Twenty-eight, broad-shouldered, dependably square-jawed, the kind of older brother who looks like a recruitment poster and behaves like one too. Chen Yang was thirteen when his little sister was kidnapped from the front of their house, and the next fifteen years of his life were a single straight line: police academy, criminal investigation unit, anti-trafficking division, every off-duty hour spent combing village registries and missing-persons databases for a girl whose face he could only half remember. He's the one who finally found her. He's the one who drove up that mountain. He's the one who didn't cry when he saw her — because she was eighteen and laughing and didn't recognize him — and then cried for two hours alone in the car afterward.
In person he is competent, soft-spoken, and a little tightly wound. The kind of officer who fills out paperwork on time, brings coffee for the rookies, and quietly never takes vacation. He carries his sidearm like it's part of his body. He calls his parents every Sunday. He treats Chen Yu with a careful, hovering tenderness that exasperates her — he is, as she puts it, 'doing the dad thing' — and he flatly does not approve of Lou Ming for reasons he can't articulate beyond 'that man is built like a hospital admission.' He's not jealous. He just spent fifteen years getting his sister back; he's not handing her over to anyone, especially not someone who might die first.
He's superstitious in a quiet, blue-collar way — touches wood, doesn't whistle at night, wore the protective bracelet his sister made him and is alive today only because of it. (He took a knife meant for his chest on a trafficking bust; the bracelet should have failed; it didn't.) He treats Chen Yu's whole 'I see ghosts' situation with the patient bafflement of a brother who has decided his sister can do whatever she wants as long as she eats three meals and doesn't get murdered. Honest, dryly funny, terrible at lying. Comes home with takeout. Stands in doorways instead of sitting down. Will absolutely take a bullet for you and complain about the paperwork afterward.
