The breakfast table was a battlefield.
Most people couldn't tell.
Yun Jiao could.
She sat across from Yunjinna's three friends — Mengqi, Lulu, Xinyi
— smiling and eating her congee and answering their questions about orphanage life with just enough self-deprecating sweetness to make them feel comfortable, all while watching Yunjinna from the corner of her eye the way you watch a pot boiling.
Something was coming.
She could feel it.
Yunjinna was too relaxed.
Too pleasant.
The smile she was wearing this morning had a different quality to yesterday's — looser, more confident, like a girl who had already decided how the morning was going to go.
Yun Jiao quietly ate her braised pork.
Twenty minutes in.
"Oh—!"
Yunjinna's hand knocked her glass.
Orange juice.
Full glass.
Tipping sideways in what looked like a completely natural accident.
Directly toward Yun Jiao's lap.
In her previous life, Yun Jiao would have gasped and jumped back and ended up soaked and embarrassed in front of everyone.
This life?She moved her bowl two inches to the left, shifted her body the same moment the glass tipped, and let the juice splash harmlessly onto the empty chair beside her.
All in one smooth motion.
Like she'd seen it coming.
Because she had.
Three seconds of silence.
Yunjinna stared at the juice on the empty chair.
Yun Jiao looked at the empty chair.
Then at Yunjinna.
"Sister, are you okay?" she said, soft and concerned.
"You should be more careful — you almost got yourself."
Yunjinna's smile didn't move.
"I'm so sorry," she said.
"I wasn't paying attention."
"No harm done!" Yun Jiao waved a hand.
"These things happen."Mengqi was already grabbing napkins.
"Oh my gosh, Jinna, you're so clumsy today—"
"I said I wasn't paying attention—"
"You spilled on Xinyi's bag last week too—"
"Mengqi."
"Just saying—"
Yunjinna took the napkins and cleaned up the juice with precise, controlled movements that had nothing to do with being sorry.
Yun Jiao picked up her chopsticks and went back to her pork.
Hm. That's all you have, Sister? How Lousy?
—fifteen minutes later.
"Oh, Jiao Jiao."
Yunjinna's voice was casual.
Friendly.
"I almost forgot — Mother was asking about the jade bracelet from the display cabinet in the east sitting room. You didn't happen to see it when you came through this morning, did you?"
The table went quiet.
Not dramatically.
Just — a small shift.
The kind that happened when a question had more weight than it looked like it should.
Yun Jiao set her teacup down.
Looked at Yunjinna.
Yunjinna looked back. Open. Innocent.
Just asking.
Right.
A missing jade bracelet.
Asked about in front of witnesses.
Directed at the new girl who'd been wandering the house alone since five in the morning.
Clean. Simple. Effective.
In her previous life this had worked beautifully.
She'd been questioned, flustered, unable to prove anything, and had spent three weeks under a cloud of quiet suspicion that Yunjinna had cultivated very carefully.
This life—"The green one?" Yun Jiao said.
Yunjinna blinked. "...Yes."
"With the small chip on the inner band?"
A pause.
"...Yes."
"Mm." Yun Jiao picked up her teacup again.
"Auntie moved it. I saw her take it from the cabinet yesterday evening when she was showing me around — she mentioned something about getting the chip repaired. Did she not tell you?"
Silence.
Yunjinna stared at her.
Yun Jiao sipped her tea with the serenity of a Buddhist monk on a mountaintop. She knew from her previous life how her auntie conveniently remembered she took it for repairs after being surrounded under suspicious gazes for 3weeks.
"I can ask Auntie to confirm if you want,"
she offered helpfully. "In case I got it wrong."
"No," Yunjinna said. "It's fine."
"Are you sure? I'd hate for there to be any misunderstanding—"
"I said it's fine, Jiao Jiao." while gritting her teeth.
"Okay!"
Bright smile. Back to her congee.
Across the table Mengqi and Lulu exchanged a look.
Xinyi studied her chopsticks very carefully.
Yunjinna picked up her tea.
Set it down without drinking.
The hand around the cup was just slightly too tight.
—Upstairs, forty minutes later.
Yunjinna's room.
Door closed.
Ruan Suyin sat on the edge of the bed with her ankles crossed and her expression smooth and unreadable, the way it always was when she was thinking the hardest.
Yunjinna paced around the room.
"Mom She knew," Yunjinna said. "About the bracelet — she already had an answer ready.
A perfect answer.
How did she already have a perfect answer?"
"Because she's not what she seems,"
Ruan Suyin said simply."She's an orphanage girl—"
"Who speaks five languages."
Ruan Suyin looked at her daughter.
"Who tested top of her cohort every year. Who walked into this house and in less than twenty-four hours has already charmed Zhou Baoshi, neutralised two of your moves before breakfast was over, and hasn't put a single foot wrong."
She paused. "Does that sound like an orphanage girl to you?"
Yunjinna stopped pacing.
Stared at her mother.
"Then what is she?"
Ruan Suyin paused for a moment.
"I don't know yet," she said. "But it doesn't matter."
"Doesn't matter?! Mother she's—"
"Yunjinna." Ruan Suyin's voice was calm. Final.
"Liang Boshen's meeting with your father is in three days. Whatever she is, whatever she thinks she's doing — in three days she will be gone and that's the end of it."
She smoothed her qipao.
"She's already walking toward her own grave. We don't need to push."
Yunjinna looked at her.
A dark glint moved in her eyes.
"But what if she finds out?" she said.
"What if she—"
"She won't."
"You don't know that—"
"Yunjinna."
"I want her gone, Mom."
The words came out flat and cold and very certain.
"I don't care about Liang Boshen's timeline. I want her gone now. I want her to regret ever coming here."
Ruan Suyin looked at her daughter for a long moment.
Then something shifted in her expression. Subtle.
"There's a difference," she said quietly,
"between removing a problem and creating one." She stood.
Smoothed her dress. "But a lesson..." She tilted her head slightly. "A lesson is just a lesson. Nothing that can be traced."
Yunjinna's eyes sharpened."What kind of lesson?"
Ruan Suyin picked up her phone from the bedside table.
"The kind," she said, "that reminds a girl from an orphanage exactly where she stands."
She made a call.
—Yun Jiao was in the garden when Hawk spoke up.
She was crouching by the koi pond, poking a stick in the water, watching the fish investigate it with the dedicated focus of someone who had nothing better to do and absolutely had several better things to do.
"Master."
"Mm."
"Ruan Suyin just made a call to an unknown number. Encrypted line."
A pause. "I got the content. But the call lasted forty seconds."
Yun Jiao watched a large orange koi nose at her stick suspiciously.
"Forty seconds,"
she said. "Enough to give an instruction. Not enough for a conversation."
She was quiet for a moment.The garden was bright and warm and birds were doing their bird things in the trees overhead and everything looked completely peaceful and fine.
She named the orange koi Tangerine in her head.
"When and where?" she asked.
"Based on the pattern—" Hawk calculated, "—tonight.
Most likely the east road outside the residential gate.
You mentioned wanting to walk to the corner store this afternoon.
"She had mentioned that.
Casually.
At breakfast.
To Mengqi.
Who had then mentioned it to Yunjinna.
Right in front of her.
Yun Jiao smiled at Tangerine."How many?" she said."Estimating three to four. Nothing too large — they want it to look random."
"Of course they do."
She stood up.
Brushed off her knees.
Looked out at the garden — the pavilion, the koi pond, the estate walls, the city beyond.
Then she thought about Yun Xiao.
Just for a second.
Her little brother.
Five years old.
Soft round cheeks and a gap in his front teeth and the way he used to fall asleep holding her sleeve because he was scared of the dark.
She found out in her previous life that her mother didn't die giving birth her, it was all a well planned scheme, she has a younger brother out there, though she wasn't able to uncover the mysteries behind her mother and her brother's birth.
In this life she has all the time in the world to do just that and he was somewhere out there.
Alive.
Five years old right now.
Still at whatever orphanage she'd left him in when the Yun family came for only her.
She had not forgotten him.
She would never forget him.