Chapter 016: Apologize to Me, and I’ll Teach You!

Chapter 016: Apologize to Me, and I’ll Teach You!

“Atai, calm down! Let your brother-in-law finish!” Li Ruobing said.

“Sis, I don’t care how he’s gotten to you—I’m not buying a word of it!” Li Ruotai pressed on. “He can’t even tell us where his information came from. For all we know, someone sent him to worm his way into your life. And now he’s coming after me too?”

His outburst wasn’t purely about Wu Chen’s silence on his source. It was also plain prejudice at work.

Prejudice—a fixed, generalized impression people formed about something or someone, with little regard for the truth.

Li Ruotai had already decided Wu Chen was a pretty boy who’d deceived his sister. That hostility colored everything—whatever Wu Chen said, he read the worst possible motive into it.

“You really need to work on that temper,” Wu Chen said, perfectly calm.

“Don’t you dare lecture me!” Li Ruotai snapped, snatching up the coat he’d tossed aside and yanking a pistol out of it.

He raised it, leveling the muzzle at Wu Chen.

Crack!

A sharp slap rang out, and Li Ruotai reeled, momentarily stunned.

“Trying to start a mutiny? Hand it over!” Li Ruobing seized the gun from his grip, fury blazing in her eyes.

“Sis, you hit me—for an outsider?” Li Ruotai clutched his cheek, staring at her in disbelief.

“I’m afraid you’ll die in prison!” she snapped through clenched teeth, raising her hand again. Li Ruotai flinched back before she’d even moved.

“Sit down,” she ordered, pointing at the sofa.

His face darkened, but he sat anyway, refusing to look at her, glaring instead at Wu Chen—calm, unbothered Wu Chen—as though he meant to devour him whole.

Li Ruobing settled back down beside Wu Chen, tossing the gun onto the coffee table without ceremony, then pressed a hand to her forehead like she had a headache coming on.

“Ease up. Why let it come to this? You’re siblings—no need to wreck things between you,” Wu Chen said, trying to soothe her.

“Cut the good-guy act. My sister and I are fine. We don’t need you sticking your nose in,” Li Ruotai shot back immediately.

Then, turning to his sister: “Sis, you actually trust this con man? He can’t even give a straight answer.”

Li Ruobing regarded her brother without expression.

Trust Wu Chen?

Truthfully, her trust in him only went so far.

But Wu Chen had claimed to be an information broker, and that claim had already been proven—he’d correctly identified the traitor in her own ranks. So whatever else might be true or false about him, when it came to intelligence, she believed him.

She had no idea what game he might be playing with her further down the line. But if Wu Chen really did have some grand scheme in mind, then for now, at least, he was clearly still in the stage of earning her trust—which meant he’d keep feeding her information worth having.

So she believed what he’d told her about her brother’s coming trouble.

Worry clouded judgment.

She didn’t want anything happening to her brother, and that was reason enough to play along with Wu Chen.

She knew that if she hadn’t been there to hold him back, her brother might already have put a bullet in Wu Chen. That was exactly why she’d had no choice but to slap some sense into him.

Rather than answer her brother’s question about trusting a con man, she simply nodded at Wu Chen. “Go on.”

“Right now, within all of Donghai’s political-legal system, only a handful of people know the higher-ups are moving against Crown Entertainment. Liao Bo—parachuted into the Donghai Police Department four months ago as deputy director—came specifically to build the case.”

“Party Secretary Wei of the municipal committee knows too. He has some history with your family, but this matter runs too deep. He’s chosen to stay out of it.”

“They’re still in the evidence-gathering stage,” Wu Chen went on. “Some investigators are working undercover, posing as customers. Others have already burrowed into the club itself and gathered a substantial amount of evidence.”

He turned to Li Ruobing. “Do you have paper and a pen?”

She was a businesswoman—she carried a notebook and fountain pen on her at all times.

She pulled them from her bag and handed them over.

Wu Chen quickly wrote out a list of names, along with their positions within Crown Entertainment.

Servers, cleaners, cooks, bartenders—their cover roles ran the gamut.

But they shared one thing in common: every one of them had joined Crown Entertainment within the past four months.

Because Li Ruotai kept such tight control over the club’s internal operations, no one had managed to infiltrate his inner circle yet—only the outer edges. Which was exactly why evidence gathering had crawled along so slowly.

Otherwise, the higher-ups would have already made their move.

Wu Chen finished writing and tossed the notebook to Li Ruotai.

His face dark, Li Ruotai picked it up, scanned it, then looked back up. “And I’m just supposed to believe they’re all undercover, because you say so?”

“They’ll still have information on them they haven’t had the chance to pass along. Check, and you’ll see for yourself.” Wu Chen spread his hands.

Li Ruotai stared at him in grim silence. After a moment, he picked up his phone and made a call. “Notify Housekeeping, Food and Beverage, Operations—” he rattled off a string of departments, then finished, “second-floor lobby. Now.”

He made a second call. “Lao Wu. Get down to the second-floor lobby and give them a talk.”

Both calls finished, he stood.

The staff had already been cleared out.

What now?

Search the rooms of everyone on that list, obviously.

Li Ruotai didn’t go himself—he called in a trusted bodyguard from outside and sent him to handle it. The men he trusted most had all come up through the Li family, many of them retired special forces or reconnaissance soldiers. Professionals, every one.

With everything arranged, Li Ruotai settled back into the room, locked in a staring match with Wu Chen.

“I’m still waiting for that apology,” Wu Chen said, smiling.

“Hah!” Li Ruotai gave a bitter laugh.

Li Ruobing leaned sideways, wrapping her arm through Wu Chen’s, and murmured against his ear, “What should we have for lunch?”

“French, maybe. Don’t you love foie gras?”

“I’m not feeling too well today, though.”

“Something lighter, then. Japanese? There’s a new place on Wutong Avenue, supposed to be good. Or we could just go home—I’ll cook.”

By any reasonable measure, with her brother facing this kind of trouble, Li Ruobing shouldn’t have had the slightest interest in lunch. The performance felt off.

And yet.

Looked at another way, the fact that she could still murmur so easily with Wu Chen about food, even now, only made her look more convincingly like a woman deep in the throes of new love.

Li Ruotai sat across from them, tearing at a strip of paper, glaring at the pair like a tiger sizing up its prey.

He genuinely ached for his sister.

Had Ding Ruilong driven her to this? How had she ended up saddled with a man like this?

With so many men at his disposal, the search didn’t take long.

A little over twenty minutes later, a knock came at the door.

“Come in,” Li Ruotai said.

A bodyguard entered carrying a tray heaped with a jumble of items—a laptop, phones, a camcorder, pinhole cameras, a diary, listening devices.

“Boss…” The bodyguard set the tray down, then leaned in to murmur something into his ear.

Li Ruotai’s expression shifted, again and again, as he listened.

The moment the man finished, he snatched up the diary first and flipped through it quickly. Page after page listed names of guests, meeting times, phone numbers.

Next he picked up the camcorder and found hidden footage inside—along with the recordings, an enormous number of photographs.

All of them images of the club’s facilities, its staff, its day-to-day operations.

He moved on to the laptop, the phones, the memory cards from the pinhole cameras. The laptop and phones were locked, but the hacker on his payroll had already cracked them open.

The longer he looked, the faster his breathing came, his face growing more savage by the second, veins standing out on his forehead. No one photographed things like this without a reason.

He even found hidden photos of ledger pages saved on the laptop.

Wu Chen had told the truth.

“Every single name on that list—seize them, now! Damn it! They dared to set me up!” Li Ruotai lurched to his feet, roaring.

“You can’t touch them. If even one of them goes missing, it could force the higher-ups to move early. They already have some evidence—the only reason they’ve held off is that they’re still missing the key evidence on the gambling operation,” Wu Chen said, his tone even.

The bodyguard paused mid-step, glancing back at his boss.

“Do you want to vent your anger and land in prison, or do you want to make it safely through this?” Wu Chen asked him.

Rage draining out of him all at once, Li Ruotai went cold, sweat beading down his back.

“Put everything back exactly where you found it,” Wu Chen said to the bodyguard.

The man hesitated, but seeing no objection from Li Ruotai, gathered the tray back up and left.

Li Ruotai sank into his seat, eyes wide, gaze flickering with dread.

He was imagining every catastrophic outcome now.

“Want to stay out of prison?” Wu Chen asked.

Li Ruotai’s head snapped up. “What do I do?”

“Apologize to me,” Wu Chen said, utterly without expression, “and I’ll teach you.”