Surrounded by Wolves
Jiang Wu couldn’t imagine it.
She had entered the gifted-youth program at Peking University at sixteen, unfamiliar with so many things on her own, and it was also the first time she had ever lived so far away from home.
By the third month, over something trivial, she’d broken down and called home in tears, saying she missed them. Dad and Mom were very worried, but they had things they couldn’t get away from. So, they asked Huo Qingzhi to go stay with her for a few days.
Not long after Eldest Brother arrived, Second Brother and Third Brother took turns coming to see her as well. Then Jiang Wu would feel like she was being too needy, as though she were causing trouble for her brothers.
After that, Huo Qingzhi would travel back and forth between Beijing and Hong Kong every month to see her.
When she was seventeen, he bought an apartment in Beijing, right next to her school. Then, carrying out the task of establishing a new company under the group’s regional operations, he relocated to Beijing to set it up.
When she was nineteen, the group’s operations in Beijing were entering a crucial period of growth. Huo Qingzhi was practically based in Beijing by then, living with her. At the time, honestly, what mostly bothered Jiang Wu was how rigidly proper he was about everything.
The climate in Beijing was very different from Hong Kong, and autumn and winter were especially cold, but during the transitional seasons, Jiang Wu still dressed in her usual style.
Whenever Huo Qingzhi saw her, his expression would turn stern, and he would bring her a jacket and make her put it on. If Jiang Wu refused, he would simply hold her in place and put it on her himself. She would end up wearing an utterly mismatched jacket over her pretty little dress.
One day, Jiang Wu came home fuming, saw Eldest Brother sitting on the sofa, and yanked her coat off, throwing it straight at Huo Qingzhi’s face. “They all say I’m a kid with parents who keep a strict eye on me. Maybe I even have a curfew and have to come home early.”
She deliberately made her displeasure sound sarcastic. “Are you happy now, Daddy?”
Huo Qingzhi took the coat down from his face, still carrying her young, fragrant warmth, and his expression darkened further.
Jiang Wu thought he was about to lose his temper, so she wisely stopped while she was ahead and went back to her room.
How could she possibly have imagined that, at that time, Huo Qingzhi had already begun to feel desire for her that he knew he should never have had?
The jacket she had thrown at him was now being gripped, slowly working it over and over in his hand.
If anything, that period of her going to school away from home was when Jiang Wu had been most exposed to new, unfamiliar things. Sometimes her classmates would persuade her to go watch horror movies. Afterward, too frightened to sleep alone, she would sneak into Eldest Brother’s bed in the middle of the night.
Half-asleep, Huo Qingzhi would sense something and, the instant she lifted his blanket, catch her by the wrist, demanding sharply, “What are you doing?”
Jiang Wu would put on her most pitiful, still frightened from the horror movie face. “I’m scared to sleep alone, Brother.”
Huo Qingzhi’s voice was hoarse, as though he had only just woken from sleep when he said, “You should be more afraid of sleeping with me.”
At the time, Jiang Wu only thought his tone sounded a little too cold and stern. She obediently fell silent and didn’t think much of it.
When she saw him heading toward the living room, she reached out and caught the edge of his shirt. “Can’t you stay with me for a while?”
Huo Qingzhi’s whole body stiffened. Then he gently pulled her hand away. “I’ll sleep in the living room. Leave the door open. You’ll still be able to see me.”
At that moment, Jiang Wu’s irritation with him had completely outweighed her fear of the horror movie. She tossed and turned in his bed, soaking it in her own scent without meaning to, and soon fell asleep.
She would never have imagined what that stern, proper eldest brother had been thinking at the time. Nor what Huo Qingzhi had been thinking the next day, lying in the bed that still carried her scent.
Jiang Wu left the Confession Cave with her thoughts in complete disarray. Amid the eerie atmosphere surrounding her, thick with a sense of sin and dark thoughts, she saw Huo Qingzhi standing in the courtyard. He stood there quietly, some distance away, daylight pooling over his black overcoat. Cold and distant as ever.
Jiang Wu’s heart skipped a beat, and for some reason, goosebumps rose across her skin.
The instant her eyes met his deep, still gaze, as tranquil as a cold abyss, what she saw no longer seemed to be the reassuring steadiness she had always known in him. Instead, it was as though she had glimpsed beneath the surface — countless dark things underneath, waiting to swallow her whole.
Jiang Wu walked out as calmly as she could.
A faint, gentle smile appeared on Huo Qingzhi’s face. “How did you end up here?”
Jiang Wu smiled too and casually brushed it off. “I took a wrong turn.”
He lowered his eyes. “Then what did you see?”
“Nothing.” Jiang Wu licked her dry lips. “That little monk told me this is the Chamber of Repentance.”
Huo Qingzhi asked as though he genuinely didn’t know, “Is that so?”
Hearing him pretend not to know made Jiang Wu’s goosebumps intensify. “It’s a little scary.”
“You think it’s frightening?”
“Mhm.”
Huo Qingzhi seemed rather regretful about that. Frightening or not, it changed nothing now. She still had to be his wife.
At the family gathering after the ancestral ceremony, Jiang Wu deliberately kept some distance between herself and Huo Qingzhi and sat beside Huo Lingyi instead. Her excuse was that they were sitting according to age.
Huo Qingzhi kept looking at her, his thoughts impossible to read.
Huo Lingyi, on the other hand, seemed quite pleased, remarking casually, “Eldest Brother is indeed the oldest. He gets along better with the uncles and is more suited to sitting with the elders.”
“We always have a bit of a generation gap when we talk to Eldest Brother.”
Huo Qingzhi said nothing. Before the meal was even over, Huo Lingyi was called away by a phone call. Apparently, his supercar had caught fire.
Jiang Wu sat there distracted. Still unable to fully process everything, her mind kept circling back — every single thing that had happened between her and Huo Qingzhi since she’d turned nineteen.
Each one now unthinkable, knowing that her impeccably measured eldest brother had, this whole time, been holding back his desire for her. She had originally thought that Huo Qingzhi’s thoughts had only crossed that line after they were married—that at most, he had developed inappropriate feelings for her within the past two years. She had never imagined it had been six years.
Six whole years.
It wasn’t until her phone vibrated that Jiang Wu finally snapped back to reality. She lowered her eyes to the screen.
Shan Lan had sent her a message: [Remember to bring your ID to work tomorrow. We’ll need them for the application for the person in charge of the collaborative project.]
Jiang Wu simply replied: [Okay.]
But with her mind still in complete turmoil, Jiang Wu forgot them anyway the next day. During working hours, she had to rush back home from the museum in a panic.
The housekeeper saw that Jiang Wu had only just left and was already back, and curiously poked her head out. “What happened?”
“Nothing. I left something behind.” As she spoke, Jiang Wu put her shoulder bag on the table and headed upstairs to the study to look for her documents.
Halfway up the stairs, she suddenly remembered that she usually kept her identification documents with Huo Qingzhi. He was the one who stored and looked after them. But where, exactly, she had no memory.
Jiang Wu stopped at the staircase.
The housekeeper came over. “Do you need some help?”
After thinking it over, Jiang Wu said, “I just can’t remember where I put them.”
“Sir hasn’t left yet. He’s on an international call upstairs. Would you like to wait until he’s finished and ask him?”
Jiang Wu still felt somewhat reluctant to face him directly. “Let’s not ask him yet. I’ll think about it.”
After the housekeeper left, Jiang Wu went to search the study first. Whenever she needed something in the past, she would tell him, and he would take care of everything for her.
Huo Qingzhi had also told her where he kept them, but Jiang Wu had never paid close attention. She guessed that something this important was probably kept in the safe.
But the safe…
Relying on instinct, Jiang Wu searched around the study for half an hour. She finally found it.
When Huo Qingzhi had gotten married, he had stored all of his passwords with her. The password to their household safe was 0908. The date they had gotten married.
Jiang Wu entered the password, and the safe opened. Inside were not only her ID but some of Huo Qingzhi’s belongings as well. Her ID was tucked neatly into a small pouch, set carefully to one side.
Jiang Wu recognized the pouch and took it out of the safe. She finally breathed a sigh of relief. She was just about to close the safe when her sleeve brushed against some documents, accidentally knocking a thick thread-bound book from the side.
Jiang Wu glanced down and bent over to pick it up. She was just about to put it back when the motion of picking it up caused the pages to fall open.
And Jiang Wu happened to see one sentence: [She isn’t my biological sister.]
Her hand, halfway through putting it back, froze.
Jiang Wu stared blankly for a moment, silently fixed on the handwriting across the page. Only then did she realize that this was a diary. It looked as though it had been used for many years. The kraft-colored paper had yellowed with age and developed a slightly rough texture.
Judging from the wear alone, a diary written on paper like this had to be several years old at the very least. The fountain-pen handwriting also looked old. The thread-bound book had begun to deteriorate, with half the binding threads already broken.
Jiang Wu flipped through it. In an instant, the pages spilled loose, scattering everywhere!
Fanning out across every corner around her.
The ink showed faintly through the thin paper, the strokes sharp and unmistakable.
And there was only one sentence: [She isn’t my biological sister.]
The page beside it said the same thing. [She isn’t my biological sister.]
And the one after that — [She isn’t my biological sister.]
The scattered pages seemed almost to spread from her feet, growing and climbing around her like a shadow that refused to leave. Hundreds of pages lay scattered around her, nearly half the book gone. And there was only that one sentence.
A statement that seemed almost ordinary at first became deeply unsettling when it appeared again and again across page after page, endlessly repeated. There was no telling what had been going through the writer’s mind each time he wrote those words.
What had driven him to the point where he could no longer write anything else?
Why could he only repeat that one sentence with almost obsessive intensity?
The more Jiang Wu looked, the more the hairs on her body seemed to stand on end, her chest heaving.
The study smelled faintly of books and ink in the early spring air. The towering bookshelves surrounded her, imposing and oppressive, carrying the cool, shadowed feeling of old wood.
Jiang Wu felt as though she had accidentally uncovered someone’s secret evidence of wrongdoing. Yet somehow, she was the one who felt guilty.
As though she were afraid that, by accidentally uncovering someone’s true nature, they would never treat her the same way again. As though the darker impulses they had kept hidden would finally be revealed. She hurriedly gathered the pages from the floor, stacking them one by one, and with every page that passed through her hands, that same demonic whisper passed before her eyes again.
It was strange.
So strange that Jiang Wu didn’t dare examine them too closely. She had no idea how many of those repetitive diary pages she had picked up. There seemed to be more than a hundred.
The dates were not consecutive. Usually, several days would pass between entries, as though the writer only returned to the diary whenever some new thought about her surfaced.
Every three to five days, there was another entry. Which meant that, taken together, the dates spanned at least two years. Until, further on, the entries grew more and more frequent. Then, finally, the page in her hand contained something different.
[I want to kiss her.]
AAAAAAAH!!!
The sudden shift, and the shock of seeing it, made Jiang Wu throw the page away as though she had touched something burning hot. But not long after throwing it away, she had no choice but to pick it up again, looking utterly miserable.
Forced to face the full horror of what was written, page after page. She tried to comfort herself. It wasn’t as though this was the first day she had learned what he was thinking.
The next page finally contained more than a single sentence.
But it read—
[She was so cute today.]
[I want her.]
Jiang Wu’s hands trembled.
Jiang Wu’s hands shook as she gathered the scattered mess of pages, nearly with her eyes closed, and stuffed them back as fast as she could. She could hear her own heartbeat pounding faster and faster, her breath coming ragged and uneven.
From the corner of her eye, she caught glimpses of several more pages.
[I dreamed about her again.]
[The poor thing cried in my dream, and I felt disturbingly pleased.]
…
[Am I really such a bad person?]
…
[Ah Wu, could you stop calling me “Brother”?]
[She agreed.]
…
Jiang Wu had no idea how she managed to gather everything and stuff it back into the safe. But she’d clearly done it in a mess, disordered enough that anyone would know at a glance someone had just uncovered a secret.
Jiang Wu’s breathing was still ragged. She forced herself to take the diary back out and scramble to put everything back the way it had been.
The more she rushed, the clumsier her hands got. It took her forever to make everything look roughly the way it had before. Then, in a panic, she put everything back and closed the safe.
Whose diary was this?
Jiang Wu leaned against the bookshelf, her whole body tingling. But inside Huo Qingzhi’s safe, there probably couldn’t be anyone else’s belongings.
It was almost as though, just by reading through it once, the person who had written it had already treated her in his imagination exactly the way he wanted to.
No.
Not once.
Many times.
What a pervert!
Huo Qingzhi really was unbelievable!
Jiang Wu was still thinking about it when voices suddenly came from outside.
The housekeeper was talking to Huo Qingzhi. “Madam seems to have forgotten something and came back for it.”
Huo Qingzhi asked, “Forgot what?”
“She didn’t say.”
“I see.”
With that, Huo Qingzhi reached for the study door. The fingerprint lock gave a soft beep and opened. The moment the door swung open, Huo Qingzhi saw Jiang Wu dart out like a rabbit.
“I’m done!”
“I’m— I’m heading to work now.”
Before either the housekeeper or Huo Qingzhi could react, Jiang Wu had already rushed downstairs.
Right now, she couldn’t remember a single thing else — her whole mind was still consumed by what she’d just read.
It didn’t take long for Huo Qingzhi to notice that something was wrong with her, though he couldn’t figure out why.
Without saying a word, Huo Qingzhi walked into the study. The things beside the safe had been moved, leaving obvious signs that someone had gone through them.
She must have come looking for something. But that wasn’t the important part.
What mattered was the corner beneath the desk, where a single yellowed piece of kraft-colored paper quietly lay, unnoticed. Huo Qingzhi’s dark eyes caught the faded handwriting on it, and he bent down to pick up the page that had slipped under the desk without Jiang Wu noticing.
[She isn’t my biological sister.]
Now he understood why she had been acting like that.
Huo Qingzhi frowned. Alongside that, he realized that Jiang Wu seemed to have mistaken Huo Yingli’s diary—the one containing some rather questionable thoughts—for his.
In truth, most of the diary’s actual content was perfectly ordinary — the disturbing parts had been the pages he’d torn out separately. By sheer coincidence, the only section Jiang Wu happened to see was this part.
Meanwhile, downstairs, Jiang Wu was just about to leave when a delivery employee from a gift service arrived at the entrance.
A large gift box behind him, he asked, “Excuse me, does Miss Jiang live here?”
Jiang Wu answered when she heard him. “That’s me.”
“This is a gift from your husband. We hope you have a wonderful day.” The employee handed the package to Jiang Wu, confirmed the delivery details, and left the courtyard.
Taking it, Jiang Wu couldn’t help thinking to herself. Even if he had bought something to win her over, there was no way it could change the fact that, in her mind right now, he was still completely unbelievable.
She placed the gift on the table beside her. After undoing the decorative ribbon and lifting the lid, she found a tiered gift box with several drawer-like compartments.
The first things she saw were several little dresses. One of them was the same design as the one that had previously been torn. Beside it were several other pretty little outfits in different styles. But the farther down she looked, the stranger things seemed.
There were several more little dresses, the same style as that bikini in red, black, and white.
Jiang Wu hadn’t thought much of it at first, simply looking through one of them when her finger accidentally caught on the silk bow at the chest and the entire front panel of the little dress came apart.
Entirely. Undone.
Jiang Wu’s mind immediately exploded with a high-pitched scream!
She slammed the lid shut again. Her entire body felt hot and flushed. She was practically burning with embarrassment.
The box shifted slightly, a rattling clatter of metal sounding from inside.
Clink, clink. It sounded like chains. So many different chains!
Jiang Wu didn’t dare look again, but the movement had jolted loose a hidden compartment in one of the drawers, revealing the corner of a fur-lined cuff and a small leather whip.
Her mind flashed back to the diary at once—those disturbing phrases about “ruining” things and other words she would rather not think about.
What is he trying to do?!
What is he even planning to do with all this?!
What does he want from her?!
For a young woman with no experience of such things, encountering such suggestive words and unfamiliar items for the first time was overwhelming enough, and worse, realizing it was someone close to her, secretly harboring all of this about her. Jiang Wu hurriedly closed the gift box and rushed out of the house.
The moment she stepped outside the courtyard, Cherry, who had been waiting for her, looked over and asked, “Did you get your ID?”
Jiang Wu stopped dead in her tracks, despairing. “Um… I think I left them in the study.”