Chapter 138: He Won
The news anchor had repeated the same reassurance three times in the last hour and it wasn’t getting better with repetition.
Nothing changed, after all.
Temperatures were expected to stabilize. Municipal cooling centers remained operational. Emergency crews were working to restore power to affected districts. Residents were urged to remain indoors, conserve water and avoid unnecessary travel.
It was all becoming so mundane that it was almost ruining the fact that the world outside was dying. Or, at least their country was dying.
Behind the anchor, footage showed paramedics carrying an unconscious child through a crowd gathered outside a cooling center whose doors had never opened.
Zeyu watched the child disappear into an ambulance that couldn’t move given the fact that the road ahead of it had become a parking lot.
Cars filled every lane, their doors hanging open after drivers abandoned them, their tires melted to the pavement. Hundreds of people moved between the vehicles beneath umbrellas, blankets and pieces of cardboard held over their heads.
Some were still walking. Others sat wherever they found shade and waited for emergency workers who would never reach them.
The temperature displayed at the bottom of the screen had risen to 74 degrees.
Inside the shelter, cool air moved steadily through the living room.
A bowl of fruit sat untouched on the table. Condensation slid down the sides of four glasses filled with ice water, and the ventilation system continued its nearly silent work behind the walls.
Shichen had inspected it twice since Hanchuan carried Zhiyi upstairs, although every reading remained exactly where it should be.
Zeyu understood the impulse.
Jingwei had opened six security feeds he didn’t need. Qinghe had been staring at hospital reports for so long that he no longer appeared to be reading them. Shichen kept finding reasons to leave the sofa and check something.
Zeyu had remained where he was because someone needed to maintain the appearance that four grown men could sit in a room without unraveling.
He was brought out of his thoughts when a faint thud came from somewhere above them.
The sound was quiet enough that the news anchor nearly concealed it, but the sound that followed was not.
Zeyu looked toward the ceiling.
Jingwei’s expression didn’t change, but one of the security feeds expanded across the wall without him touching the controls. Qinghe lowered his gaze to the tablet in his hands. Shichen became deeply interested in the cooling figures he had already checked.
"Shichen, next time, make sure the rooms are soundproof," Zeyu joked. Or at least it would have been a joke at one point in time. Now it fell short, and everyone else in the room knew it, too.
"The walls are soundproof," Shichen replied. His attention remained fixed on the ventilation report. "The floor evidently required additional reinforcement."
Under any other circumstances, Zeyu would have laughed.
He waited for Jingwei to offer something dry and insulting or for Qinghe’s mouth to betray the smile he was trying to suppress. No one did.
The silence lasted long enough for another muffled sound to reach them.
Zeyu reached for his ice water and drank more than he wanted.
Hanchuan was upstairs with his wife.
There was nothing remarkable about that.
The two of them had been married for more than two weeks, and Hanchuan had carried her away from the communications wall with an expression that made his intentions obvious to anyone capable of recognizing desire.
Zeyu had recognized it.
And that was part of the problem.
He had also recognized the way Zhiyi looked at Hanchuan.
She had allowed him to lift her as if trusting his arms required no thought at all. She had rested against him and left the city behind because he asked her to.
Zeyu had been interested in her before the wedding, and he remained interested despite knowing that the distinction no longer mattered.
Hanchuan had seen her first—or perhaps Zhiyi had seen Hanchuan in a way she hadn’t seen the rest of them.
Either way, Hanchuan had married the woman, built the house, stocked it with thirty years of supplies and carried her upstairs while his four closest friends sat beneath them watching Yunzhou die.
He had won.
Zeyu paused for a second, the cup halfway up to his lips. The thought was ugly enough that he finished his water in one long gulp to avoid examining it closer.
Zhiyi wasn’t something to win.
She had chosen Hanchuan.
She had made that choice publicly in front of hundreds of people and privately every time she reached for him without flinching. Zeyu had no right to resent either of them because a woman he had begun wanting belonged to the man she wanted.
But no matter how many times he told himself that, it that didn’t make the wanting disappear.
What bothered him most was that Hanchuan hadn’t merely reached Zhiyi first. He had become the only man she seemed capable of wanting.
Zhiyi tolerated other people’s touch when circumstances required it.
Occasionally, she allowed one of them close enough to adjust her hair, guide her through a dangerous space or inspect an injury.
But with Hanchuan, there was no tolerance involved. She reached for him. She leaned into his hands and followed him upstairs while the rest of them remained behind.
Marriage had made the boundary unmistakable. Hanchuan had the woman, the private rooms and a future built around keeping her alive. Zeyu had been invited into that future as his friend.
That should have been enough.
Hanchuan had given him safety without demanding anything in return, and Zeyu would have struck anyone else for looking at his best friend’s wife the way he sometimes caught himself looking at Zhiyi.
None of that stopped the bitter thought from returning.
Hanchuan had everything Zeyu had chosen to leave behind—and the one thing Zeyu could not have even while living beneath the same roof.
Suddenly, Zeyu’s phone vibrated against the table.
The name on the screen brought relief so quickly that it hurt. Zeyu accepted the video call before the second vibration ended.
His mother’s face appeared beneath bright afternoon sunlight. She wore a wide hat and sunglasses, and a blue swimming pool stretched behind her toward a line of trees. Someone moved through the background carrying a tray of drinks.
"There you are." Her smile appeared immediately. "I was beginning to think you were avoiding us."
"I considered it," Zeyu answered. He turned the volume down before leaning back against the sofa. "Then I remembered how devastated you would be without my daily reassurance that I remain handsome."
"You look tired," she continued, like he hadn’t been joking.
"Handsome and tired are not mutually exclusive," Zeyu countered.