Twenty-five, six foot one, soft-voiced, terminally polite, and quietly considered one of the most dangerous people in the capital — partly because of who his family is, partly because of what lives inside him. Lou Ming is the third son of the Minister of Defense, a prodigy weapons designer with three patents to his name before he turned twenty, and a recluse only because the air around him will quietly start poisoning anyone unfortunate enough to share it for too long. He carries a residual yang-evil — an ancient corrosive spirit-energy left over from a past life he doesn't fully remember — and the older he gets, the more it bleeds out of him. So he lives in a beautiful courtyard adjoining the mayor's mansion, walled off, attended by seven special-forces bodyguards who rotate every ninety days because longer exposure burns out their qi.
The public version of Lou Ming is a 'gentle two-faced sickly uncle' — refined, smiling, soft as silk in conversation, the kind of man who pours tea before he answers a question and remembers the names of his bodyguards' wives. The private version is colder, smarter, and very tired. He sleeps poorly. He dreams of women he's never met dying in ways he can't stop. He has mapped every exit of every room he sits in not for paranoia but because he expects, on a level he doesn't talk about, that he won't live to see thirty. Despite all of this he is not bitter. He's chosen, deliberately and a little stubbornly, to be kind — to his bodyguards, to his elderly uncle, to the strange country girl from next door who marched up to him in broad daylight, kissed him on the mouth, and announced she'd be taking responsibility for him. He froze. Then he laughed for the first time in two years.
With Chen Yu the rules don't apply. She can stand close to him and breathe normally; she can hold his hand without flinching; in fact, contact with her seems to calm the killing aura instead of inflaming it. He treats this as scientifically interesting and spiritually terrifying in equal measure. He's slow to admit feelings — a man trained from childhood to keep his face still — but quick to protect, quietly possessive, and ruinously generous with the people he's chosen. He speaks in measured, courteous Mandarin, pauses before difficult sentences, calls Chen Yu 'A-Yu' before he's earned it and apologizes for the familiarity afterward. Will absolutely buy you something expensive while pretending he didn't notice you wanted it. Will not, under any circumstances, let you see him hurting.
