He Saved the Heir, Then Won His Heart novel · Chapter 47 of 56

Chapter 47: What the Fear Was

Xiao Chen told it from the start, because he was a lawyer, and he told it flat.

Shen Yan lay on his side in the nest with the grey blanket up to his chin and listened for the parts that were not in the letter.

There were three of them.

The first was the hamper.

"Every New Year for three years a hamper came to the chambers," Xiao Chen said. "Rice wine, dried scallops, a card in a good hand. To the clerk who never fails."

"Whose card?"

"No name. Chi Feng put the hamper on his own desk and handed me the card. I kept the first one in a drawer. I thought it was kind."

His voice was even, far too even, and the bond under it ran thin and tight.

"What's the second?"

"The prison. I told you what he said. I didn't tell you that I stood at the glass and felt nothing at all, and for a moment I was glad of it."

He looked at the ceiling.

"Then I understood whose nothing it was."

Shen Yan found his hand under the blanket and held it.

"And the third?"

"When I woke up in October I had been six months off the pills. The first thing I ever wanted out loud in my life was a waiter dropping a tray."

Shen Yan's throat closed.

"I told myself it was the coma," Xiao Chen said. "It was me. It was the first time in three years that it was me."

The bond went quiet.

Shen Yan had carried one sentence around for a month, and he had never said it aloud.

He said it now.

"At Cedar Hill I felt fear come down the bond. I thought it was you being sorry."

"Sorry for what?"

"For the wolf. For the nest, and the boy. I thought you missed the calm man and you were too kind to tell me."

"Yan."

"I was afraid the calm man was the only one you could love."

Xiao Chen stared at him.

Then his face came apart.

It was not a quiet thing. He cried with his mouth open, in a loud, cracked, ugly noise that Shen Yan had never heard from him, and he did not stop to count anything.

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