After that storm, Luo Huo’s clan split like a cracked cliff, roots rotting where gray businesses once fed them. Every relative tied to the shade got dragged into the light, guilty or not, all felled like reeds in a flood. A family once modestly famous toppled in this generation, its collapse the shadow cast by his betrayal.

But Luo Huo was different. Spared by a powerful figure, he became a thorn left on the branch, awkward and sharp, a special case no one dared grasp.

When that big man recovered, he weighed the wind and chose stone over shelter. He didn’t shield Luo Huo, didn’t muzzle the family’s gossip. He threw him like a knife into An Ruyi’s hand, made him her bodyguard. That way his edge could be used, and he wouldn’t sit at home catching cold stares like falling sleet.

Because of that, even after losing kin, Luo Huo planted his feet like a stake in hard ground. He offered loyalty like a steady flame, not blind, not the fool who spends life on a single favor. He knew what betrayal brings—a winter with no spring.

“Hey, brat. Still not moving?” The two short men spoke in a chorus, voices twinned like echoes in a narrow valley. Their dagger tips flashed like thin ice. Luo Huo saw the glint and let a cold smile bloom, head shaking like a wet dog throwing off rain.

He could die here, like a leaf caught in fire. He would not retreat here, not like a shadow at dusk.

His steadiness made the two strange short men grin, their teeth bright as chips of frost. They dropped their knives with a clatter, metal jumping like startled fish. One crooked a finger, brazen as a rooster at dawn, inviting him in. An enemy tossing away a weapon—this was his first time seeing snow fall upward.

A breath later, he understood what their hands had hidden, the trick crouched like a snake in grass.

Inside the hotel’s fire stairs, Changqing cut a path with fists like hammers, carrying An Ruyi through smoke and thorns. Gunmen and hired fists lay behind them like fallen branches after a gale. The danger swelled like a black tide, no weaker than the ambush from the night they first met; this time the tide climbed higher.

Changqing couldn’t fathom how the other side pushed in so many guns, like smuggling a river through a sieve. Working under Miss An, he’d only seen guns at “proper” ranges, clean as tiles after rain—government stamped, tightly fenced.

To pull this many pieces out of places like that, unless you meant open revolt, unless no muzzle ever flashed—under bright sun, it’s impossible. Thinking that, Changqing slipped on gloves like a second skin, wiped a pistol on its dead owner’s sleeve, then set it back like a stone on a cairn.

It wasn’t that he feared guns. It’s that his hands didn’t sing that song.

Why trade a tiger’s claw for a borrowed bow? Up close he believed; in close quarters he was the storm. The bodies up the stairs proved it, stacked like sandbags. Maybe the planner was too proud. Maybe these men were just goats for the altar. None of them respected how far his craft could reach.

Most gunmen twitched on instinct, finger tightening like frostbite. But the moment he closed in, before a wrist could rise, his elbow or straight punch cracked down like a mallet on wood. Their “professional” hands went numb; their pistols fell like loose fruit. Then his kicks and fists harvested them, hard as hail.

“Miss An… any idea who sent them?” He stomped a gun aside, metal skittering like a beetle. Another wrist snapped under his heel with a dry branch’s pop. He paused to breathe, chest pumping like bellows, focus tight as a bowstring. He’d burned through fuel. They’d just fought mercenaries upstairs, and now he had to guard Miss An while trading blows with more thugs.

He wanted to push through a side door and spill into open ground, but a wide space is a killing field under rain. A close fighter becomes a shield of meat, a tree in lightning, good for nothing else. At distance, even the best don’t catch bullets barehanded.

You can be fast, but are you faster than a round leaving the barrel, a hawk diving on a mouse?

If he had a few throwing knives, he’d gamble, slipping from cover to cover like a fox. Now he had nothing steady, maybe a pistol at most. With no proper training, he didn’t trust his shots to fly true, like arrows in crosswind.

“It’s gotta be the Li clan. Bringing in this many guns, they’ve got enough scapegoats to swallow a sack of bullets. I don’t buy anyone else in the Southeast has that reach. There were snipers and mercenaries earlier. These Thunder tactics feel like that old Li patriarch, though the staging is still green.” Miss An checked her screen, a sliver of ice in her tone. Partners who used to answer were dead lines now, wires cold as winter vines. She’d pinged her clan, but for over ten minutes the wind carried no reply. Busy signals thudded in her ear like dull rain. That told her plenty.

Again—traitors from the family’s own marrow. Again.

Her teeth clenched like a pearl between blades. Ten years ago the family purged the rot, uprooted whole houses like weeds. After that storm, their seat in the Southeast was solid bedrock. Who knew that after a decade, with the big man at his peak, petty shadows still dared jump out like moths to a torch?

Anger couldn’t melt the ice. She kept calling for help, throwing lines like a fisher on a black sea. Every hand she’d gathered drew back at once, palms turning to stone. They watched from the riverbank, cold-eyed, as she drifted toward the falls.

She’d never expected too much of them. But this silence felt like an island cut off by fog, enough to drain the warm blood from her fingers. Even a steel-nerved woman trembles at the cliff’s lip. Her tapping hand shook like a reed in wind.

“Miss!” Changqing’s whisper cracked like a whip. He wrapped both her hands, firm as iron around silk.

At a time like this, the keel can’t wobble. He was only a guard; she was the helm. She was the table’s turning card. Only if she pulled every string she could reach would the two of them find a path through thorns.

“Miss An, I believe in you. Please believe in me,” he said, voice steady as a mountain’s shadow. “These hitters can’t touch you. They’re just gutter boys with guns. I’m strong. I’m stronger than they are. Trust me.”

His eyes were clear water, no panic, no doubt.

“So I need you to focus on what only you can do. Believe me—no enemy will touch a single hair on your head. Just like the first night we met. Can you?”

Maybe his heat thawed her. Her hands stilled, pale and fine as porcelain no longer quivering. She patted her cheeks, a quick slap of color, then drew a long breath like a diver before night water. Panic wouldn’t buy a bridge.

She took out her second phone. The contact list held three numbers, names heavy as iron keys. No matter when she called, they would answer, and they would help like torches in rain.

But when she highlighted the first, she hesitated, finger hovering like a moth over flame. Their help never came free. In this knife-cold moment, was she ready to pay the price the river demanded?

Seeing her pause, Changqing only sighed, soft as wind through pine, and led her downward again. She could waver; he couldn’t. If he hesitated, the river would take them both. Live out—he held that thought like a talisman.

Lower down, the gunmen thinned like mist, either spent or coiling tighter for a deeper bite. He stole a breath, mind turning gears. He traced threads and found only that ambush from the other night, a knot in the weave.

He nudged a fire-door open with two fingers. The corridor beyond was empty as a dead town at noon. For today’s talks, Miss An had cleared guests ahead of time, swept the floors like a careful host. Even so, it shouldn’t be this hollow.

The fire stairs sat on both sides of each corridor, with a blind corner before the rooms—a legacy design like an old scar. Miss An hadn’t had time to cut new lines yet. Some changes take seasons.

If he walked that corner blind, death waited like a hunter behind a curtain.

A few shooters in rooms, watching the bend through peepholes and cameras, could turn the hallway into a sluice. Even sloppy marksmen would have enough river to drown him. A shot through wood doesn’t care about pride. He couldn’t dodge thunder through a door.

He didn’t dare shout for help either. Pulling civilians into this was tossing sparrows into a storm. Better to call the police than feed bystanders to wolves. If ordinary people could handle these hitters, why keep a bodyguard?

“I don’t know,” Miss An said, head shaking like a willow. “Today was supposed to confirm terms, just a formality. It wasn’t our call anyway. If he hadn’t overreached earlier, the big clans wouldn’t be stepping in.”

Today blew her deck across the floor, plans scattered like cards in a gust. Her guards and the hotel’s sentries were all ghosts, lines cut like ropes at sea. Beyond betrayal, she saw no other shape.

And the betrayal was tangled vine: clan orders or bribed hearts? Any one of those three calls could tell her within minutes.

“Li’s people shouldn’t be that crazy,” she murmured, eyes narrowing like a blade’s edge. “But among the big houses in the Southeast, to smuggle this many guns under our nose without stirring us—that’s… interesting.”

Both of them felt the same shard glint, a dangerous guess rising like a shark’s fin. Even a dull mind would catch it now. If no outside clan could reach this deep on land the family had tilled for years, then one possibility remained, dark as an eclipse.

Miss An’s face went pale, moonlight on snow. She tried not to step on that thought, but the ground led there. Her finger hovered over the screen like frost refusing to melt.

They fell silent. If their guess was right, the two of them alone couldn’t break this net. All her ladders would turn to smoke. All her work would be ash on wind.

“No,” she said, biting her lip till it bloomed red. “If it’s the family… if it is, they wouldn’t stage an assassination. Not like this. The drumbeat’s too loud. The family has better ways. The underworld is a tool, not a rule. If they wanted to crush me, commerce would be the blade.”

She lifted her chin, refusing the winter. The clan wasn’t a cradle of mercy, but it shouldn’t aim at her throat. Never mind her work. Her father still held the seal. Why me?

This time she didn’t panic. Her mind ran fast, a river under ice, measuring every bank and bend.

Her family shouldn’t have any reason to move against her—unless some hidden link had snapped.

She’d been driven to a cliff’s edge, the wind cutting like blades.

Better to cut straight through the fog than sit and brood.

Across or down, a blade cuts the same—two strokes of the same character.

Resolve hardened like ice in her chest; An Ruyi dialed the number on the screen.

Even if this ended in death, she wanted to die knowing why, not in mist.

They waited in the stairwell, two shadows on cold concrete, breath pale as smoke.

The call was brief, yet the silence pressed like deep water on both her and Changqing.

Soon, the other end came alive—a warm, magnetic voice, like spring rain on cold stone.

“My daughter, you’ve spent your one arrow.”

“Father… this assassination—was that knife sent from our own house?”

She loosed the question like an arrow; the gentle, middle‑aged voice answered at once.

“What kind of joke is that, Ruyi? Even a tiger doesn’t eat its cubs. Do you think I’d send knives after my own daughter?”

“Even if I were that vicious, do you take me for a fool?”

The twin questions stuck like a fishbone in her throat; she still wanted to speak.

Hard truth or not, the answer was hard to swallow, yet it came from her father, the man at the helm of House An.

If anyone could tilt their fate, it was this pillar holding up House An.

The last person she could call for aid was her father, the only weight heavy enough to tip the scales from outside.

Her heart stilled like a pond; she forced her voice to steady.

“Then… Father, please settle this storm and pull out the one who planned it, root and all.”

“Of course.”

His reply fell into the silence like a pebble into still water.