Chapter 12: The Locked Door

Xie Zhaoran woke with a warm arm across his stomach, and for the length of one breath he was happy.

It was a thing he had forgotten the shape of.

Then he heard the wheels in the corridor, and the happiness went out of him and left the plan behind.

He had practiced for seven weeks.

His face went slack before his mind had finished the thought.

The eyes closed, the jaw eased, the hand on the sheet lay open and empty.

Lin Zhi's arm went out from under his ribs, and the bed shook as he sat up.

"Signed by whom?" Lin Zhi asked.

"By the spouse," said a man's voice, and paper rustled.

Zhaoran lay in the dark behind his eyelids and listened to the man he had spent the night with read his own name on a page he had never touched.

There was no heat in the voice.

It had gone flat and careful.

"This isn't mine," said Lin Zhi.

He said it three times, to the orderlies and the paper and a housekeeper on the phone.

Madam Xie had gone to a temple retreat the night before, and could not be reached.

Zhaoran had not known that.

He understood the shape of the trap then.

His grandmother had left, and the order had come within hours of her going.

It had been timed.

"Sir," said an orderly. "We have to move him."

"One minute," said Lin Zhi. "He's my husband. Let me dress him."

There was a pause in which Zhaoran felt his heart climb, and he fought it down with six counts out.

Hands came to him then, quick and shaking and very gentle.

They put the blue pajama top back over his shoulders, and found the buttons, and did them up one by one.

A thumb brushed the hollow of his throat as it passed.

Lin Zhi's breath was against his ear.

"Don't you dare," he whispered, so low that only a man who was awake could have heard it. "Don't you dare let them see you."

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