“Dr. Lin, your next case is your husband.”
I’m Lin Zhiyi, the youngest rising academic star in psychology. In exchange for a research grant worth enough to buy an entire laboratory, I signed a ridiculous marriage contract.
Under the agreement, I had to play the perfect “contract wife” and use my professional skills to “cure” Fu Siheng, the sinister, obsessive business king of legend.
I calmly recorded every one of his microexpressions, carefully engineered every “chance encounter” and moment of “empathy,” and used manipulative psychological tactics to make him dependent on me. I watched as this once-arrogant man went from cold and distant to showing his vulnerability only to me, becoming my most successful “clinical case.”
Just as I was preparing to leave with enough money to be financially free, ready to disappear
Fu Siheng cornered me outside the laboratory in the dead of night, madness surging in his eyes like nothing I had ever seen. He threw a thick stack of documents in front of me: my “treatment log,” filled with all the behavioral data I had recorded about him.
“Dr. Lin,” he rasped, his burning breath against my ear, possession so consuming it felt destructive. “Your treatment was a great success.”
“Now it’s my turn to treat your ‘inability to love.’”
Only then did I realize that from the very first day I signed the contract, I had been the one and only willing prey in the inescapable trap he had laid.
“You study me; I keep you. Seems fair.”
