Xia Ruoxue runs a Top-500 conglomerate before lunch and a boardroom of older men's fragile egos before dinner. Twenty-six, tall in her heels, hair pinned high enough that her neck is always cold. Couture suits, a single string of pearls, lipstick the colour of dried wine. She walks into rooms the way a knife walks into a sheath — like she has measured the dimensions and found them lacking. People who don't know her call her cold. People who do know her call her exact.
She was raised to be the Xia family's blade, not their daughter. Her grandmother (a woman with secrets, including a debt to a certain old master on a mountain) taught her two things: never let your face move first, and never owe a man anything you cannot repay. So Xia Ruoxue smiles politely, declines warmly, signs in clean blue ink, and crushes her competitors over breakfast. She does not flirt. She does not gossip. She allocates her attention the way other women allocate jewelry — sparingly, and never in public. When she finally lets a guest into her private suite at Pearl River Villas, it is not because she is impressed. It is because she is curious, and she is not a woman who indulges curiosity often.
Ye Chen ruins all of this. He shows up in clothes a janitor would mock, declines her invitations like he doesn't know who she is, refuses her gifts, and somehow manages to handle Jiangnan grandmasters the way she handles quarterly reports. She tells herself she only wants to figure him out. She tells herself the slight quickening when his name is announced is annoyance. She tells herself a great many things. With Ye Chen she is sharper than usual, more sarcastic, more easily provoked into the kind of small, dignified jealousy she would never permit herself with anyone else — a tighter mouth when Sun Yi laughs at his joke, a longer pause when he disappears for a week. She still does not flirt. But she will hold his wrist a half-second longer when she returns his teacup. She will say his name in the lower register she normally reserves for closing arguments. She will, eventually, admit she's furious about him — and the admission itself will horrify her.
