It was deep into a night when the family was already listing, surrounded on every side, the kind of night in which even the walls seemed to listen. Marco watched his mother—Lian—moving through the hours with a spine that remained unnaturally straight despite the way she had been thinning day by day: bargaining with solicitors, sparring with old retainers, circling the lawyers like a predator that refuses to show fatigue. The sight should have steadied him. Instead, something in him flinched.
For the first time, the calculation he had been nursing about Zola made him feel a hot, scalding shame—not the clean shame of a mistake, but the crawling disgrace of a man catching sight of his own ugliness. His mother was throwing herself in front of the ship as it sank, stuffing the cracks with her bare hands, and he—he had been quietly plotting how to haul up a piece of her lost blood and use it as driftwood. The awareness lodged in him like a splinter under the skin, small enough to ignore for a second, sharp enough to make every nerve ache.
He finally spoke. His throat was dry; his voice came out scraped raw, tentative in a way that sounded almost like confession. He said the girl's name aloud, gave it up in full, as though handing over contraband still warm from the body.
The moment the name left his mouth, the study fell into a dead stillness.
The fire in the grate crackled with nervous little snaps. Light and shadow trembled across Lian's face—and then her face went suddenly, violently still, as if every muscle had been ordered to freeze.
First came pure, almost blank astonishment—not theatrical, not performative, but the stunned look of someone hearing a word they have never heard before and yet somehow recognise in their bones. She had never seen that child. The child had been torn out of her life and sealed away, existing only as a smudged silhouette at the most painful point of midnight—an ache without a face.
And then astonishment was covered over, rapidly, by something more complicated: a blade-flash of recognition that hurt (so it was true, then; the "error" had a body, a name), a shock as if an invisible hand had reached down and flicked her fate into a new position, and—beneath that—depths of guilt and icy estrangement, sealed under years of dust, suddenly boiling up in her eyes.
For a few seconds it looked as if the whole buried thing might tear through her.
But Lian did what she had always done. With a will like steel, she forced everything back down. She gathered the chaos, compressed it, crushed it into shape. Whatever emotion had surged was seized and refined into two cold, appraising lines of sight—sharp as needles—driven straight into Marco's face.
She looked at him—her son, the one she had poured herself into, the one she had raised as both revenge and future, the only hope she had ever allowed herself to keep—and something in her expression shifted with a bleak, almost sardonic intelligence. It was as if Fate, that most calculating dealer, had quietly slipped the worst debt of her life into the same hand as her most carefully cultivated asset. The silence spread in the room, dense enough to press on the ribs, heavy enough to flatten a heartbeat.
It went on so long that Marco began to feel he might be swallowed by whatever storm was forming inside it. He almost regretted speaking. Almost reached, in his mind, for the old instinct: retract, deny, reframe.
Then she spoke.
Her voice was unexpectedly even—so calm it was worse than shouting. It had the quality of a frozen lake: smooth on the surface, and under it a violent, unseen current with the power to numb the soul and drag it into depth.
"Zola…" Lian repeated the name slowly, as if tasting the syllables against the inside of her mouth, testing their texture—strange, and stabbing all the same. There was no grief in her tone, no joy, no softness. Only a tiredness that sounded like being struck by a fact you cannot outrun, and a cold, clinical curiosity.
"You found her," she said. Not a question. A statement. A diagnosis.
Then, after the briefest pause: "It seems you know… more than I expected."
She did not ask Marco how he knew. She did not demand explanations, nor did she lunge toward confession as if starving for it. Instead—after that short, lethal stillness—she began to dissect a part of her past that had long since stopped living in any ordinary sense. She spoke with a calm so surgical it was frightening, as if she were reading out someone else's medical file. Only the occasional glint in the depths of her eyes—cold as quenched steel—betrayed what lay beneath the flatness: the scar tissue, the magma, the ruin.
She spoke of the postnatal months as a kind of walking death: the body moving, the mind absent, the world muffled behind glass. She spoke of the bar nights—alcohol and strangers' warmth used like a crude anaesthetic, a desperate attempt at self-erasure. She spoke of the pregnancy not as accident, but as a twisted, vicious thrill—because for a moment it felt like retaliation. Against her husband. Against her father. Against the whole world that had reduced her to an object, a contract, a decorated pledge. It was the most brutal kind of revenge—and also the most powerless.
She told him about her mother—devout, rigid, armed with scripture like a blade—who condemned her with one breath and saved the child with the next. How that same woman, with the efficiency of someone disposing of a hazard, had arranged for Zola to be removed at three months old, sent away as if she were contraband, and ordered that there would be no meeting, ever, at any cost. How the child was not "given up" but processed—handled like a dangerous item that had to be sealed and hidden before it contaminated anything else.
She mentioned, too, the moment the truth surfaced and the patriarchs erupted—the two father-figures whose authority could not tolerate a challenge. Their rage was not merely the humiliation of infidelity. It was the fury of men whose power had been mocked. A crown struck. A god laughed at.
And then the compromise: the filthy, fragile deal stitched together out of interest and face-saving. Not justice. Not forgiveness. An arrangement—dirty enough to leave stains, delicate enough to tear if touched.
For Lian herself, the daughter's brief existence and sudden removal became the final weight that broke what was left of her. Whatever false exhilaration revenge had offered evaporated instantly, replaced by the cannibal pain of flesh torn from flesh. And then—even that pain was crushed flat beneath the machinery of patriarchy and family profit until it became numbness. From then on, the last warmth in her that might have been called human went out. What remained was calculation, cold resentment, and the obsessive decision to place everything—every hope, every unfinished ambition—onto Marco like a gambler pushing all her chips into one final hand.
The narrative stopped abruptly, as if cut.
Lian's gaze tightened again on her son. There was no tenderness in it now, only an appraisal so sharp it bordered on cruelty, and a thin, self-punishing mockery buried deep inside.
"So," she said, each word measured, chilled, pointed, "you bring me this name—this thing from the past, a past tense I can barely remember the face of—what is it you want?"
Her voice remained even. That made it worse.
"Are you reminding me," she continued, "that I have another child out there—another piece of my blood—some… defective remainder that might be useful?" The word landed like ice on skin. "Or are you testing me?" Her eyes did not blink. "Trying to see whether I—someone who is no longer fit to be called a mother—might do something inconveniently human."
She paused, and in that pause her contempt sharpened into something almost elegant.
"Softness," she said, as if the concept itself tasted bitter.
Every sentence was a needle dipped in cold.
Marco went rigid. His throat tightened. He could feel his own earlier thinking—utilise, probe, assess risk—turn to ash in his mouth. In front of his mother's bloody, unvarnished admission—her calling his unseen sister "defective," calling her own blood "dirty"—his calculations suddenly looked not merely ruthless but cheap. Petty. Shallow. Stupid.
Because Zola was not just a tool. She was a wound.
She was the most painful, most despised tear in a family history that had been forcibly stitched shut. She was the living scar of his mother's madness and misery—so real and yet so faceless in Lian's memory that she still spoke of her like an abstracted infection. And she was, horrifyingly, part of Marco's own blood: another hidden stream, twisted and secret, treated by the people closest to him as a stain.
The "piece" he had imagined suddenly carried a weight like lead.
It dragged behind it a whole minefield of emotion, a moral abyss, a depth of trauma and coldness in his mother that he realised he had never truly approached.
The undertow behind her frozen stare made Marco's spine go cold.
For the first time he felt—viscerally, unmistakably—that the woman who had raised him, taught him calculation, and was still, even now, fighting for him with everything she had, contained an inner landscape he had never stepped into: a wasteland of despair and resentment, of extreme rationality fused to something like self-loathing, a frozen tundra where unknown beasts slept under the ice.
And he—heedless, proud, anxious—had just thrown a stone into it.
A stone heavy enough to crack the surface.
Heavy enough to wake whatever had been held down there for years.
The heavy door of the study closed behind Marco without a sound, cutting off whatever lingering anxiety and covert calculation still clung to the young man, sealing it neatly on the other side. Lian stayed where she was, before the fireplace. The flames pulled her upright figure long and thin, casting it across the expensive, cold carpet like a solitary cut-out—an isolated silhouette that looked less like a person than a decision.
Silence folded back around her, deeper now, heavier than before. It seemed to retain the aftertaste of what had just been spoken in this room—those blood-wet fragments of the past—and the cautious, probing look in her son's eyes. Bitterness lodged in her throat like an aged olive pit: too hard to swallow, too lodged to spit out.
That child… he is so like his father.
The thought slid through her mind with a clean, icy ease. Not in the face. Not in the mouth, the jaw, the lines of the brow. In the thing underneath—in the bone-deep habit of seeing every person and every object as a piece of possible leverage, of calculating gain and loss with a precision that never flinched. Especially with women. Women, in that logic, were either vases for display, vessels for bloodline, or—as tonight—tokens on a board, a pawn that might be useful if moved at the right moment.
For an end, any means. And afterwards, always the same talent: to find the most "reasonable" explanation, to polish the ugliness until it passed as necessity, to refuse the word wrong with an almost moral stubbornness. She had spent half her life resisting a man built like that. And in the end, in her own hand-raised "work"—the son she had shaped with everything she had—she was forced to watch the shadow she hated most reproduce itself.
A sorrow rose in her that was almost absurd in its cruelty.
Under the hem of her skirt, no soft flower had bloomed. Instead, there had grown a blade: cold, sharp, and bright—a knife that might one day pierce her, pierce all women like her trapped in gilded cages and told they were homes.
And the deeper sorrow was worse: she found she could not hate him cleanly. She could not even disappoint herself with purity. Because she herself had long ago become part of that same shadow. Years of calculation, cold weighing, survival by using whatever could be used—those years had altered her. She loathed patriarchy, and yet she handled the rules of its power game with fluent ease. She had once been the objectified sacrifice; now she was calmly assessing the "use value" of her own daughter. Marco was the knife—yes. But what was she, if not the hand that held it? Worse: the whetstone that made it keener?
Weariness came like a tide. Not the fatigue of the body, but an iron-rust exhaustion down in the soul, metallic and old. She closed her eyes, trying to drive back the churn of thoughts—
—and another shadow rose, unbidden and uncontrollable: the daughter she had held for three months.
She should be… eighteen or nineteen now, shouldn't she? Lian could scarcely force that number to attach itself to the memory of a wrinkled, red newborn. What would she look like? More like Lian, or more like that foreign man whose face had long since blurred into contempt and fog? Was she well? Were her adoptive parents kind? Did she… did she even know Lian existed? Did she hate her?
A sharp pain punched through her chest, so sudden it nearly bent her in half.
She had believed her heart had been torn in two all those years ago—one half dying when the child was sent away, the other wrapped in ice until it became numb. She had believed she would never again be moved by the word feeling, neither love nor kinship. Men were long dead to her. The world was leverage.
But it was not true.
Her children—one she had raised with obsessive care and yet could no longer fully recognise, one she had never raised and yet shared her blood—still possessed the power to rip away every mask and press directly on the softest old wound. Marco's calculation chilled her to the bone. And the strange, sudden, unfamiliar surge of concern and guilt for Zola—the concern for a stranger who was also her own—hurt in a different way: not cold, but raw, like exposed flesh.
She remembered the baby at birth—truly not pretty, like a little monkey. Then, day by day, she changed. The skin grew pale and luminous. The eyes turned dark and bright, watching. Sometimes a smile would bloom without any reason at all—angelic, unconscious… and it was precisely when she became soft, perfect, heartbreakingly easy to love that they were separated.
The sweetness of that memory braided with the brutality of loss into a pain that, nearly twenty years later, was still fresh as if it had happened yesterday.
No. Enough.
Lian opened her eyes sharply. The last watery flicker of weakness was cut off at once, replaced by the familiar ice and decision. Feeling had to stop here. The real problems were waiting, urgent and unforgiving.
Marco's sudden mention of Zola had not been simple confession. He had withheld something. He had an aim. Lian did not know the details, but she knew her son, and she knew the crisis gnawing at the family and at Marco himself. If Zola was being pulled into this, it would not be for anything good. That girl—her blood, her daughter—might know nothing of Lian, might even carry resentment, and yet she was likely being pushed toward danger. And the hand pushing her might come from her other child.
Lian could not sit and watch. At least—she could not do nothing.
Not from pure maternal love; she no longer dared to claim she still possessed such a thing. It was a complex mixture instead: unfinished responsibility, delayed guilt, the last instinct to preserve her own bloodline—and perhaps, so faint she refused to name it, a small impulse to make amends.
She went to the desk. She opened an ordinary drawer and took out a plain brass key, featureless, cold and solid in her palm. From a stack of the cheapest white envelopes, she drew one out, and a sheet of plain paper.
She wrote with blue-black ink. The note was short, the wording restrained to the point of distance:
For Miss Zola—Private.
If you meet a danger you cannot resolve, take this key to The Iris Bookshop (Address: XXX). Show it to the proprietor and say: "An old friend has entrusted me with begonia in autumn."
You may shelter there for a time. Ask nothing further.
Burn this after reading.
No signature. No tenderness. Only the location of an emergency refuge she had quietly secured years ago under an anonymous arrangement—something even Marco did not know—and a fabricated passphrase.
The address, written in letters almost too small to see, she placed along the inner side of the key's handle, tucked into a shallow notch where ink could hide.
She folded the paper, slid it into the envelope with the key, sealed it with ordinary glue.
Then she rang.
A moment later the study door opened softly. A Chinese man in his fifties stepped in, dressed in a neat dark suit. His face was plain, steady, almost kindly; his eyes were calm with an intelligence that did not seek attention. Mr Wang. Not a servant brought from her natal family, but the steward she had promoted herself after marrying into the Carlisles—selected, observed, tested, raised step by step from the lower staff until he became a man she could rely on.
He was meticulous. More importantly, he was one of the few who knew something of that "accident." When Lian's mother had handled the aftermath in secret, Mr Wang had, by circumstance, learned fragments of the truth—and had kept a remarkable silence. He was among the very few who knew that a girl had been sent away.
"Madam," Mr Wang said, stopping at the proper distance, bowing slightly.
Lian pushed the plain envelope across the desk. "Mr Wang. There is an old matter. I need you."
His gaze paused on the envelope for a brief second. He took it with both hands. "As you instruct."
"Find her," Lian said. Her voice was low, even, carrying a force that allowed no refusal. "Only a name, and an approximate age. She should be called Zola. Eighteen or nineteen. Her biological father… was from C Country. At the time, my mother arranged the placement."
She paused, watching the look of quiet understanding in Mr Wang's eyes—comprehension without ripples.
"First, locate her. Confirm her situation—where she lives, where she goes, the places she frequents. Do not approach. Do not alarm her. Once you are certain, choose the safest time, the least visible time, and put this"—she indicated the envelope with a precise motion—"into her hands personally."
Her eyes narrowed. "The entire process must remain unknown to the young master. And to anyone else in this family."
The task was vague, heavy, dangerous. Mr Wang showed no hesitation. He understood the weight of it, and he understood what Lian was truly entrusting him with.
"I understand, Madam," he said quietly. "I will begin with the channels the old madam may have used at the time, and with expatriate circles from C Country. I will proceed carefully."
"Go," Lian said, her gaze returning to the fire.
Mr Wang slipped the envelope away as though it were both delicate and hazardous. He withdrew without sound and closed the door gently behind him.
The study returned to silence.
The flames moved and settled, throwing light across Lian's rigid profile. She had offered an address, a key, a passphrase. It might be nothing. It might be futile against the storm that could arrive. But it was what she could do, now, as the woman time and pain had reshaped into something cold and complex: the closest thing she could still manage to call an arrangement for the daughter who carried her mad past and a faint, almost laughable shadow of "home."
Within her intricate web of calculations and interests, she had prised open a narrow seam for blood, and for a conscience that arrived too late and in an ugly, complicated form. Whether that seam would become a way out—or the beginning of another knot—she no longer had the illusion of controlling.
What remained was to swallow the bitterness rising with the deep hours of the night, alone, upright, watching the fire, and to wait for fate's next touch—whether it would be mercy, or something crueller still.