Chapter 1: First Meeting

The mountain air in early March was still chilly, and the rain carried a cold bite that seeped through people's clothes.
Assistant Huo folded his umbrella and headed straight for the basement of the villa at the mountaintop.
Outside, dusk clouds hung heavy. Inside, the basement was just as lifeless.
Assistant Huo was a little worried. “He still refuses to eat anything?”
The villa's security guard hurried to answer ingratiatingly, “He ate, he ate. We happened to take some food in just before you arrived.”
Assistant Huo nodded. This basement did not hold fine wine or treasure. It held a beauty.
And the beauty had a very special identity: he was the younger brother of his boss's fiancée—in other words, his future brother-in-law.
There were some things Assistant Huo knew better than to criticize, but at the very least, he had to make sure nothing happened to this future brother-in-law, Su Qing, before his boss came back.
“Mr. Su?”
Once he stepped inside, he could see a separate room behind a wooden-barred door. Every piece of furniture had been wrapped in expensive silk fabric.
The young man curled up in the corner looked like a canary shut deep inside an exquisite cage.
He was not breathtakingly beautiful. Compared with all the men and women Assistant Huo had seen around his boss, he could at most be called above average.
His greatest advantage was his pale skin and delicate, handsome features. When injured, he had a way of provoking a cruel urge to torment him.
Like now, when he lifted his eyes. His thick, long, curled black lashes trembled, and those naturally melancholy, affectionate eyes seemed veiled in the misty rain of the southern riverlands—hazy and fragile.
His thin lips were beautifully shaped, drained almost completely of color, yet the corners were stubbornly drawn upward, somehow making him even more capable of stirring the beast in a person.
Of course, Assistant Huo did not consider himself the same kind of animal as his boss. What he felt was only sympathy and pity.
Yet this time, looking at Su Qing's face, that sympathy seemed even stronger.
Especially when Su Qing pressed his lips together and said softly, “Assistant Huo, my stomach hurts.” An impulse actually surged up inside him to let Su Qing go no matter the consequences.
“I'll have someone bring you medicine.” Assistant Huo rubbed his head, grateful that his boss was not here right now.
Otherwise…
Looking at Su Qing's face, made more vivid by the pain he was forcing himself to endure, his boss would probably turn perverted again.
Creak. Assistant Huo took out the key and opened the wooden-barred door. The security guard who had come down with him had not yet returned with the stomach medicine, so he went in to check on Su Qing himself.
Maybe Su Qing had been locked in this damp basement too long. Or maybe, after going several days without food, his stomach could not handle suddenly eating again.
Or perhaps it was because…
Bang—
His boss…