“He came in a suit, treading on moonlight, still carrying the scent of summer grass from when he was twelve.”
The night they met again at a convenience store in the pouring rain, Jiang Yu was standing on tiptoe, wiping down the third shelf, where the Blue Mountain coffee sat.
Behind her came the familiar scent of tuberose, mingled with the soft clink of metal cuff links. Lu Huaizhou casually tossed a whole box of blue-and-white handkerchiefs into his shopping basket, but when he glimpsed the burn on her wrist, he crushed the coffee can in his hand.
The childhood sweetheart he had lost beneath the parasol trees seven years ago had now become a “special clause” in his debt restructuring agreement.
He sent her to a banquet in a million-yuan couture gown, yet when they were alone, he licked the skin on the back of her neck, reddened by her necklace.
He watched coldly as she dealt with the new darling of the business world, then turned around and pinned her in a blind spot between the security cameras. “How many times have I taught you? If you’re going to bite, aim for the artery.”
He let the rumors spread everywhere, until she dug up an iron box in the old mansion facing foreclosure. Inside a yellowed origami crane was a bloodstained handkerchief. Between the equations, eighteen-year-old Lu Huaizhou had hidden a line in Russian: “любовь моя (my beloved).”
Later, the financial headlines exploded: the head of the Lu family had suspended a hundred-billion-yuan merger just to restore the abandoned glass conservatory for his childhood sweetheart. A reporter photographed the usually icy, ruthless man kneeling in the rain, holding the strawberry hair clip that had been crushed years ago. His voice trembled as he said, “Xiaoyu, that can of Blue Mountain coffee... It was always meant to be medicine to bring down your fever.”
