Chapter 011: I Could Be Your Fourth Fake Boyfriend. Think It Over?

Chapter 011: I Could Be Your Fourth Fake Boyfriend. Think It Over?

The sudden violence left everyone frozen for half a second. The bodyguards at the door were wound tight—if anything happened to Li Ruobing on their watch, they’d all be feeding fish at the bottom of a river by nightfall.

But it wasn’t her he had at gunpoint. It was Feng Yan. So no one fired.

Once the shock passed, Li Ruobing lifted a hand toward the doorway, a silent order to hold.

“It wasn’t me! Boss, I’ve been set up, I swear!” Feng Yan had no idea who Wu Chen was. He assumed this was Li Ruobing’s own doing and started begging her directly.

He even thought the shout for guards had been aimed at him.

Face pinned to the desk, he couldn’t see who those weapons were actually pointed at.

“Set up? Staring death in the face and you’re still calling yourself innocent?” Wu Chen’s voice had gone hard with fury. “Then explain the five million U.S. dollars sitting in your Swiss account.”

“What? What five million—I don’t know what you’re—that’s not mine—” Feng Yan kept scrambling for an answer.

Crack!

Wu Chen struck him again, then patted him down with his free hand and pulled the phone from his pocket.

He grabbed Feng Yan’s own thumb and used it to unlock the screen.

“Look—look, there’s nothing on it, nothing—” Feng Yan shouted.

Wu Chen didn’t bother looking. He punched in a number from memory and dialed it on the second SIM.

Ding Ruilong’s private line would never have been saved to a phone—Feng Yan had memorized it, wiped every call log the second he hung up, and used a secondary SIM whose call records even the carrier couldn’t retrieve.

Unfortunately for him, Wu Chen happened to have that same number memorized.

The call connected. Wu Chen set the phone on the desk, speaker on.

A few rings, then a voice, urgent: “Did you get the files?”

Wu Chen tapped the screen and killed the call.

He set the gun down, slid it across the desk toward Li Ruobing—it came to a perfect stop right at the edge. Then he straightened his sleeves, adjusted his collar, and walked back to the sofa, settling in with his legs crossed, calm as ever.

Li Ruobing’s expression had frozen into something arctic as she looked down at Feng Yan.

She picked the gun up herself, turning it over in her hands, checking it out of habit. Without lifting her eyes, she said quietly, “You’re an old hand in this family. Ten years with my father. Four with me.”

“You’ve skimmed off plenty over the years, quietly and not so quietly. I knew. I let it go, out of respect for your loyalty. And five million dollars was worth throwing that away?”

She finally looked up at him.

The guards outside seemed to grasp the shape of things by now. Guns went away, the door swung shut, and one man jogged off to seal the stairwell, locking down the entire floor.

Thump.

Feng Yan dropped to his knees, shaking, sobbing openly.

“Eldest Miss, I—I—it wasn’t—I was forced into it—”

“So it really was you. All along.” Something dangerous surfaced in her eyes. “No wonder it kept happening—running into Ding Ruilong on trips that were supposed to be private. That endorsement deal falling apart out of nowhere—”

“Eldest Miss, I didn’t do it for the money—”

“You didn’t take his money?”

“I took it! I took it, but—but it was Madam’s idea! Madam told me to!” He was drenched in sweat, blood running down his back.

Her expression froze.

Madam. Her mother.

The Li family had wanted her married off to Ding Ruilong from the start. But the terms of the bet had included one clause: if the Li family was ever caught deliberately tipping the scales for Ding Ruilong, he would automatically forfeit.

Which meant—if her mother really had ordered this—Ding Ruilong had already lost.

But.

Ask her family directly, and they would deny it. Every single one of them, without hesitation.

There was no way to prove any of it.

“Eldest Miss, I was in an impossible position. I didn’t want to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you. I’ve been loyal to this family my whole life—” Feng Yan begged.

The killing look in her eyes softened into something more complicated.

If her mother really had put him up to it, then Feng Yan genuinely had been cornered with no way out.

“He’s lying.” Wu Chen spoke up from the sofa, not even bothering to look over—inspecting his fingernails instead. “It was Ding Ruilong. Your mother never actually wanted you to marry him. She didn’t want you sacrificed to another family alliance. But she was under pressure of her own—your grandfather on her side leaned on her hard.”

“Pinning it on your mother was Ding Ruilong’s idea from the start. He promised this man a company, once it was all done—not just five million dollars. And if he got caught, same deal, a company either way.”

“Ding Ruilong knows you can defy anyone in your family—you even dared curse out the old man himself. The only person you can’t bring yourself to turn against is your mother, the one who’s always taken your side.”

“Feng Yan never wanted to be a traitor to begin with. He knows exactly what your temper is like. But Ding Ruilong told him, if he ever got caught, just blame your mother. She’d deny it, obviously—but you’d read that denial as exactly what the bet’s rules would predict, and you’d convince yourself she really was behind it.”

“You—that’s a lie! Slander! Who are you? Where the hell did you crawl out of?” Feng Yan lost every ounce of composure, screaming curses at him.

Because every single word had landed true.

The reason Wu Chen knew things this deep, this private, was simple. Across the thousand-year loop, when he wanted secrets, he took them the fastest way available.

Every day reset. There were no consequences to answer for.

He’d once kidnapped Feng Yan first thing on a July seventh morning, sliced his fingers off joint by joint, and pulled every secret worth knowing straight out of him.

He’d once flown for hours to reach Guangdong by noon, gone straight to Ding Ruilong’s door, and taken him too.

Tortured him. Then killed him.

There wasn’t a secret left in this world that Wu Chen didn’t already own.

“If I’m lying, why are you getting so worked up?” Wu Chen looked at him, voice mild. “And think about it—if Boss Li calls Ding Ruilong right now, repeats every word I just said, do you honestly think he protects you?”

“Protecting you costs him a company. Letting you die costs him nothing at all. Which do you think he picks?”

Feng Yan’s fear tipped into something closer to terror.

“Nothing wrong with being greedy,” Wu Chen finished. “But if you’ve got no brains to go with it, you can’t blame anyone else for what happens next.”

Whatever was left of Feng Yan’s resolve gave out completely.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

“Eldest Miss, I was wrong! I know I was wrong! Eldest Miss—!” He was kowtowing now, hard enough to split his forehead open.

Li Ruobing sat back down slowly, set the gun on the desk. “Tell me everything. What have you done for Ding Ruilong, all these years?”

Trembling, Feng Yan confessed it all—tracking her schedule, leaking company files, quietly sabotaging deals wherever he could.

By the time he finished, she had gone entirely calm.

“Get out. I don’t want to see your face again.”

“Thank you, Eldest Miss—thank you—!” He scrambled up, half-tripping over his own feet, and fled through the door.

The moment he was gone, she picked up her phone, dialed once, and said only:

“Feng Yan. Keep it clean.”

She hung up, dropped the phone on the desk, pulled off her glasses, and rubbed at her eyes—looking, for the first time, genuinely tired.

Her life, in truth, wore her down more than people knew.

“So when’s the ten million landing in my account?” Wu Chen’s voice drifted over.

She looked up at him. Something subtle passed behind her eyes.

She wasn’t nearsighted at all. The lenses in those glasses were plain glass, nothing more—she saw perfectly well without them.

“Did I ever agree to pay you?” she said, quiet.

He spread his hands, unconcerned either way.

“Hah.” A short, cold laugh. She picked up her phone, swiped through a few screens.

Ding.

His phone buzzed. He checked it—a bank alert. Twenty million yuan, received.

She’d already had him investigated, so she hadn’t needed to ask for account details. All of it had been sitting right there on her desk from the start.

“You overpaid,” he said, pocketing the phone.

“What’s happening with my brother?” she asked, direct.

He only smiled and said nothing.

“You lied to me.” Her voice stayed level.

“I know exactly what’s running through your head. You believe I have real information, but you still don’t trust me. You think maybe I’m angling for your confidence—or worse, that Ding Ruilong sent me here, that sacrificing Feng Yan was just theater to win you over. Am I close?” He smiled wider. “So my guess is, once I tell you what’s coming for your brother, you shoot me. That about right?”

She said nothing, just watched him.

“So—to put your doubts to rest, I don’t mind volunteering to be your fourth fake boyfriend. You know exactly what Ding Ruilong cares about most. He doesn’t want to wear a green hat, even a pretend one. What do you say? Worth considering?” Still smiling.

“…Why?” she asked, after a pause. “Aren’t you afraid of dying?”

“People climb toward whatever’s higher up. Attach myself to you, and my life gets a lot more interesting, doesn’t it?” His smile was easy, unguarded.

She studied him, and slowly, the corner of her mouth lifted.

She actually smiled.

“I’m starting to like you a little,” she said.

She meant it, too. She liked greed in people. A person with no wants, no hunger for anything—that was the frightening kind. Greed meant a weakness. And a weakness meant something you could hold onto.