Currently preparing the manuscript. If you're interested, babies, please follow and help the author launch this story sooner 🥺 The similar story next door, The Villain's Game, is currently ongoing. If you're interested, bb, please add it to your favorites.
To cover her living expenses during a year-long exchange program, Li Suining takes a live-in job: looking after someone's fish.
The temperature-controlled water flows day and night. Arowanas, arapaimas, and stingrays drift through the deep blue light, a whole tank of quiet, expensive danger.
Their owner is even harder to deal with than the fish.
Twenty-one years old, mixed-race, the youngest son of a state legislator, arrogant and untamable, a real bad seed.
The first time they meet, Jin Siye is playing with a bait fish still wriggling in his hand. His blue eyes narrow as he openly looks her timid face up and down.
"You're the new girl?"
"You look easier to keep than my fish."
Everyone says he treats her too well.
He takes her for drives, shields her from drinks at rowdy parties, and kneels in front of everyone to tie her shoes. Even when her coat picks up a trace of someone else's cigarette smoke, he coldly tosses it into the pool on the spot, then firmly wraps her in his expensive clothes.
Only she knows how awful he is: clingy and completely lacking in boundaries.
He'll corner her in the fish room, or press up behind her while teaching her to change the filter media, pin her hand against the tank, and grin wickedly. "You're so easy to bully."
"One touch and you're all soft."
*
After she returns home, life settles back into its usual calm.
Until the night before her thesis defense, when an unfamiliar number sends her a photo: in the fish tank, a scarlet arapaima swims right up against the glass.
She doesn't reply, but the sender sends more pictures, one after another.
Her campus gate. The apartment building where she lives. The coffee she just bought.
Then one last message.
"The fish doesn't recognize anyone anymore. Do you?"
She feels as if she's plunged into an icy abyss.
*
Jin Siye admits that he's bad-tempered and possessive, and not a good person.
But she isn't so innocent either.
She was the one who looked at him with those teary eyes. She was the one who cried after he bullied her. And even though she was afraid of him, she let him pull her into his arms again and again.
So how could she run away?
How could she leave without a word, abandoning him in that whole house of water and light, so quiet it drove him mad?
He gazes at the lit window upstairs, lowers his head with a smile, and slowly types a message:
"Baby, open the door."
"When you're gone, I can't even be bothered to feed the fish."
"I only want to feed you."
Theme: If freedom is at stake, both can be cast aside.
