Fu Jinyan stood frozen, the fine porcelain of the restaurant floor feeling like thin ice beneath his feet. Su Luo’s words echoed in the sudden, deafening silence around their table. “You’re just the next piece of trash I plan to discard.” His blood ran cold. The woman before him was a stranger. The hollow-eyed, submissive wife he had tormented for three years was gone, replaced by a queen surveying her domain with lethal indifference. Her eyes, once vacant, were now sharp as obsidian shards, and they cut right through him, seeing every ounce of his arrogance, his foolishness, his regret. “Who… who are you?” he finally managed to breathe, the question torn from his throat. It was a question he’d never once bothered to ask, and now it felt like the most important question in the world. Su Luo let out a soft, mirthless laugh. She picked up her napkin, dabbing delicately at her lips. “I am the woman you humiliated. The woman you accused. The woman whose life you thought you held in the palm of your hand.” She dropped the napkin onto her plate and rose from her chair, her movements fluid and impossibly elegant. “And you, Fu Jinyan, are nothing to me anymore.” She didn’t spare him another glance. As she walked away, the restaurant patrons parted for her like she was royalty. He was left standing alone, the weight of a thousand gazes pressing down on him, the whispers branding him with the humiliation he once so freely dispensed. He watched her get into a sleek, black Maybach that had materialized out of nowhere, the kind of car reserved for true global power players. As it pulled away, disappearing into the city lights, the truth hit him like a physical blow. He had been a fool. A blind, arrogant fool. *** The stench of stale takeout and cheap perfume filled the cramped, one-room apartment. Lin Yao stared at the cracked screen of her secondhand phone, her knuckles white. News headlines screamed at her from the glowing display. “Zhang Corporation Collapses Overnight! Elysium Group Flexes Unprecedented Power!” “Mysterious Heiress Linked to Elysium Group Seen with Disgraced CEO Fu Jinyan!” Beneath the headline was a paparazzi photo, grainy but unmistakable. Su Luo, stepping out of the exclusive restaurant, her expression cold and commanding. And behind her, trailing like a lost dog, was Fu Jinyan. “No… NO!” Lin Yao shrieked, hurling the phone against the peeling wall. It shattered, the screen going dark, but the images were burned into her mind. Elysium Group. The global behemoth, the financial dynasty so powerful its name was only ever spoken in whispers. And Su Luo—the blind, pathetic orphan she had manipulated for years—was connected to them? It wasn’t possible. It was a nightmare. She staggered around the tiny room, kicking over a pile of dirty clothes. The Fu family had cut her off completely. The bank had frozen her accounts. The friends who once fawned over her now wouldn’t even answer her calls. She had lost everything. The luxury penthouse, the designer clothes, the future as Mrs. Fu Jinyan—all of it, gone. Snatched away by the very person she had considered less than dirt. “She took it all,” Lin Yao sobbed, her body wracked with a fury so intense it felt like it would tear her apart. “That blind bitch… She was pretending! She was playing me! Playing all of us!” Her sobs devolved into a chilling, unhinged laugh. Her eyes, wide and bloodshot, darted around the miserable room. She was at rock bottom. She had nothing left to lose. And when a person has nothing left to lose, they become capable of anything. Her gaze landed on a small, framed photo on her nightstand—the only remnant of her old life. It was a picture of her and Fu Jinyan from a charity gala, him looking powerful, her clinging to his arm, the perfect picture of a loving couple. A lie. She remembered the source of that lie. The fire. The fire that had nearly killed him, the fire from which she’d claimed to have saved him. She had been a nobody then, too. A desperate girl who saw an opportunity in a tragedy and seized it. That one, single lie had given her three years of paradise. An idea, dark and twisted, began to form in the ruins of her mind. Fire had given her everything once. Perhaps fire could give it to her again. Only this time, it wouldn’t be for a lie. It would be for revenge. Her movements became sharp, purposeful. She rummaged through an old, dusty box under her bed, pulling out a burner phone she’d kept for emergencies. Her fingers, trembling with a terrifying mixture of fear and exhilaration, dialed a number she hadn’t called in years. A number that belonged to a man who operated in the city’s deepest, darkest shadows. The line picked up on the second ring. “Who is this?” a gruff voice demanded. Lin Yao’s own voice was a venomous whisper, stripped of all its fake sweetness. “It’s me. You once told me I could call if I ever needed a problem to disappear.” There was a pause, then a low chuckle on the other end. “Lin Yao. I wondered when you’d fall from that ivory tower. Problems cost money. You got any left?” “I have enough,” she hissed, glancing at the last designer handbag she owned, its value enough to buy a small car. “I don’t need a problem to disappear. I need a person.” *** Fu Jinyan stormed into his office at Fu Corporation, his face a thunderous mask. His assistant, Ken, flinched as the door slammed open. “Cancel all my meetings,” Fu Jinyan commanded, his voice raw. “I want a full, top-priority investigation launched immediately.” “On… on who, sir?” Ken asked, scrambling to keep up. “Su Luo.” Just saying her name felt strange, like tasting a foreign, dangerous chemical. “I want to know everything. Her family. Her background. Her education. Every move she made for the last three years. And I want to know her exact connection to Elysium Group. I don’t care what it costs or what lines you have to cross. I want answers. Now!” He had built an empire on information and control. For three years, he had believed he knew everything about his wife: she was an insignificant, indebted orphan. Now, he realized he knew nothing at all. He had been living in a cage of his own making, and she had held the key the entire time. *** In a grimy, dimly lit bar in the city’s underbelly, the air thick with the smell of cheap liquor and desperation, Lin Yao sat opposite a man with a jagged scar across his face. He leaned back, taking a slow drag from his cigarette, his eyes appraising her. She pushed her last Chanel handbag across the sticky table. “This is the down payment.” The man didn’t even look at it. His eyes were fixed on hers. “Who’s the target?” Lin Yao’s lips twisted into a smile that was utterly devoid of warmth. It was the smile of a woman who had embraced her own madness. She slid her shattered phone across the table, the screen miraculously flickering to life for a moment, showing the paparazzi photo of Su Luo. “Her,” she said, her voice dropping to a low, conspiratorial whisper. “I don’t want her just gone. I want it to be a lesson. I want her to suffer.” The scarred man raised an eyebrow. “Suffering costs extra.” “I don’t care,” Lin Yao breathed, leaning forward, her eyes gleaming with a feverish light. “I want her to feel the heat. I want her to know what it feels like to have everything turn to ash.” Her gaze was terrifying, her resolve absolute. She was no longer the pitiful victim. She was a monster in the making. “I want you to burn her alive.”

Chapter 16: Lin Yao Snaps