Chapter 129: You’re My Lord and Master!

Chapter 129: You’re My Lord and Master!

The bald middle-aged man had caved. Utterly. He no longer cared that a crowd of his own men stood watching across the café. The instant he decided to kneel, he knelt.

Because he was afraid of dying. Terribly afraid.

He was the kind of man who bullied the weak and cringed before the strong.

His name was Meng Junhao: owner of Jiangnan Dragon Shield Security Group, general manager of Donghai Changjiu Property Group, council member of the Jiangnan Provincial Security Association, and a representative to the Donghai Municipal People’s Congress.

He had begun as nothing more than a man with ties to the Ding family. Four years ago he had not even known Ding Ruilong—or rather, they had not been close. Meng Junhao had simply been very close with one of the Ding family’s direct-line members.

Men in the security business generally built their networks inside the public-security system. But Meng Junhao also owned a property-management company in Donghai, so his reach was broader than most.

Four years ago, not long after Li Ruobing came to Donghai to start her business, Ding Ruilong began sending people into the city, using his connections to buy off certain local figures and put them to work for him.

That was how Meng Junhao became one of Ding Ruilong’s men.

At first he had thought himself fortunate. To be connected to the leading figure of the Ding family’s third generation was a benefactor dropped out of heaven.

Ding Ruilong only asked him to keep an eye on things in Donghai and, now and then, to send men to watch Li Ruobing while she was in the city. Nothing else. Surveillance at most, and surveillance did not frighten Meng Junhao.

After all, Ding Ruilong had told him that all he wanted was to marry Li Ruobing—and that the Li family themselves wanted the match.

In other words, this one favor would tie him to Ding Ruilong without offending the Li family. At worst he would offend Li Ruobing alone, and Li Ruobing was going to marry Ding Ruilong in the end anyway…

However he ran the numbers, he saw only profit and no risk. So he stepped in.

Very soon he regretted it so bitterly he wanted to die.

Because he discovered that Ding Ruilong’s opponent in Donghai was not Li Ruobing at all.

It was Li Ruobing’s own younger brother, the eldest grandson of the Li family’s eldest branch—Li Ruotai!

Li Ruotai had come in as an outsider challenging the local powers.

When Li Ruobing first came to Donghai, Li Ruotai had only just finished university himself. But he had begun laying his groundwork two years in advance, and once he graduated and put down roots in the city, the speed of his rise left Meng Junhao stunned.

In a very short time every man on Donghai’s streets had been gathered under Li Ruotai’s banner. The city’s most powerful figures all had dealings with him, to one degree or another.

An outsider, and yet he had swiftly become a man who could summon the wind and call down the rain in Donghai. Somehow the city had become his ground.

And Li Ruotai was shielding his elder sister, Li Ruobing. With his life, if it came to that.

Nor was that all.

Over the years that followed, Ding Ruilong handed Meng Junhao a great many benefits—and the tasks he handed down grew steadily more dangerous. Ding Ruilong had even sent trusted men to Donghai and ordered Meng Junhao to arrange things: to plant them, respectively, beside Li Ruobing and Li Ruotai.

That was lethally dangerous. It was nothing like a bit of tailing. If a tail was spotted, the man simply shook it off; and if blame had to fall, it fell on Ding Ruilong directly. Nobody bothered digging through the intermediaries.

But personally arranging to slip Ding Ruilong’s trusted men in beside Li Ruobing and Li Ruotai? That was another matter entirely. If they were caught, there would be a reckoning.

Meng Junhao had no way out.

He was already in too deep.

So he did it. Using the peculiar network his industry gave him, he installed one of Ding…