Surrounded by Wolves
Huo Qingzhi stepped around him, heading straight into the room.
Huo Yingli braced one hand against the doorframe and stopped him. ” Huo Qingzhi, do you know what I’ve felt like all those times?”
“Watching you come out of her room late at night, again and again.”
“Lying to me that you’d coaxed her to sleep.”
“Whatever you’ve done to her,” Huo Yingli leaned in a little closer, “I’ve done to her too…”
Before Huo Yingli could finish, his eldest brother, a man who prided himself on his own discipline, seized him by the throat and slammed him back against the entryway shelf with a bang!
After the clatter and clink of things toppling, the two of them fell silent for a moment, both careful not to wake Jiang Wu. She didn’t wake.
But Huo Yingli’s expression grew darker. “Such a big reaction. What exactly did you do to her?”
“So afraid I might do the same?”
Huo Qingzhi didn’t waste any more words on him and went straight into the room. He rounded the entrance and crossed the sitting area, where he saw Jiang Wu curled up peacefully beneath the covers on the bed in the inner room.
She was wearing her nightdress.
Huo Qingzhi remembered clearly that wasn’t what she’d been wearing when she came in. “Who changed her clothes?”
Huo Yingli laughed quietly. “She has hands and feet of her own. Did she need me to change them for he?”
“Where’d she change?”
Huo Yingli said, deliberately provoking, “She took them off in front of me and changed.”
Huo Qingzhi knew he was deliberately trying to rile him up. He ignored him and went straight to take Jiang Wu away.
“Hey, hey,” Huo Yingli caught his wrist, smiling as he warned him. “Eldest Brother, if you dare take her out of here tonight…”
“I’ll tell Mom and Dad you dragged your little sister off in the middle of the night, and who knows what you did.”
“And what about you?” Huo Qingzhi found no threat in that at all. “How clean are your own hands right now?”
“Exactly, so both of us are just as guilty now.” Huo Yingli looked at him. “Neither of us gets to steal her from the other.”
” I’ll let you stay here and watch us if you want. Just don’t interfere when I’m close to Ah Wu.”
The two of them turned their heads and discovered that someone else had appeared in the room at some point.
Huo Lingyi, leaning against the wall, gaze moved away from the sleeping Jiang Wu and settled on them. He grinned, flashing his canines. “What are you two up to? Why didn’t you call me?”
Both Huo Qingzhi and Huo Yingli went instantly on guard at Huo Lingyi’s presence.
Huo Yingli caught on, slowly. “You bugged my place again?”
Huo Lingyi didn’t bother answering that. He looked thoroughly pleased with the scene in front of him instead. “With Wen Ciying gone, I don’t think there’s anyone left who could take her away from the three of us now.”
Jiang Wu had fallen asleep watching a movie.
Second Brother had picked something so boring that she’d forced herself through it just to be polite, and knocked herself right out in the process.
Her sleep, that whole night, had been a hazy, unsettled thing. Even though she was in sunny Dubai, she felt as though she were deep inside a damp, eerie den. Lush vegetation surrounded her from every direction. It seemed she wasn’t the only one there. Every time she shifted, she brushed against something warm.
In the dream, the den belonged to wolves. A tail draped over her; its whole form curled around her and enclosed her in its embrace.
In the dark, a pair of clear eyes gave off a strange, cool green glow, watching her, slowly scenting every inch of her. Before long, a second one joined the den. Then a third.
There were so many that Jiang Wu could no longer make them out clearly. All she could feel was that they blocked out the sky, surrounding her with waves of warmth.
And those eyes, watching her like they wanted to tear her apart, grind her down, devour her whole. Nothing about her was hidden from them. They were intruders in the den.
And somehow, they felt like intruders in her world too.
The wolves around her had originally maintained clear boundaries and a sense of order between them. Until one of them, she couldn’t tell which, quietly crossed a line, using its position to brush against the hair at her forehead, leaving warm breath and a kiss there without a sound.
Then another wolf discovered it. Everything immediately descended into chaos.
A wolf’s tail tightened around her waist, while others wound around her arms and legs. Rough and powerful, pinning her utterly still.
Warm, damp breath spread across every inch of her, and beyond the kiss left at her brow, soft, intimate touches followed one after another — her nose, her cheek, the curve of her neck, her shoulder, her arm, even down to her calf.
Soft fur brushed against her, and Jiang Wu struggled on instinct, trying to break free of this bound, coveted position, but the pressure on her arms and legs only grew clearer. So distinct that it no longer felt like a dream.
Every inch of skin they touched sent a shiver of numbness through her. She couldn’t tell whose touch belonged to whom.
Her tightly curled body was gradually drawn open, soothed by even softer, dense fur.
In her haze, she heard a familiar voice. It echoed through the wolves’ den, intimate and breathless, sounding uncannily like Second Brother.
“Does it really have to be a fight over her? Actually, I can accept it, too. We all can dote on her together.”
Jiang Wu’s heart was racing. When she woke, she stared blankly at the sunlight that had already spilled into the room.
Morning had come.
The sunlight fell warmly over her, soft and golden. It was completely different from the eerie darkness of her dream. So why had she dreamed of that?
Dreamed of falling straight into a den of wolves. Being gnawed at. Being fought over.
A delayed sense of unease fluttered through Jiang Wu. There was clearly no one else in the room now. She was lying right in the middle of the large bed. No trace of anyone else having slept there.
It must have been because she had spent the whole night watching a documentary about the great East African animal migration with Second Brother. That had to be why she dreamed about this.
Jiang Wu pulled herself up. After taking a moment to recover, she got out of bed and found her phone.
Only once she saw her inbox sitting clean and empty, no other messages, did she relax and put the screen away, heading out to the sitting room.
The message Huo Qingzhi had sent her had long since been deleted by Huo Yingli, who’d borrowed her phone the night before.
Jiang Wu had no idea what had happened during the night, nor did she know that Huo Qingzhi was currently holding back quite a bit of anger.
And now the room really did contain only Huo Yingli, exactly as it had been before she fell asleep.
When Jiang Wu walked out, she immediately apologized to Huo Yingli. “Sorry, I fell asleep while we were watching.”
Huo Yingli looked up at her for a moment after hearing her apology. A faint, almost imperceptible smile played at the corner of his lips.
Such a good little bb.
She’d spent the night here and had somehow managed to make quite a scandal over it, and she was still apologizing. Looking, for all the world, like some little succubus who’d be bullied by humans and still felt she owed them all an apology.
Huo Yingli said nothing of what had happened the night before, and handed her a hotel invitation instead. “There’s a beach pool party at the hotel today.”
Vacationing in Dubai practically demanded a beach and a pool.
Most hotels ran their own pool parties — blue sky, white clouds, palm trees, gleaming skyscrapers, an endless stretch of beach, the whole standard package.
The pool party itself was a paradise of bikini fashion. Depending on the party’s theme and the hotel’s dress code, everyone attending picked out a different style of bikini to match.
Jiang Wu wasn’t opposed to going, but she hesitated slightly. “If we don’t go today, Mom and Dad will probably want to go tomorrow.”
They weren’t going to hang out with that couple. Aside from a few unavoidable spots, they tried to keep their itineraries carefully apart.
But wearing something like that around her brothers still made Jiang Wu feel a little…
Perhaps noticing her discomfort, Huo Yingli found a perfectly reasonable excuse. “Lingyi and I are going to play beach volleyball. We’ll be right nearby. Just call us if you need anything.”
Jiang Wu immediately brightened and agreed. “Okay.”
She went back to her room to change, then arranged to head over with them.
Jiang Wu carefully picked out an emerald-green satin swimsuit, paired with a green velvet cropped top and a short skirt, tying the top neatly at the chest. A modest yet breezy look, entirely appropriate.
Once she had changed, Jiang Wu went straight to the third-floor sitting room of the villa to wait for them. Soon, she heard footsteps coming from the hallway.
Huo Qingzhi emerged from the far end of the corridor, from the direction of his room.
Jiang Wu pressed her lips together slightly. She could feel his gaze settle directly on her, direct and burning. Even though, for a pool party, what she wore wasn’t exactly revealing.
Huo Qingzhi’s gaze slowly traveled over her light, delicate outfit before he looked away. He said nothing. Instead, he walked over to the shelf nearby and asked, “Who are you meeting?”
Jiang Wu stole two glances at him. “No one in particular. Second Brother and Third Brother are coming with me.”
“Do you want to come?”
Huo Qingzhi wasn’t interested in this kind of activity. He picked up a pair of beach shorts from the shelf nearby. They were the hotel’s complimentary pool party attire. “This is what they’re wearing to keep you company?”
Looking at Huo Qingzhi’s completely serious expression, Jiang Wu’s impulse to tease him won out over her common sense. “You could wear these and keep me company too, you know.”
Huo Qingzhi turned to look at her, his eyes dark and unfathomable, revealing no emotion.
Jiang Wu wisely fell silent, muttering as she looked away, “I was just joking.”
“They’re not keeping me company either. They’ll just drop me off and go straight to beach volleyball.”
Jiang Wu couldn’t even picture Huo Qingzhi actually wearing that, joining in with her.
Out in public, he was always so untouchably refined, composed, and cold. A man like that, stripped down, was nothing like an ordinary person. He’d give off, in an instant, an intense sense of invasion.
Jiang Wu still remembered that time — the sweeping, powerful line of his shoulders and collarbone, the hormone-charged heat rolling off his chest. That was what danger looked like on someone untouchable, the moment his own territory had been breached — the threat surfacing from the inside out. Before anyone else could see through him, he’d already moved to strike first.
Like now, Huo Qingzhi asked, “You want to see it?”
The question made Jiang Wu’s whole body tingle, but she figured there was nothing to be afraid of. They were on vacation with their parents. There was really nothing he could actually do — just his usual bluster, trying to intimidate her.
Jiang Wu lifted her chin. “If I want to, will you go with me?”
Huo Qingzhi gave her no answer for the moment, only walked toward her.
But Jiang Wu was thoroughly enjoying herself now, knowing Huo Qingzhi was very conservative about this sort of thing. His reaction told her something useful — that apparently even he had limits somewhere.
He planted both hands on the sofa she was sitting on, trapping her inside.
Seeing his reaction, Jiang Wu, instead of her usual reaction, laughed and deliberately said, “You probably won’t come with me. After all, your desire for me is already very obvious.”
She used his own words to suppress him. “If you came with me, would you be content to just play the part of Brother?” She looked straight into the murky depths of his eyes. “Won’t you want to do something else?”
The more she talked, the more playful she became, and she leaned in a little closer. “I’m a little curious, actually — do you still feel desire for me, right now?”
Provoked again, Huo Qingzhi’s dark pupils narrowed, watching her. “You think that with Mom and Dad here, there’s nothing I can do to you?”
Jiang Wu glanced away, then told him, “Mom and Dad are right downstairs. They haven’t even left for the charity dinner yet. If I called out, they’d hear me.”
She continued to provoke him. “What’s wrong? I’m just inviting you to the beach party. If you can’t go, just stay here.”
“Eldest Brother, is there something you want to do that Mom and Dad can’t come up and see?” Jinag Wu kindly reminded him, “If you can’t, you’d better hold yourself back.”
Jiang Wu found it hard to describe the exhilarating feeling of retaliating against Huo Qingzhi.
As she spoke, she got up, pushed away the man who was looming over her, and was about to go check why Second Brother still wasn’t ready yet.
She hadn’t taken two steps before Huo Qingzhi caught her wrist and pulled her straight back down onto the sofa.
He bent over her, pressed against the curve of her neck, and called her by a name he rarely used. “Huo Wenni.”
“I don’t undress in public because I’m married. Not because I’m afraid of you.”
As he spoke, he cupped her cheek. “As your husband, I won’t interfere with your normal activities while we’re on vacation. But you should also be prepared that I will be collecting some compensation from you.”
The moment he finished, a cool kiss landed on her neck without warning. Jiang Wu flinched away twice, only to be held fast, and just then the sound of a door opening came from a nearby room. The warm breath and grinding against her neck, along with the creak of the wooden door, both hit her senses at once.
Huo Qingzhi still managed to rise and step away before Huo Yingli’s door fully opened.
Huo Qingzhi understood Jiang Wu’s behavior. It was the New Year. Her spirits were high with everyone around her. His wife was young and easily took advantage of being in a crowd to make jokes she wouldn’t normally dare make, waiting for him to deal with her later.
Jiang Wu briefly remained in that somewhat unnatural state as she slumped onto the sofa.
When she sat up straight, her hair was slightly messy. Nothing anyone would notice without looking closely.
But Huo Yingli noticed.
His eyes flicked from the corner toward Huo Qingzhi passing by nearby. Huo Qingzhi ignored him, walking straight past and out.
Huo Lingyi also came out from his room after Huo Qingzhi left, joined them in the third-floor sitting room, and asked casually, “Eldest Brother’s not coming?”
“He’s not coming.” Jiang Wu brushed off Huo Qingzhi’s matter and walked toward them. “Let’s head out, then.”
Jiang Wu walked ahead of them. A faint dark-red mark showed, unannounced, at the curve of her neck, exposed to the two men behind her. But both of them, in unspoken agreement, said nothing.
Jiang Wu walked a little faster than usual.
Once she was out of earshot, Huo Lingyi murmured to Huo Yingli, “Did we go too far last night?”
Huo Yingli turned his head. “What?”
Huo Lingyi gestured. “That mark on her neck, which of us left that last night?”
Huo Yingli took a breath. “That doesn’t look like something from last night at all.”
Last night, the three of them had, in fact, stayed with Jiang Wu while she slept, and something did happen in the middle of the night, but it had all been small, harmless mischief. She wasn’t woken up, let alone with Huo Qingzhi watching over her.
There was no way any of them had left a mark on her neck. That mark was fresh.
Not far off, Jiang Wu, probably noticing they hadn’t caught up, stopped and waited for them. The two of them tacitly fell silent again.
They walked Jiang Wu to the poolside, then headed off to the beach.
Huo Yingli reminded her, “Don’t drink anything given to you by strangers. If you run into trouble, call us. We’re not far away; we can hear you.”
Jiang Wu agreed. “Okay.”
With that, the two of them left. Their spot wasn’t just within earshot – it was within sight, too. One look up, and they could see where Jiang Wu was.
In truth, a private resort community like this wasn’t likely to have many people with bad intentions lurking around. But who could really say it for sure? After all, Huo Yingli considered themselves to have bad intentions toward her.
Although Huo Qingzhi didn’t go to the pool party, he stood on the tech tower in front of the pool beach. In front of him, a massive floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the pool, the palm grove, and the endless stretch of sea all at once, including that flash of emerald green and snowy white in the pool.
Jiang Wu’s outfit was emerald as the base, with thin black tulle layered on both sides, making fair skin appear even more captivating.
The satin shimmered like jewels in the sunlight; a string of jewels hung from her waist, pulled tight and dangling between the white feather-like wings at her chest. Her soft, dark hair fell loose in waves, faintly curled. Emerald tassels threaded through it too. She looked like a Western Region princess emerging from an ancient desert castle. In perfect harmony with this desert city around her.
Huo Qingzhi watched her. At some point, footsteps sounded behind him. He didn’t even need to look up to know who it was. “Why aren’t you playing your beach volleyball anymore?”
The answer that came had nothing to do with Huo Qingzhi’s question. “You know perfectly well that I won’t let go. There’s no need to keep provoking me.”
“Why do you think I’m provoking you, and not just doing something perfectly ordinary with her?”
Huo Yingli, in a simple shirt and trousers, leaned against the glass beside him, watching the same figure. “You know exactly why, in your own heart.”
“You know what I feel for her. When you took my diary, you must have read everything in it, Eldest Brother.”
Huo Qingzhi had noticed something off about Huo Yingli a full two years before he’d noticed it in Huo Lingyi. As the eldest brother, the moment he noticed something wrong in either of them, he’d stepped in immediately. But intervention was useless; Huo Qingzhi knew that now.
Some things, the harder you suppress them, the more violently they surged back up. Especially since Huo Yingli had never once believed he was in the wrong.
Huo Yingli had always believed that if Jiang Wu hadn’t been his sister, but just a friend, a classmate, someone in his circle, he’d only have fallen for her sooner.
Huo Yingli was younger than Huo Qingzhi, though not by much. For a stretch of their childhood, the environment they grew up in had been exactly the same. In the same house, listening to their parents fight. Things thrown, things broken. Then living through the family’s upheaval — their parents’ divorce.
Whatever the underlying conflict, a divorce born from a broken marriage always left its mark on the children caught in it. And theirs wasn’t an ordinary family besides, uncles and relatives with their own agendas, the press outside always hungry for a show.
Huo Yingli had grown used to chaos and turmoil, used to outsiders cornering him to ask about things at home, used to certain relatives treating him like a fool, sowing discord between him and his parents. Or badmouthing his mother and father right in front of him, then watching him lose his temper like some kind of spectacle for their own entertainment.
He and Huo Qingzhi had ended up with the same core wound, but entirely different ways of handling things. He told himself he didn’t care, and made sure everyone else believed it too. He could tear his own wound wide open and still eat, still drink, still go on having fun as if nothing had happened.
The turning point in all of this was around the time Jiang Wu arrived. The chaos of his life came to a stop. He had a little sister now.
How to even describe the sense of security Jiang Wu brought him. She was a child who’d had no shortage of love since the day she was born. And yet she seemed to take only the share that was hers, and hand the rest out freely to everyone around her. She never held back in giving. Giving, to her, was the smallest, least significant thing in the world.
Which was exactly why she could bid tens of millions on a piece and turn around and donate it to a museum without a second thought. Buy one, donate one away.
A little girl who loved hugging and kissing people, coaxing them into happiness. Without a shred of ulterior motive, no other purpose behind it at all. At her core, Jiang Wu carried a kind of honesty and openness that no one else in this family had.
Perhaps it was thanks to her biological parents.
Huo Yingli believed that a family where everyone secretly cared about one another, yet too twisted to say so, needed exactly this kind of outlet for love.
They simply needed to love her. To give her the affection buried deep inside them, all the feelings they could never bring themselves to say aloud. And she would turn that love into the most straightforward kind of response and return it to every one of them.
Huo Yingli knew — she wasn’t the one who needed this family. This family needed her.
Huo Yingli needed her too.
If she was his little sister, then what he felt was familial love. If she wasn’t his little sister, then what he felt for her was simply love.
Was there really a difference?
None at all.
Only that, once he’d learned the truth, it was inevitable that something closer to romantic feeling would emerge.
Huo Yingli had always been at peace with that. Even when Huo Qingzhi had confiscated his diary several years ago, he hadn’t cared in the slightest.
Huo Qingzhi knew all of this. Which was exactly why he knew that Huo Yingli’s line “there’s no letting go” hadn’t been a provocation. It was the truth.
He meant it.
Huo Yingli had come to tell Huo Qingzhi that no matter how far things went between them, he would rather share her than step aside.
He would never leave. Never.
After Huo Yingli left, Huo Qingzhi stood alone, looking down at the figures below.
Another Western man had appeared, approaching Jiang Wu to flirt. This one she seemed somewhat satisfied with, letting him stay by her side a while longer.
For a moment, Huo Qingzhi found it difficult to breathe. He loosened the tie that had been cinched tightly around his collar and gripped it in his palm.
He could understand Huo Yingli’s feelings, but he wasn’t nearly as generous as his younger brother.
Every person who wanted to get close to Jiang Wu, he wanted to make them disappear forever, including what Huo Yingli had just said.
As Huo Qingzhi listened in silence, he didn’t know how many times he repeated the same words in his mind: He’s my biological brother. He used them to remind himself that he couldn’t kill him.
Ah Wu was simply too dazzling.
Huo Qingzhi gripped the tie from his shirt, tightened it in his palm, yet merely having it wound there felt strangely unsatisfying. He wanted it wrapped around someone else.
Fastened with sleeve garters, so that with the slightest tug, she would come back to him, letting him brand her with his mark. Anyone who saw her would know who she belonged to.
But the discipline and propriety he had lived by all his life also made Huo Qingzhi understand that this was wrong.
She shouldn’t belong to anyone. She belonged only to herself.
Caught between those two opposing impulses, he was slowly being consumed.
~~
By evening, the pool party finally ended after everyone had had their fill of fun.
Jiang Wu draped a large shawl around herself against the chill, enthusiastically saying goodnight to the new friends she had made before heading back with them to their respective vacation villas.
At last, on a wooded path so dark she could barely see her own hand in front of her, she ran into Huo Qingzhi.
He stepped out of the shadows with a trace of cold air clinging to him. The nervous tension in Jiang Wu’s chest eased for a moment. “You scared me. Why are you only getting back now too?”
Huo Qingzhi still held the tie he hadn’t put away. “Same as you, having so much fun outside that I forgot to come home.”
“I was even considering whether I should spend the night outside.”
The tie hung at his side, wound around the long, sinewy back of his hand, veins standing out beneath the skin. It tightened, revealing a barely perceptible sense of restrained strength.
He was indirectly mocking Jiang Wu for having spent the previous night in Huo Yingli’s room, but the implication was far too subtle.
And because Huo Yingli had deleted the message Huo Qingzhi sent her the day before, Jiang Wu had no idea he was angry. Instead, she became even more curious. “What could possibly be so much fun that you don’t even want to come back?”
Huo Qingzhi simply looked at her. “If you want to know, come back to my room with me. I’ll show you exactly what’s fun.”
Jiang Wu sensed that something was off, but couldn’t quite put her finger on what. She curved her eyes into a smile and brushed it aside. “It’s too late, Brother.”
“Mom and Dad are still here. You should go back to your room too.” She even added considerately, “Get some rest.”
As she spoke, Jiang Wu returned to her own room on her own. The moment she closed the door, her phone suddenly rang.
On the black incoming-call screen, the cold, stark name “Huo Qingzhi” appeared. For some inexplicable reason, a layer of cold sweat broke out along Jiang Wu’s back.
She answered.
Huo Qingzhi’s voice came from the other end. “Are you in your room?”
“Yes. What’s wrong?”
“Go close all the curtains in your room, including the ones in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows.”
Huo Qingzhi’s request was strange.
But Jiang Wu thought perhaps she had been wearing too little, and without the curtains drawn, people outside could easily see her. So, she did as he said and closed all the curtains in the room.
Her bedroom faced the sea, with light coming in from three sides. Once every curtain was drawn, it quickly became a sufficiently enclosed and private space. Yet the vertical folds of the curtains, drawn together around her, faintly resembled the bars of a tiny cage.
Huo Qingzhi patiently waited until the timing was right before asking her, “Done?”
“They’re closed.”
The very next instant.
From the phone in her hand, and from just outside her door, at the exact same moment, came Huo Qingzhi’s hoarse voice. “Jiang Wu. Open the door.”