Chapter 4: The Wedding Night

The east wing was silent.

Lin Wan followed the maid up two flights of stairs, down a corridor lined with closed doors, past portraits of people whose names she would never learn. The house breathed around her the soft hum of climate control, the distant tick of a grandfather clock, the whisper of her own gown against the floor.

"Here we are, Mrs. Mu." The maid stopped before a door at the end of the hall. "Your things have been unpacked. His Grace's room is at the opposite end of the wing. You will not be disturbed."

His Grace. As if Mu Chen were royalty. As if this were a palace, not a prison.

"Thank you," Lin Wan said. The maid curtsied actually curtsied and disappeared.

Lin Wan pushed open the door.

The room was beautiful.

She hadn't expected that.

Cream-colored walls, a four-poster bed dressed in silk, fresh peonies on the nightstand. A walk-in closet the size of her old apartment. A bathroom with a claw-foot tub and marble countertops. Someone had even laid out silk pajamas on the bed pearl white, her size.

He prepared for me. He planned all of this.

The thought made her stomach turn.

She walked to the window. The grounds stretched below manicured lawns, a fountain that glittered under moonlight, iron gates in the distance. Beyond those gates was the city. Normal people. Normal lives.

She was on the other side now.

Lin Wan sat on the edge of the bed. The silk pajamas felt cool against her fingers. She should change. She should sleep. She should stop shaking.

But every time she closed her eyes, she saw the contract. Clause seven. No love. She had signed away her right to be loved.

A knock came at the door.

Her heart leaped into her throat. "Who is it?"

"Who do you think?"

Mu Chen.

She stood, smoothed her gown, and opened the door exactly two inches. "The maid said your room is at the opposite end."

"It is." He leaned against the doorframe, still in his white shirt but now with the top two buttons undone. His hair had fallen slightly over his forehead. He looked almost human. "I wanted to make something clear."

"What?"

He pushed the door open wider — not barging in, but not asking permission either. He stepped inside and looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time.

"This is your space," he said. "I won't come here uninvited. Not for that."

For that. He meant sex. The heir clause.

Lin Wan crossed her arms over her chest. "Then why are you here now?"

"Because you looked like you were going to faint in the study. And because I don't want a wife who spends her first night crying herself to sleep." He walked to the nightstand and picked up one of the peonies. Twirled it between his fingers. "This arrangement doesn't have to be cruel, Lin Wan. It only has to be honest."

"Honest." She laughed a bitter, broken sound. "You blackmailed me into marriage. You wrote a contract that calls me a broodmare. And now you're standing in my room talking about honesty?"

Mu Chen set the peony down. He turned to face her fully.

"Do you want to know the truth?"

"I don't even know who you are."

"You did. Once." He stepped closer. One step. Two. She backed up until her knees hit the bed frame. He stopped, leaving a foot of space between them. "Ten years ago. A garden. A handkerchief. You said I looked less scary when I was hurt."

Her breath stopped.

The memory surfaced like a bubble from deep water — a moonlit garden, a bleeding man on a bench, her mother's handkerchief. She had been eighteen, invisible, wandering the gala because no one wanted to talk to her. She had seen him sitting alone and thought, He looks sad.

"You," she whispered. "That was you?"

"My father had just died. My uncle had tried to kill me at the gala. I was bleeding and angry and ready to burn the world down." His voice was low, rough. "Then a girl in an ugly dress knelt beside me and tied a handkerchief around my ribs. She told me to smile more."

Lin Wan's throat tightened. "I didn't even remember your face."

"I know." He smiled — not coldly, not cruelly, but with something that looked almost like pain. "That's what destroyed me. You saved me, and you didn't even think I was worth remembering."

"I didn't—"

"You don't have to explain." He stepped back, putting distance between them. "You asked if this marriage is a transaction. Yes. But not the kind you think. I didn't marry you for an heir, Lin Wan. I married you because I've spent ten years trying to forget you, and I failed."

The room was too quiet. The peonies smelled too sweet.

"Then why clause seven?" she asked. "If you feel… whatever you feel… why write 'no love' into a contract?"

Mu Chen's jaw tightened. "Because I don't know how to love. I know how to own. I know how to protect. I know how to destroy anything that threatens what's mine." He looked at her then really looked, with something raw and unguarded in his eyes. "Clause seven isn't for you. It's for me. It's me admitting that I'm not capable of giving you what you deserve."

Lin Wan didn't know what to say.

She had expected a monster. A cold, calculating CEO who saw her as a womb with a signature. Instead, she got… this. A broken man standing in her bedroom, confessing his failures like sins.

"That's very poetic," she said finally. "But it doesn't change the fact that I'm trapped here."

"No," he agreed. "It doesn't. But it might help you sleep better, knowing that the man who trapped you is more pathetic than evil."

He walked to the door.

"Mu Chen."

He paused.

Lin Wan clutched the silk pajamas to her chest. "The handkerchief. My mother's. Do you still have it?"

A long silence.

"Every night for ten years," he said quietly. "I sleep with it under my pillow."

Then he left, closing the door softly behind him.

Lin Wan stood alone in the beautiful room, surrounded by peonies and silk, and tried to hate him.

She couldn't.

And that terrified her more than any contract ever could.