Although Ren Qin had only moved in not long ago, she had made the apartment feel very homey, completely getting rid of that cold, empty, fully furnished model-unit look it had at first. A fluffy blanket was spread over the bay window in the living room, and the whole place had a warm, gentle color scheme. Even the half-open door behind her had a decorative hanging on the doorknob, with a tassel dangling from it.
But after Ren Qin said, “I live alone,” Chi Qing only felt that the moonlight shining in through the window made the whole room look especially cold and eerie.
The pitch-black crack of the door looked like a silent monster, quietly lurking behind Ren Qin.
“Meow.”
Gaogao still crouched warily at Ren Qin’s feet.
And this cat, which he didn’t particularly like, looked wrong too. It seemed tense, its fur slightly puffed up, restless and uneasy.
Chi Qing noticed that Ren Qin’s hair was also tied up messily today, with a strand stuck to the back of her neck. There were faint dark circles beneath her eyes, and a barely noticeable kitchen stain on her sleeve.
Her mental state really didn’t look too good. The fatigue was obvious.
Chi Qing couldn’t be sure whether things were really as he suspected.
“I’ve been looking for a roommate lately too. The rent here isn’t cheap,” Ren Qin said with a smile. “I listed the room on Anjia. The app will help promote the shared rental listing and see if there’s anyone suitable.”
Chi Qing hadn’t said a word the entire time, but suddenly asked, almost like he was checking her household registration: “How long has it been listed?”
Ren Qin paused, then still answered, “Almost a week… Why?”
Chi Qing: “No one’s contacted you?”
Ren Qin: “Not yet.”
Chi Qing: “What are your requirements for a roommate?”
“If I had to say, definitely a girl, with a good personality, clean, and someone who doesn’t mind cats,” Ren Qin said. She thought Chi Qing was asking because he wanted to introduce someone to her, so she asked hopefully, “Do you have a friend who wants to move out?”
Chi Qing slowly pulled a tissue from the side. He was still wearing gloves while eating, and the black fabric against the white tissue made a sharp contrast. He wiped the corner of his mouth and said, “No. I don’t really have any friends.”
Ren Qin: “…”
Naturally, Chi Qing couldn’t tell her about the things he’d heard in the middle of the night while he was out of control. People would easily think he was crazy, like he’d spent the night lying under her bed eavesdropping.
“There’s not much common ground between us, and not much to talk about,” he said. “I’m just making conversation out of politeness.”
Ren Qin: “…”
Xie Lin: “…”
Coming from him, that line wasn’t surprising at all. Compared to that, the questions he’d asked earlier—questions that had made Xie Lin somewhat suspicious—suddenly seemed perfectly normal.
“You should just eat,” Xie Lin said with a laugh, using the serving chopsticks to pick up a piece of stir-fried asparagus for him. “Don’t eat the spicy dishes. Your lips are already red.”
Ren Qin had said she’d only added a tiny bit of chili, but to people from other regions, that “tiny bit” might as well be a lethal dose. Chi Qing’s lips were red to begin with, and after one bite of the shredded potatoes, they looked even redder. Dark hair framing red lips—it was hard to look away.
Xie Lin rested an elbow on the table and tilted his head as he watched Chi Qing eat.
He noticed that Chi Qing didn’t say anything and just ate the food he’d picked for him. To Xie Lin, the fact that this germaphobic assistant was obediently eating food served by someone else was no small thing, so he picked up another bite for him.
Only after eating both mouthfuls Xie Lin had given him did Chi Qing react. His hand holding the chopsticks paused awkwardly.
Xie Lin: “Still eating?”
Clearly, before this, the two of them had had the kind of relationship where it was hard even for Xie Lin to get him to agree to a meal.
After one “course of treatment,” the chemical reaction between them had exceeded Chi Qing’s expectations.
Chi Qing put down his chopsticks. “…I’m not eating anymore.”
It was only after the meal that Ren Qin opened the bottle of red wine Xie Lin had brought.
She wanted to pour a glass for Chi Qing, but Xie Lin took the glass instead. “Give it to me. He can’t drink.”
Ren Qin thought to herself, this Mr. Chi upstairs really does have a lot of strange ailments.
By the time the meal was over, it was almost eight.
Outside, the sky was completely dark. The weather had been bad lately, and the heavy clouds made the night especially gloomy, the color of the sky an oppressive ink-black.
Ren Qin walked them to the door. She had just washed some fruit, and was wiping her damp hands on her apron when she was about to speak and suddenly saw Chi Qing staring straight at her with eyes darker than the night outside.
Chi Qing’s pupils were so black that, hidden behind his hair, there was no visible reflection in them. Cold and inorganic, almost inhuman. Ren Qin felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise under his gaze. She couldn’t read anything in his expression; she only felt as though something had fixed its eyes on her.
“Have you heard about the two recent cases?” he asked.
“The cases?” Ren Qin said. “You mean the Yangyuan and Tianrui ones?”
Chi Qing could only warn her in this indirect way: “You fit the kind of target this killer picks very well. Living alone, pretty, not in much contact with your family. Even if you disappeared for a month, you might not be discovered.”
He paused there. The way he looked at her made Ren Qin feel even more creeped out.
“If I were the killer,” he said, “I’d probably go after you.”
Ren Qin’s smile froze on her face. “…”
“Gaogao,” Ren Qin said after Chi Qing and Xie Lin had left, picking up the orange cat that had been circling around her feet the whole time, “that Mr. Chi probably just doesn’t know how to talk to people.”
The orange cat looked at her and let out a meow.
Ren Qin stroked it a couple of times. She had been busy with work lately and hadn’t spent much time playing with it. But this time, when she touched the back of Gaogao’s head, she felt that a small patch of fur seemed to be missing there. Lowering her head, she gently pressed aside the fur and examined it carefully, and found a small, inconspicuous wound.
She thought to herself, when did it get hurt? How did it lose a patch of fur?
It probably hadn’t done it to itself. Gaogao was a very lazy cat; if it could lie down, it would never squat, and it didn’t like dashing around either.
Just as she was thinking that, the doorbell rang again.
She thought it was the two upstairs neighbors coming back because they’d forgotten something, but when she opened the door, she found it was the neighbor across the hall, someone she’d only seen a few times since moving in. The opposite-door neighbor was a middle-aged woman with high cheekbones and monolids—the kind of person who looked difficult before she even opened her mouth.
And sure enough, the moment the door opened, the woman’s sharp, mean-looking brows lifted and she said in a shrill voice, “Oh good, finally caught you home for once. Can you do something about your cat? Why’s it making noise in the middle of the night, meowing all the time? I don’t object to young people keeping pets, but if you’re going to keep one, can you keep it under control? Don’t disturb other people’s sleep, alright?”
Ren Qin was dumbfounded by the tirade. Though she suspected the woman next door was deliberately picking a fight, she still explained gently, “There may be some misunderstanding. My cat is very well-behaved, and neutered cats generally don’t meow for no reason…”
The middle-aged woman’s shrill voice rose several degrees higher. “What misunderstanding? Oh, so you mean I’m misunderstanding you? Why would I misunderstand you for no reason? Your cat is noisy, that’s all. It was fine the first few days after you moved in. Seeing that you were a young girl from out of town living alone, I was even thinking of making a cake and bringing you a slice in a few days. Who knew? It only took a few days before the cat started making noise. Other people need to rest at night too—not everyone can sleep through a cat yowling like you can.”
“…”
Ren Qin was good-natured after all and didn’t want to get into a dispute with the neighbor, so she could only apologize again and again.
The woman gave her a sidelong glance, but her tone softened a little. “At least your attitude’s alright. I’ll let it go this time. Keep your cat under control. Don’t let it scream at night again.”
After seeing the neighbor off, Ren Qin crouched down and stared at the missing patch of fur on Gaogao’s head for a long time. Her earlier conviction—There’s no way my cat could have been meowing at night—began to waver.
Uncertainly, she thought: Could it really have cried at night? But why didn’t I hear it?
Was I just too tired lately?
It was an eerie thought, one that had no answer.
When she stood up, she suddenly remembered what Chi Qing had said before leaving, staring straight at her:
—“If I were the killer, I’d probably go after you.”
Ren Qin was still a girl, after all, living alone in such a big two-bedroom apartment, with two unsolved cases involving women who lived alone. If she said she wasn’t scared, that would definitely be a lie.
And once that kind of thought took hold, it was easy to become suspicious of everything.
There was clearly no one in the house but her, yet the curtains shifting in the wind, the sudden bang of the sugar jar being knocked off the coffee table by Gaogao’s tail, the pitch-dark bedroom, the tightly shut wardrobe—all of it created the feeling that someone might be hiding in the apartment.
It was the same feeling as after watching a horror movie, when you always feel there’s someone under the bed.
Ren Qin shook her head, trying to shake the feeling off. She bent down and picked up the sugar jar from the floor. Just as she was about to put it back on the table, her hand paused midair.
She blinked, shook the jar, and no sound came from inside.
“…It’s empty? I remember there were still a few pieces left.”
Ren Qin opened the lid. The jar was completely empty.
She stood alone in the empty living room while the curtains billowed even higher in the draft coming through the crack in the window.
Little details like this were easy to overlook in everyday life. She muttered to herself as she tossed the jar into the trash can, “I must be remembering wrong.”
Meanwhile—
After Chi Qing and Xie Lin went upstairs, Chi Qing stood at his door entering the keypad code. He had only entered four digits when Xie Lin, standing across from him at his own door, suddenly asked, “That thing you said before you left—was that just random small talk too, because you couldn’t think of anything else to say?”
Leaning against the coded lock door behind him, Xie Lin had made no move to go inside after reaching his door. He had simply been standing there quietly watching him, his gaze crossing the hallway and winding itself around him with quiet meaning.
“Assistant Chi,” he said, “you don’t seem like the type to casually talk about something like that.”
Chi Qing’s fingers paused slightly. The code stopped at the fifth digit.
He knew Xie Lin wouldn’t be that easy to fool.
“I was only stating an objective possibility,” Chi Qing said. “She really does fit the kind of conditions the killer looks for. The killer hasn’t been caught yet. Since she lives alone, it’s better for her to be careful.”
He couldn’t tell whether that answer had fooled Xie Lin or not.
Xie Lin only nodded and said in an easy tone, “You’ve learned to care about your neighbors. That’s progress.”
It was already hard enough for Chi Qing to explain logically the things he’d heard in the middle of the night, and on top of that he had someone like Xie Lin beside him—the kind of person who was as alert as a fox the instant there was even the slightest rustle in the grass. It made him irritable.
“Oh right, there’s another question I’ve been wanting to ask for a long time.”
As he spoke, Xie Lin took a few steps closer, the distance between them shrinking all at once.
Hearing that, Chi Qing frowned. He thought, I knew this guy wouldn’t be that easy to fo— Before the word had even finished forming in his head, Xie Lin had already stopped in front of him.
The man was a little taller than he was; when he lowered his head, Chi Qing could clearly see the upward slant of his brows and eyes.
Then Xie Lin said, “…Why are your lips so red? Do you usually wear lipstick?”
Chi Qing’s mind blanked for a second, and a vein in his temple jumped. “?”
What the hell was this man talking about?
Was he sick? Why would he wear lipstick for no reason?
Chi Qing had already been in a bad mood because of what he’d heard in the middle of the night before, so when he heard that, he replied coldly with sarcasm, “Try it and see if the color comes off.”
He had forgotten that Xie Lin was exactly the kind of person who would actually “try it” if you told him to—just like the first time they met at the clinic.
The way Xie Lin was standing in front of him now was actually somewhat ambiguous. Behind Chi Qing was the door; in front of him was Xie Lin.
Still bent slightly forward with his head lowered, Xie Lin leaned closer again, then lifted a hand, fingers slightly curved at the knuckles. With a soft laugh, he said, “Then I’ll try. Don’t get mad.”
Chi Qing blinked. He only had time to curse inwardly—fuck—before the man’s warm fingertip lightly brushed across his unnaturally vivid lower lip.
Then Xie Lin glanced at the spot he’d just wiped and found that his fingertip was perfectly clean, with no trace of color on it.
“…So you really aren’t wearing any.”
“…”
Pressing his lips together, Chi Qing’s mind flashed through countless ways to kill a person without leaving a single trace.
And every last one of them, he wanted to try out on Xie Lin.
