Chapter 241: Bedtime Story
*Runze’s POV*
Bael’s text comes at eight forty-seven.
*Something came up. Don’t wait for dinner. I’ll explain when I’m home.*
I read it three times standing in the kitchen doorway while Mrs. Wen moves around behind me pretending not to watch my face. The message is short even by Bael’s standards, which tells me more than the words themselves do.
I go back to the sitting room and sit down.
An hour later I hear a car on the driveway and I’m on my feet before I’ve thought about it, crossing to the glass panel beside the front door. My chest drops when I see it. Just one of the estate cars, idling by the steps. Grandmother comes down a moment later dressed in whatever she had on at dinner, she didn’t stop to look at me, and gets in without looking back at the house.
The car pulls away.
I watch the gate close behind it and stay standing there for a moment, my hand against the cold glass, trying to figure out from the shape of what I don’t know what is actually happening tonight.
Ling Yue is in the sitting room when I come back from the door. He doesn’t ask what I saw, he just moves over slightly on the sofa, his shoulder pressing against mine, and we sit together in the kind of silence that doesn’t need filling.
I’m not sure how much time passes. My eyes keep drifting to my phone, to the message, to the dark screen between checks. Ling Yue refills his tea at some point and brings me a cup of warm water without being asked, and I hold it without drinking much of it.
Eventually he stands, stretches, and pulls me into a brief hug from behind, his chin resting on top of my head for a second.
"Don’t worry too much," he says. "I’m sure nothing else has gone wrong."
I nod.
He lets go and looks at me for a moment, then nods once like he has decided something, and heads toward the guest corridor without another word.
I watch him go.
By ten o’clock I give up and go upstairs to wait properly.
***
I hear the car at half past eleven.
I’m off the bed before I’ve made a conscious decision to move, my feet finding my slippers, one hand on the doorframe as I come out into the corridor. The house is dim and still around me, staff long since retreated for the night. I take the stairs carefully, one hand on the railing, and I’m crossing the entrance hall when the front door opens.
Bael steps inside.
I cross the distance before I’ve thought about it, my arms going around him, my face pressing against his neck. His arms come around me immediately, one hand pressing flat against my back, pulling me against him with a firmness that tells me more than any explanation could.
For a moment neither of us moves.
Then I become aware of something and open my eyes.
Grandmother is standing just inside the doorway, watching us with an expression that is entirely unreadable. She looks tired, more tired than I have ever seen her, but her posture is exact and her eyes are steady.
I step back from Bael quickly, my face heating.
"Welcome back, Grandmother."
She looks at me for a moment. Then something shifts at the corner of her eyes, the smallest softening, there and gone.
She gives a single nod, touches Bael’s arm briefly as she passes him, the lightest possible contact, and continues toward her wing without stopping.
I look back at Bael.
He looks exhausted in the specific way he gets when he has been running on controlled focus for too many hours and the focus has finally begun to cost him something. His tie is loosened. There are shadows under his eyes that weren’t there this morning.
Bael steps forward and pulls me back in, his arms coming around me carefully, mindful of my stomach. His face drops into my hair and he breathes in, slow and deep, and I feel something in him settle that had been held tight all day. I let my own shoulders drop, some of the hours of waiting releasing all at once against the warmth of him.
"You’re supposed to be resting," he says into my hair.
"I was resting," I say. "Upstairs... waiting."
He exhales slowly against the top of my head.
I pull back just enough to look at his face. "Tell me what happened."
***
By the time Bael finishes telling me everything, it’s past twelve thirty.
Ming alive. Jun Haowei’s involvement. The address, the raid, the fingerprints, the station. Grandmother in the corridor. All of it delivered in the dim bedroom while I sit beside him and listen, my hand finding his somewhere in the middle of it and staying there.
There’s a lot to take in. I know I haven’t fully taken all of it in yet. But sitting here right now, what I feel most is relief.
Pure and uncomplicated. Bael found the source of it. He dismantled it. And whatever comes next for Ming, the charges, the media, the legal proceedings, it already feels like the worst of it is behind us.
That’s enough for tonight.
***
We’ve shifted sometime in the last hour without either of us deciding to. Bael is lying down now, his head resting in my lap, and I have one hand moving slowly through his hair while he talks. His voice is unhurried, the way it gets when he has finished fighting something and is simply reporting on it.
"The evidence of Ming’s attempt on your life has already been submitted," he says. "The accident, Secretary Liu, the full chain. I made the Legal team file everything tonight."
I card my fingers through his hair slowly. "And the media?"
"Already running. Every outlet that carried the broadcast is now running the story of Ming being found alive. The investigation against me is formally dropped." He pauses. "The news companies that ran the story about your accident will be dismantled within the week."
I look down at him. "...Just those ones?"
"Yes."
I think about that for a moment, my fingers slowing in his hair.
"But what about the ones that kept calling you a murder suspect?" I ask. "Shouldn’t they go under too?"
Bael raises his head from my lap and looks up at me.
For a second I think he’s going to say something serious. Then his shoulders move, and the sound that comes out of him is something I don’t hear often enough, low and unguarded, the kind of laugh that doesn’t have any performance in it.
"Wow Runze," he says, with something in his voice I can only describe as fond disbelief. "I didn’t know you had it in you."
My face goes warm immediately. "I just... they were so horrible about you, it bothered me more than the ones that talked about my accident. At least that actually happened. They were just making things up."
Bael looks at me for a long moment without speaking, something soft settling in his expression.
"That makes two of us," he says.
I blink. "You were angry about them talking about me?"
"Furious," he says simply.
I don’t know why that makes me want to laugh and also press my face into his shoulder at the same time, but it does. Something warm and slightly ridiculous rises in my chest and we’re both smiling, and for a moment the last several days feel very far away.
Bael settles back into my lap.
I go back to his hair.
After a while his hand lifts, his fingers finding the platinum chain around my neck, tracing it slowly along my collarbone the way he sometimes does without seeming to realize he’s doing it. The diamond catches the dim light.
Then his hand curves around the back of my neck, gently, and he pulls me downward at the same time he rises to meet me, careful of the space my stomach takes up between us.
His mouth settles over mine with a soft, unhurried pressure, warm and cool against my lips.
He tilts his head, pressing his lips deeper into mine until the kiss turns slow and heavy. My breath catches, and whatever I was just thinking about slips completely away. When his tongue slides against mine, a small sound escapes my throat before I can stop it. My fingers tighten around the fabric of his shirt, clinging to him as my head spins.
When he finally pulls back I’m breathing harder than I’d like to admit.
Bael sits up, closing the small remaining distance between us, his eyes on my face with that particular focused look that means everything else has ceased to exist for him.
I wrap my arms around him before he can kiss me again.
He goes still for a moment, then his arms come up around me, one hand settling at the back of my head, the other moving in slow circles against my back.
We stay like that.
"At first," I say into his shoulder, "...I thought you had ordered your uncle’s death."
His hand pauses on my back.
"I’m really glad you didn’t," I continue. "That he was alive all along and things ended this way."
I pull back enough to look at his face. He’s watching me with an expression I can’t entirely read, something careful in it.
I reach up and touch his jaw.
"But Bael," I say, "if you had done it, I know it would have been because of me. I wouldn’t have blamed you."
He exhales.
The kind of exhale that sounds like something being released, slow and quiet, like he had been holding it without knowing he was.
Then he reaches up and curves his hand around the back of my neck again, tilting his head toward me.
I put both hands flat on his chest.
"Wait, wait, wait."
He stops. His eyes drop to my hands on his chest, then back up to my face, one brow lifting just slightly.
I scratch the side of my face with one finger, not quite meeting his eyes.
"Ummm."
I reach over to the nightstand without looking at him and pick up the book sitting there. I hold it with both hands and stare at the cover for a moment.
Then I look up at him.
My face is already burning.
"D-daddy?" I say. "Could you read us a bedtime story?"