Surrounded by Wolves
Jiang Wu felt uneasy. She looked at Third Brother, who had gotten hurt like this because of her. She really couldn’t bring herself to leave him alone.
In the end, Jiang Wu turned back to Huo Qingzhi. “I’ll go home with them first. You… you have things to do anyway. Why don’t you go take care of them?”
Huo Qingzhi’s expression darkened. “He’s a grown man. He shouldn’t need you worrying about him.”
“That’s different.”
Jiang Wu didn’t argue with him any further. She simply said goodbye. “Then we’ll get going.”
A wound that had gotten wet needed to be treated as soon as possible. Huo Lingyi still hadn’t had his injuries tended to, and now he had a fever on top of that. If the wounds became infected later, it would only be more troublesome. And regardless of whether Huo Lingyi had ended up like this because of her, he was still family, someone she had grown up with since childhood.
Whichever of the three of them had ended up like this today, whatever the reason, she could never bring herself to walk away and leave them.
Huo Qingzhi stood where he was, watching Jiang Wu leave with the other two.
Before going out the door, Huo Lingyi paused for a moment, turned his head, and shot him a glance loaded with meaning.
The door closed, leaving Huo Qingzhi alone in the room.
The deep night was silent and cold. Two of the lights in the hall had been switched off. It only made things dimmer where he stood.
Huo Qingzhi’s eyes felt dry and sore. Through the hazy glow reflected on the glass doors, he watched her leave with someone else.
Only after the car drove away did her figure disappear, leaving nothing on the glass but his own reflection.
He understood Jiang Wu. And he understood his third younger brother just as well.
Huo Lingyi had grown up starved for attention, so he had always liked causing trouble, and especially loved hurting himself.
And Ah Wu had always been softhearted.
Only then did Huo Qingzhi understand what Huo Lingyi had meant earlier when he had said, with that deliberately provocative look in his eyes—Absolutely necessary.
That little bastard.
~~
Huo Lingyi knew what he was doing was wrong, but so what?
If physical pain could ease another kind of pain—the kind that clawed at his heart and gnawed at his insides—then he was perfectly willing to make the trade.
He hadn’t always been a good brother.
When he was very young, he had been jealous of his newborn little sister. Why did she have everything from the moment she was born?
Everyone doted on her, loved her, revolved around her. They were both children of the same family. Yet no one cared about him.
At first, he would angrily steal his little sister away and hide her. While she was still too young to speak, he was always trying to bully her and make her cry, but the moment she saw him, she would stop crying.
She wanted him to hold her, babbling as she burrowed into his arms.
Like a little ball of sticky rice.
Once she learned to talk, it became even worse.
Brother this, Brother that.
Brother, are we playing hide-and-seek again today?
Annoying.
That was what Huo Lingyi thought and had even told her so. But then Jiang Wu would go play with one of her other brothers instead. He would regret it.
Yet all it took was buying her a little piece of cake, and once again she would beam at him and say, “I love Brother the most.”
Huo Lingyi knew. In this family, she was the one who cared about him most. She would ask why he was always unhappy.
When he was blamed for something for no reason, she would demand that Daddy and Mommy apologize to him. She would insist that the entire family celebrate his birthday.
Unfortunately, she treated everyone in the family with the same wholehearted devotion.
And Huo Lingyi never lost that bad habit of trying to draw more attention to himself. He always wanted just a little more than everyone else got; even the tiniest bit more would do.
That was why he eventually fell in love with off-road racing—a dangerous, high-risk hobby. His parents hadn’t wanted him doing it, but Huo Lingyi loved it.
The more they objected, the more clearly he could feel that he wasn’t entirely absent from their hearts after all, and that only made him love the sport more.
Perhaps he really was rebellious.
But she had said, “A rebellious brother is still my brother.”
In other words—no matter what you become, we’ll always be family.
And so, Huo Lingyi accepted his own flaws, accepted all of himself.
When had it started? Huo Lingyi couldn’t remember anymore.
In truth, when he first learned that Jiang Wu wasn’t his biological sister, his first reaction had been rage.
That could not be true. Someone must have made a mistake.
The whole world could turn out to be fake, but Ah Wu couldn’t be.
The hot-blooded young master stayed furious for a long time. He wanted to pick a fight with everyone he saw, wanted to kick a stray dog just for being in his path.
Until, eventually, he calmed down, accepted it, and got used to it.
The first time Huo Lingyi realized something inside him had changed was when he entered his first off-road race, and she had been worried about him.
Before he set off, Jiang Wu had anxiously blurted out, “Don’t drive too fast.” Then, realizing it was a race, “I mean…”
She racked her brain, desperately trying to find the right words.
Huo Lingyi teased her as usual, mimicking her tone. “You mean…?”
In the end, all she managed was, “I’ll wait for you to come back.”
He couldn’t describe what he felt at that moment.
Huo Lingyi only knew that someone was waiting for him to come home. For a long time afterward, he remained trapped in a strange emotion he couldn’t escape.
He kept asking himself—
Am I wrong?
Then what would make it right?
Thoughts he could never speak aloud could only be locked inside his room with him. There, he talked to the lit-up screen, and the algorithm gave him an answer.
There is nothing wrong with love.
Love her.
Go mad for her. Mark her. Possess her.
In truth, the algorithm had only given him the first sentence. Everything after that, he had forced it to say, over and over, himself.
Two years ago, when he learned that Huo Qingzhi was sending Jiang Wu to the United States for further study, Huo Lingyi secretly applied to join a research project at the same university, gone over to work on a project — the project was artificial intelligence.
Huo Lingyi and Jiang Wu rented apartments in the same building, directly across the hall from each other.
Outside his door, he was her good older brother. Behind closed doors, however, he would switch on the AI robot he had personally trained every single day, telling it as casually as if he were discussing the weather, “I wanted to do bad things to her again today.”
“Esteemed Creator, those are not bad things. That’s what people who love each other are meant to do.”
“But she isn’t my lover yet.”
“Then make her your lover.”
Huo Lingyi thought; he really did like the AI robot he had created. It knew all his twisted thoughts about her. And now, Jiang Wu was right there, tinkering with his robot.
She muttered to herself as she searched, “How do I adjust the room temperature?”
No sooner had she said it than the robot’s screen lit up. “I’m here. Adjusting the room temperature for you now. What temperature would you like?”
The exact same tone it used for “make her your lover.”
Jiang Wu told it, “Set at 26 degrees, with ventilate.”
“Understood.”
Jiang Wu cupped its square little face. “You’re so cute.”
“Thank you. So are you.”
Huo Lingyi had taken a quick hot shower to wash off the dust, dried himself, and stood at the bathroom door. Watching her chat away, all innocence, with the companion who held all his twisted thoughts he had ever had.
Until she noticed him standing there.
“You’re done,” Jiang Wu called him over. “Need to get the medicine on right away.”
She found the supplies from around his room with practiced ease, and waited for him to sit down.
Huo Lingyi asked, “Where’d Huo Yingli go?”
“He went to get medicine with the doctor. Should be back soon.”
Jiang Wu took a cotton ball, soaked it in iodine, and leaned closer, but it still wasn’t close enough. She told him, “Come a bit closer.”
Huo Lingyi lowered his gaze, glanced at the round stool beneath him, and suddenly reached down and gave it a tug. The stool bumped right up against Jiang Wu’s legs. Her hand froze mid-motion.
Huo Lingyi settled himself in front of her, perfectly at ease, with his legs spread at an angle, framing her in.
Seeing him so unbothered, Jiang Wu didn’t think much of it. She dabbed the cotton ball to the wound on his cheek.
Huo Lingyi was a bit taller than her, and even seated, he kept that advantage of height. He had to lower his head; she had to tilt her face up to make it easier.
Jiang Wu focused intently on the wound. “You really should stop getting into fights. You’re already so prone to getting hurt.”
She’d lost count of how many times, over the years, she’d put medicine on him like this.
Huo Lingyi asked, “Do you find me troublesome?”
“No.” Jiang Wu didn’t know why he’d think that. “I worry about you.”
Huo Lingyi knew — that was exactly what he wanted to hear. But hearing it for real still left an indescribable soreness in his chest. He looked at her eyes, so close to his. Bright and earnest, studying his wound with total seriousness.
They were very close. A little closer and he could…
“How about this,” she said, cutting off his thoughts. “Let’s make a bet.”
Huo Lingyi’s gaze lingered a long moment on her lips before he dragged it up to her eyes. “What kind of bet?”
“Within a year, no more getting hurt. If you lose, you owe me one favor.”
“And if I win?”
Jiang Wu, not wanting to come out behind, tried to wriggle out of it. “If you win, shouldn’t you just be happy you’ve got a healthy body?”
Huo Lingyi’s intent was plain. “If I win, you owe me a favor too.”
Seeing she couldn’t talk her way out of it, Jiang Wu said, “Fine.”
Huo Lingyi went quiet for a moment, only aware of his head growing heavier, his cheeks growing hotter. The slowly climbing heat and the soft, cool scent coming off the person in front of him were both starting to blur his mind.
So, he voiced a request that would normally sound unreasonable. “Tonight… could you not leave?”
Jiang Wu misread it. “I’m not leaving. I’ll just be staying home.”
Huo Lingyi knew she’d misunderstood, but he just didn’t know whether it was intentional or not, or perhaps she just instinctively believed there could never be any other possibility between them.
Huo Lingyi lowered his eyes, unable to keep from thinking of what he had heard earlier that day.
Done playing brother and want to be her man now?
He brought it up. “What Zheng Senze said earlier…”
“He was just talking nonsense. I won’t take it to heart, and you shouldn’t either.” Jiang Wu finished applying the medicine and felt his forehead again. “If the fever’s making you feel awful, go lie down for a bit.”
She stood up, muttering to herself, “Where’s Second Brother? Why isn’t he back yet?”
Huo Lingyi took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He couldn’t tell if it was the high fever or her getting up to leave that made his head throb so badly.
Jiang Wu walked over to the small cabinet in Huo Lingyi’s room and asked him, “Do you have any fever medicine in here? Might as well take some now.”
Not knowing what was in his cabinet, she opened it up to look.
She heard Huo Lingyi rise from the stool and drag his heavy body toward her, his voice hoarse. “Left side, third shelf.”
Jiang Wu opened the left cabinet, but the third shelf held nothing but some boxes of parts. No medicine box. She went ahead and checked a few other spots too.
Huo Lingyi’s voice came closer, his breathing noticeably heavier. “Not there?”
Jiang Wu turned back, about to tell him no, when his shadow loomed over her!
Huo Lingyi braced himself against the cabinet and pinned her against it with a thud! The sound she made, squeezed against it, was almost like a small cat’s.
His forehead buried itself in the curve of her neck, and only then did the pounding in his head start to ease.
His fingers tightened on the cabinet as he fought to hold back his impulses.
Jiang Wu, pinned rigid, felt the man’s excessive heat spreading over her whole body, eroding her, while beside her ear his breathing grew heavier and heavier.
Each hot breath brushing against her neck raised a fine layer of gooseflesh.
A wave of guilt rose in Huo Lingyi. “Sorry.” But he really did want to hold her.
Then, her voice—a little flustered but understanding. “It’s all right.”
Such a good girl. Huo Lingyi’s other hand couldn’t help but come to rest on the cabinet shelf behind her waist. He leaned in another step, pressing her harder.
“Wait…” Jiang Wu tried to push him upright. “If you can’t stand, maybe we should get you to bed.”
She probably had no idea how suggestive that sounded.
Just then, Huo Yingli returned. He heard what Jiang Wu had said, and his steps visibly faltered. He looked up, and his expression turned cold.
Hearing him come in, Jiang Wu called out for help. “Second Brother, come help me.”
Huo Yingli, taking in the scene before him, set down what he was carrying at the entryway. Jiang Wu struggled to support Huo Lingyi, but Huo Yingli appeared at her other side, still in his trench coat, carrying a faint lavender scent as he steadied her arm.
But the moment Huo Lingyi caught sight, from the corner of his eye, of Huo Yingli’s hand on her, he instinctively wrapped his arm around Jiang Wu’s waist, pulling her toward himself, and asked Huo Yingli warily, “What do you think you’re doing?”
Startled by Huo Lingyi’s sudden move, Jiang Wu was caught off guard and stumbled straight into his chest. But Huo Yingli didn’t let go either, and she shot back, “What are you doing?”
Unable to make Third Brother let go, and unwilling to yank at Jiang Wu roughly, Huo Yingli had no choice but to step in closer. “Let go.”
But Jiang Wu happened to be wearing a denim halter top that night. The bare skin of her back pressed suddenly against the buttons of Second Brother’s coat, and her spine went rigid at once. “No, wait, that’s…”
Trying to escape the cold press against her back only pushed her closer against the burning chest of the sick man in front.
Huo Lingyi’s breathing had grown noticeably heavier, and he stubbornly refused to hand her over. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
Huo Yingli let out a laugh. “Fever’s cooked your brain? I’m not Zheng Senze.” As he spoke, one hand held Jiang Wu’s wrist firmly, the other pried Huo Lingyi’s arm off her waist.
Sick as he was, Huo Lingyi’s strength was no match for Huo Yingli’s. But both of them, afraid of hurting Jiang Wu, kept miscalculating their moves.
In the confusion, Jiang Wu stumbled a step and pitched straight into the open front of the coat on the man behind her.
Huo Lingyi’s eyes, already faintly reddened from the fever, went redder still, watching her fall into his brother’s arms. He dragged his heavy body forward another step.
The light in front of Jiang Wu’s eyes was blocked out again by the man bearing down on her, but her arm was still caught in Second Brother’s grip behind her. For a moment she could neither push away the one in front of her, nor escape the one behind.
It was strange.
So strange that when Huo Lingyi came at her again, Jiang Wu panicked. “Wait, Brother!”
Not until a third pair of hands appeared — Huo Qingzhi, coming into view, pulling them apart. Only once she was free of that bizarre tangle did Jiang Wu feel the air around her ease at all. She instinctively ducked behind Huo Qingzhi, though she still felt hemmed in, watched, preyed upon from every side.
The three of them stood together, a moment of silence and standoff.
Huo Qingzhi first scolded the older one. “He’s sick, and you’re acting up too?”
Huo Yingli said, unhurried, “Eldest Brother, be reasonable. I was just here to help.”
“Then mind your own business.”
Having said that, Huo Qingzhi turned to look at Jiang Wu. She met his gaze and saw a chance to leave, hurrying to smooth things over. “Well, then, you… Second Brother, watch over him while he takes his medicine. I’ll head back first.”
She did not linger any longer and left the room with Huo Qingzhi. Only once she was fully clear of that situation did Jiang Wu let out a breath. But before long, she noticed something off about the man walking in front of her.
They walked the whole way without a word. Once in the elevator, Huo Qingzhi finally asked, “Why did you come with me?”
A strange question. Jiang Wu thought that tonight, all three of them were acting a little off. “Didn’t you come to get me?”
“And if I did come to get you, you’d just go with me?”
Jiang Wu could tell Huo Qingzhi was upset over her not going home with him earlier. “Of course I’d go with you, since you came to get me.”
Sure enough, he brought it up. “Back at the station, then, why didn’t you come with me?”
It was Huo Qingzhi, after all, who had just rescued her from that awkward situation, so Jiang Wu pushed back weakly. “Third Brother was in that state; I couldn’t just pretend not to see it.”
They reached her room by then, and there was no one else around. Huo Qingzhi, with no thought of keeping his distance, opened Jiang Wu’s door himself. The door slammed shut with a bang. Her heart gave a startled leap.
Only once the door was closed did Huo Qingzhi let his temper show, unguarded. “So why did you run away just now? Is it because you realized those two aren’t easy to handle?”
Before she could get a word in to smooth things over, he kept going.
“They’re men, Jiang Wu. Can you not just think of them as two ordinary men who happen to share no blood with you? And yet you’d dare stay with them, alone, deep into the night, at the hour a man’s desire runs strongest.”
Jiang Wu’s ears rang hearing this, almost unbearable to listen to. She couldn’t bring herself to agree. “I can’t just think of them in such a filthy way. Just like I don’t think that way about you. And besides, aren’t we often alone together late at night? You’ve never…”
Before she could finish, she heard his footsteps closing in. They were still only just inside the entryway, had not even stepped further into the room, had not turned on a light. As he came closer, what little space she had left to move in shrank again. In the dark, Jiang Wu made out the blurred shape of him and stepped back on instinct, but the door was right behind her.
Huo Qingzhi stopped in front of her, and as he leaned down toward her, his hand reached out and flicked the fingerprint lock on the door. “Never what?”
A single beep sounded.
From that moment, only he could open or close her door. Jiang Wu had no idea, but some part of her sensed, faintly, that she had nowhere left to go. She stammered out, “You’ve never… done anything bad to me.”
In the dark, her back pressed flat against the door, and the cool cedar scent of him drew closer and closer until her chin was caught in his hand and lifted up. His breath was right there in front of her as he asked, “What counts as bad?”
Jiang Wu couldn’t answer. But he made the first move, lightly brushing a kiss on her cheek, the way he always had. “Like this?”
Her lashes trembled. Then, she heard his voice by her ear, answering his own question. “This one doesn’t count, because you’ve let me do it plenty of times before. But do you even know what this is?”
“This is a kiss. The kind that only happens between lovers. For grown adults, kissing a cheek and kissing anywhere else means exactly the same thing.”
His voice came low and rough, laced with lingering frustration, but holding a hint of calm before a storm. Sensing his intention, she gripped his hand on her chin. Before she could pull free, that cedar scent came crashing over her entirely, and his cool, faintly damp lips sealed over hers without warning.
The sudden, overwhelming intrusion pulled a few thin, helpless sounds from her throat. Every inch of her felt, in that instant, as though a current had run straight through her. Her body drew in tight, and she fought back a little harder, but the hand trying to pull away only found itself held all the more firmly in place.
Beneath her soft palm, his muscles were unmovable. The overwhelming rush made her instinctively recoil, but there was no escape from it. Nothing to do but wait until he chose to stop on his own.
Huo Qingzhi rested his forehead against hers and asked, “And this, does this count?”
Jiang Wu couldn’t get a word out, wave after wave of numbness running straight up her spine to the crown of her head. She was forced to tip her head back, meeting his press, and in that moment the difference in their heights showed itself at its starkest.
“This shouldn’t count either.” He spoke it against her lips. “The moment you let me kiss you, you should have known I’d do this to you.”
Jiang Wu, unable to bear it, turned her head away.
“Hm?” Huo Qingzhi watched her reaction and turned her face back to him. “Never thought about it?”
Still held with her chin tipped up, her breath ragged, a flush of red bloomed at the corners of her eyes.
Uneasy, her voice weak. “I haven’t.”
“You should have,” Huo Qingzhi said, lowering his head to press in again. “Jiang Wu, I thought I’d made what I want from you obvious enough by now.”
“You know it. You just don’t want to admit that your own brother is the kind of bastard who’s developed feelings for you.”
That night on the yacht, her birthday, she should have known then that kiss on the cheek had only ever been a test. She tacitly approved of this test. Had even, somehow, been surprised it was only ever a test.
Jiang Wu, breathless and inexperienced, gathered enough strength to push him back when he closed in on her again. But the separation lasted only an instant; his long leg had already wedged between hers, blocking any way out with ease.
He released the hand gripping her jaw, only to close the other around the back of her neck instead, pressing in on her harder than before, pinning her. “Why push me away? Weren’t you happy enough to come back here with me a minute ago?”
After all the chaos before, Jiang Wu found herself once again entirely under his control, forced to tilt her head back and meet those dark, unreadable eyes straight on.
“You went with me to get away from them. What makes you think I’m any better?”