot water across the table. She did not touch it.

"I need you to say it again," he said, not unkindly. "From the moment your grandfather gave you the glass."

"I've told you three times." Her voice came out as a ruined whisper. "He asked me to hold it. He said his hands were shaking. That's all. That's all it was."

"And you put nothing in it."

"I loved him." The words broke in the middle. "He raised me. Do you think I would..." She pressed her knuckles against her mouth and shook her head, hard, until the tears came again, hot and helpless. "I just want to see him. Please. Please let me see him."

Han Bo was quiet for a long moment. Then he exhaled.

"Ms. Lin, your grandfather's body is no longer in our custody."

Her head snapped up. "What?"

"He was pronounced dead at 9:42. Before my forensic team arrived, the Lin family's private physician had him removed. The family waived the autopsy." He rubbed his eyes. "Cremation is scheduled for dawn."

For a second she could not breathe. "Dawn? That's only a few hours away. Nobody has even..." Her voice shattered into pieces. "They won't even let me say goodbye."

"Strange, I thought so too," the detective murmured, almost to himself. "A man that powerful dies of poison in front of the city's entire elite, and no one in his family wants to know exactly how."

A young nurse slipped in with a kit and tied a band around Qingyue's arm without a word. Qingyue watched the dark tube fill, numb, as if the arm belonged to someone else. The nurse labeled it, glanced at the quick scan, and murmured, "AB negative. That's rare, you know. Fewer than one in a hundred." She left a printed slip on the desk and hurried out.

Qingyue did not answer. She did not care. Han Bo, though, wrote something down.

"One more thing," he said, turning his tablet toward her. "We found the bullet. It was lodged in the lighting rig above the stage, straight through the main power cable. One shot. A marksman's shot." He looked at her carefully. "Whoever fired did not aim at your grandfather, or at you. They aimed at the lights."

Qingyue stared at him. "Why would anyone..."

"I was hoping you could tell me."

A tall figure in black flickered at the edge of her memory, a man at a marble pillar, eyes on the ceiling, counting something down. But the thought slid away, too heavy and too tired to hold, and she shook her head.

"I don't know," she whispered. "I don't know anything anymore."

They moved her to a holding room with a barred window and a television bolted high on the wall. She had not asked for it. She wished, afterward, that she had asked them to turn it off.

The screen glowed with a red banner: LIN HEIRESS ARRESTED IN GRANDFATHER'S MURDER. Her own face filled the frame, a grainy still from the ballroom, her mouth open in a scream, her hair wild, blood on her cheek. She looked like a monster. She looked exactly like what they wanted her to be.

Then the picture cut to a podium and a wall of flashing cameras, and her heart lifted, absurdly, helplessly, because it was Zhou Yifan.

He wore a black suit with a mourning band on his sleeve. His face was composed and grave. He looked, she thought, like the man who had once promised her under a sky full of paper lanterns that he would never let anyone hurt her.

"On behalf of the Zhou family, I offer our deepest condolences to the Lin family," he said, in that smooth, practiced voice. "I have also made a difficult decision. Effective immediately, I am ending my engagement to Lin Qingyue." He paused, lowered his eyes as if the words pained him. "I will not comment further."

The cameras exploded into white light.

Qingyue did not move. She did not blink. She felt something inside her go very quiet, the way a house goes quiet after the last door has been closed.

Slowly, she looked down at the diamond on her left hand. She tugged at it. It would not come off over her swollen knuckle. She tugged again, harder, her breath catching on a sob, twisting until the skin tore and the ring finally slid free with a small, wet pain. For a moment she held it up to the cold light, a tiny, glittering lie.

Then she dropped it into the paper cup of water on the table. It sank with a soft plink.

The family lawyer came at four in the morning.

Mr. Fang was a small man with a briefcase and a face that had never once looked at her with warmth. Behind him, lounging in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, stood her cousin Lin Jiahao.

"By decision of the Lin Family Council," Mr. Fang read from a single sheet of paper, "Lin Qingyue is permanently removed from the family register. All accounts, properties, and privileges are revoked, effective immediately. Her personal belongings will be disposed of." He lowered the page. "You are no longer a member of this family."

Qingyue let out a thin, broken laugh. "I don't even have shoes."

"You should have thought of that before you killed him," Jiahao said lightly.

She turned to look at him, really look at him. The boy who had once crawled into her bed during thunderstorms, trembling, because he was too proud to admit he was afraid. "Jiahao," she said, and her voice cracked. "You grew up in my room. You know me. You know I could never..."

Something flickered across his face, a crack, a hesitation, so quick she might have imagined it. Then his jaw tightened.

"I don't know you," he said. "Grandfather loved you best. And look what it got him."

He turned and walked out. His eyes, she noticed, were completely dry.

It was nearly dawn when the door opened again, and for the first time that night, Qingyue felt her heart leap with something like hope.

"Qing'er."

Lin Meirong stood in the doorway in a dark coat, her eyes swollen and red, her hair coming loose from its pins. In one hand she carried a thermos. In the other, a pair of plain flat shoes.

She crossed the room in three steps and knelt on the cold floor. Without a word, she slipped the shoes onto Qingyue's bare, bruised feet, one and then the other, and the small, tender gesture undid her completely.

"Aunt Mei," Qingyue sobbed, and she folded forward into her aunt's arms, shaking so hard her teeth knocked together. "They all... Yifan, Jiahao, everyone... I didn't do it. I didn't, I swear, I swear on my mother's name-"

"Shh. Shh, my girl." Meirong held her tightly, stroking her hair, rocking her as if she were still small. "I know. I know you didn't. I posted your bail myself. I'm taking you out of here." Her voice trembled. "I'm the only one who believes you, Qing'er. And I will never, ever leave you."

Qingyue wept into her shoulder like a child.

Over her head, Meirong's gaze drifted to the desk, to the printed slip the nurse had left behind. AB negative. Her fingers went still against Qingyue's hair. Her smile stiffened for the barest instant.

Then, gently, she reached out and slid the slip into her sleeve.

They left through the back, past the garbage bins, while the reporters swarmed the front steps. The car was cold and smelled faintly of jasmine. Qingyue pressed her forehead to the window as the city slid by in the gray, bruised light of early morning.

Far off on the horizon, a thin column of smoke rose from the Lin family crematorium and bled into the clouds.

She watched it until it blurred.

"Goodbye, Grandfather," she whispered. Her breath fogged the glass. "I'm so sorry I couldn't be there."

Meirong's hand found hers and squeezed. "He knew you loved him."

Qingyue nodded, wiping her face with a trembling hand. Then she hesitated.

"Aunt Mei... at the end, he tried to tell me something. He said, 'Don't trust.' Then he..." She swallowed. "Don't trust who? Who was he talking about?"

For a heartbeat, Meirong's hand stiffened around hers.

"I don't know, child," she said softly, eyes on the road. "But think about who turned on you tonight. Yifan. Jiahao. The people who stood there and let them drag you away." She sighed, and the sound was heavy with grief. "Maybe he was trying to warn you about them."

Qingyue closed her eyes. Her tears slid down, warm and silent. "Then I'll never trust any of them again."

"Good girl."

Exhaustion finally dragged her under. Her head sank against the seat, her breath evening out, her fingers still curled around her aunt's hand like a child's.

Meirong waited until she was sure the girl was deeply asleep. Then she eased her hand free and took out her phone. The screen lit her face blue in the dim car.

A new message was waiting.

Is she in place?

For a long moment, Meirong looked at the sleeping girl, at the tear tracks on her cheeks, the cheap flat shoes, the tiny cut on her finger where the ring had been. Something like grief passed over her face. Something like regret.

Then it was gone.

Her thumbs moved across the screen.

Yes. She trusts me completely.

She pressed send, deleted the thread, and turned the car toward a road Qingyue had never seen.