CHAPTER 88: CHAPTER 88; BECAUSE OF HIM

What had she gone through... alone... while he ignored her calls, too consumed by his meetings, his mergers, his empire to notice the silent suffering of the woman who waited each night by the window for a husband who never came home?

His obsidian eyes burned with a dark, restless fury as he swiped back to the CCTV folder.

Each video from that day blinked with the same corrupted error message. Systematically deleted. Entire hours gone as if the day itself had never existed.

His chest tightened with a suffocating heaviness.

If something had happened to her... if she had called out to him for help...

And he hadn’t answered.

Because he didn’t care.

Because he had told her to stop disturbing him.

Because he had believed she was nothing more than a quiet, unobtrusive wife who asked for too much even in her silence.

His vision darkened around the edges as he pressed a fist against his mouth, exhaling a quiet, ragged breath through clenched teeth.

Slowly, he lowered his hand, his jaw tightening with silent finality.

He would find out what happened.

He would uncover every erased record, every hidden truth, every shadowed betrayal, no matter how deeply buried, no matter how many lives he had to destroy in the process.

Because she was his.

And this... this silent suffering... this truth he had been too cold to hear... it burned through the iron walls around his heart like acid.

His eyes flicked down to the tablet screen one last time, scanning the deleted footage logs with lethal calm.

Then he reached over to press the intercom button, his deep voice low and cold as death.

"Bring me everything you can recover from the hospital servers. Hire external cyber forensics if you must. I want every second of that day reconstructed within forty-eight hours."

"Yes, Sir."

He ended the call with a flick of his thumb, the line disconnecting into silence.

Then he leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling with eyes blacker than midnight.

His decision had been made.

No one would ever hurt what was his again.

Not even him.

The team immediately gathered together and began working on the files. They only had 48 hours but even so, they had a few hours before Shen Xiao called them to give him some feedback on their findings.

Shen Xiao went on checking the CCTV footage of their mansion to see if there was anything suspicious registered.

— — — — — — —

The server room on the city’s edge buzzed with digital tension. Flickering monitors cast pale light across the team of black-clad technicians scrambling through corrupted files.

Then a sharp crackle in the comms line broke the silence.

"He has started digging," a low voice said through static.

"Shen Xiao?" one of the hackers murmured, pausing mid-code.

"Yes. He’s recovering the hospital records and CCTV footage, and he has already deployed cyber-forensics to handle the corrupted files. High-level."

A tense beat followed.

Then the lead tech’s screen flickered. A secure encrypted line forced its way into the feed. A camera activated, revealing nothing but a dark silhouette.

Even distorted by voice masking, his authority was unquestionable.

"Shut it down," the man said coldly. "Scrub everything. Every trace from that night."

"Sir," the hacker hesitated, glancing at his team, "he’s cross-referencing servers with forensic algorithms. We can’t just wipe it. He will know."

"Let him know," the voice snapped. "Let him feel powerful, but feed him with illusions. Leave some Ghost trails, some errors. A version of the truth he can stomach."

"But...,"

"She suffered enough," the man said, his voice a low growl now. "I will not let him dig her open again."

"Understood."

The feed was cut off.

Elsewhere, far from the corporate towers Shen Xiao ruled, a crumbling teahouse in the heart of Shanghai lay silent.

In its lowest cellar, beneath layers of forged brick and rusted doors, a man leaned over a locked drawer. He pulled out a photograph, torn at the edges, the image slightly faded.

Yueyao, who was barely conscious and covered in bruises, had her hand clutching his coat even in sleep.

He heavily exhaled, with a cigarette held between his two forefinger and thumb.

"I told you I would protect you," he murmured with heartache. "Even from him."

He stared at the image for a long moment before tucking it back inside his coat.

"Let him tear apart the world for answers but he won’t find what I have already buried. He is acting too late..."

Incense smoke curled around a silent man seated in front of a flickering wall of surveillance screens.

He was tall, clad in black, face obscured in shadow, except for the covered face.

The room smelled of iron and sandalwood.

On one of the old screens, paused footage flickered, Yueyao, in a hospital bed, pale as death, eyes fluttering weakly open as she winced in pain, hand trembling against her stomach.

The man’s knuckles whitened against the edge of the table.

He remembered that night like it was carved into his soul.

The way she had cried, silently, all alone. Her lips were bitten raw to keep herself from making a sound.

The smell of blood in the air.

The soft whimper she’d made when the anesthesia began to fade.

The way she kept turning her face toward the door... waiting for someone who never came.

And he had stood just beyond the security glass.

Hidden.

Watching.

Powerless.

He had paid to erase his presence from every angle. Hacked into hospital systems himself and cleared all footage. Switched the logs and transferred the staff out the next day.

No one knew the surgeons. No one remembered the nurses. Even the anesthesiologist had been relocated under a different name. Auntie Mei, the only witness left behind, was now in a coma. Shen Xiao was already late.

"She almost died that day," he whispered, his voice rough. "Because of him."

He picked up a silver lighter and flicked it open, letting the flame dance before his eyes. The fire reflected in his dark pupils, eyes that had seen too much.