The airstrip appeared in the distance.
A small private plane waited on the tarmac, gleaming white in the afternoon light.
Yun Jiao watched it with calm, dark eyes.Imperial Capital City.
The Yun estate.
Yunting and his perfectly pressed suits and his perfectly cold eyes.
Stepmother Ruan Suyin — architect of this entire scheme, who had smiled into her husband's ear and offered up a girl she had never met like a bargaining chip because she could not bear to lose the daughter she had raised.
Yunjinna — who, in this life, was still seventeen and still pampered and still entirely unaware that the girl being brought home was not the desperate, lovesick fool she had eventually destroyed.
And Chu Jintan, somewhere in that city, still breathing.Still alive.Still blissfully unaware.
Yun Jiao's fingers tightened once around the strap of her bag.
Then relaxed.
She stood as the car rolled to a stop, smoothed the front of her white dress, picked up her bag, and walked toward the plane with small, measured steps.At the top of the airstairs, she paused.
The wind came in from the east, carrying the smell of grass and engine fuel and something that tasted, faintly, like the beginning of everything.
She looked back — not at the orphanage, not at the city, not at anything in particular.
Just once.
Just to mark the moment.
Then she stepped forward.
Her eyes were cold as winter stars.
Her smile was sweet as summer rain.
And deep in the bag over her shoulder, a tiny mechanical voice whispered: "Master! I calculated the flight time! It's approximately one hour and forty-seven minutes!
Shall I prepare a preliminary dossier on the Yun household personnel?"
She pressed a hand lightly over the bag."Already done,"
she murmured.
A pause.
"…Master is so amazing."
"I know,"
she agreed quietly.
And she disappeared into the plane.
—Below, Butler Ye watched the door close.
He stood for a moment in the wind, his expression — for once — not entirely composed.
The girl was not what he had expected.
Not at all. He had picked up the children of powerful families before.
Had collected heirs and heiresses from boarding schools and summer estates and, yes, once or twice, from less comfortable circumstances.
They were always one of two things.Frightened. Or arrogant.
This one was neither.She had the eyes, he thought, of someone who had already seen the end of a long and difficult road.
Which made no sense at all for a girl of seventeen who had never left a provincial orphanage.
He straightened his cufflinks.
Turned back toward the car.
He would note it in his private records, he decided.
Something to observe.
He had served the Yun family for thirty years.He had learned, in that time, to recognize when something significant had entered their orbit.
And he was rarely wrong.
If yunjiao were to know what he was thinking, she would have given him her sweetest smile and thought "I haven't even started and the butler is already tensed...ahhh what to do?".