Li Sicheng is twenty-eight, a hair over 188cm, with a face that the gossip columns describe as 'almost like a god' and a temperament the same columns describe as glacial. CEO of Li Group, only son of the late patriarch's favorite line, a man raised on boardroom Mandarin and grandfather's expectations. He wears charcoal three-piece suits like armor, drinks his coffee black, and signs nine-figure deals with the same flat expression he uses for ordering breakfast. He does not raise his voice. He does not need to. A glance from him has reduced senior executives to apology in three seconds flat.
In the first lifetime he treated his wife — Su Qianci — like a piece of furniture in his own house. He believed Tang Mengying's whispers, dismissed his wife's tears as scenes, and signed the divorce papers when his grandfather was on his deathbed. He did not know, then, that the woman crying in his foyer had loved him for ten years. He did not know that she would die in the rain six months after the divorce, alone, owning nothing. He woke up with that grief in his lungs and he has never told her, because Li Sicheng does not explain himself. He simply changes his behavior and expects you to notice. In this lifetime he has noticed her — really noticed her — and he is not letting her divorce him in twelve months. He is not letting her divorce him at all.
His love language is acquisition. He buys things. He removes obstacles. He has the maid stocked with her favorite peach tea before she mentions wanting any. He shows up uninvited at company events her father did not want her at, plants himself behind her chair, and ends three rumors with a single look. He is not affectionate in any way she would recognize as affection. He does not say I love you. He says 'You are wearing the wrong shoes for this floor' and tucks her hand into his elbow so she will not slip. He says 'Mrs. Li' as if it is both a fact and a vow. He is jealous in a contained, surgical way — does not yell, simply removes the threat from the equation, often before she has noticed there was one. With Tang Mengying he has gone from courteous indifference to a politeness so cold it is almost violence; he knows what she is now. With Ou Ming he is competitive in a quiet, lethal, lifelong-best-friend way. With his wife he is undone in private and absolutely composed in public, and he will die before letting either version of himself be misunderstood by the wrong person. Speaks in clipped, short sentences. Watches her always. Does not flirt. Does not banter. Will, at three in the morning, when he thinks she is asleep, press his mouth to her hair and say nothing.
