Chapter 12

The boy stopped looking straight at her and turned his eyes somewhere else. Those eyes of his were too frightening to hold.

Ning Shu breathed deeply and settled herself, and said quietly, "Tuanzi."

"Mm." The boy answered.

He had that air about him that keeps people off, and the cold came off the whole of him, and it was hard to know how to begin with him.

So he broke it himself. "If you're frightened, I'll go."

His voice was low, and cold with it.

"Don't!" Ning Shu said quickly. "You're my son. How would I be frightened of you?"

And she was not, in fact, very frightened any more. He looked dreadful, but there was no ill will in him towards her.

"The air I carry is heavy," Ning Tuanzi explained. "It will tell on you."

Ning Shu remembered what her grandmother had said. The living and the dead keep to their own roads, and if a person has too much to do with ghosts it eats into their spirit and their luck.

"Is there anything that gets round it?" Ning Shu said. "You're my child. Are we never to see each other again?"

Ning Tuanzi thought about it and said, "Once you've opened the heavenly eye and grown strong, this air of mine won't be worth mentioning to you."

Which meant that Ning Shu really did have to work at becoming a great master, and not only for her own sake. For the two small ones as well.

"Tuanzi, did that fire at the children's shop have anything to do with you?" Ning Shu had been uneasy about it, and putting it beside Zhou Honghua and Li Mazi, both of which had been his doing, there was very little chance this one was not.

And Ning Tuanzi admitted it perfectly openly. "I did it."

The small creature said so little. Exactly like his father, the sort who says nothing and gets on with it.

Having a small ghost as strong as this standing behind her was something, and Ning Shu felt it. But a child cannot judge weight and measure, and doing as he pleased could easily kill somebody.

That assistant today had wanted teaching a lesson. But burning the shop and burning the whole of her went far past it.

"Tuanzi, don't do that again." Ning Shu was serious with him. "Doing it costs me in hidden merit, and it will ruin what you've built in yourself."

"I understand."

He did as he was told, in fact. He was not stubborn, the way Lu Zheng was.

Ning Shu let out a breath, and Ning Tuanzi came forward and handed her a black necklace. "This is for you."

Ning Shu looked at it. There was a black cord with something strung on it like amber, except perfectly black, shaped like a drop of water, and inside it looked like thick ink turning over on itself.

"What is this?"

"Wear it and it will help what you're building in yourself, and if you run into trouble I can come quickly." Ning Tuanzi said, "In time this is what the fool and I will use to stay beside you."

"The fool?"

"Ning Yuanzi," he said.

Ning Shu took the necklace without hesitating. "Thank you."

By the time she had put it on and looked up again Ning Tuanzi had gone. The bathroom was empty and as quiet as it had been before.

He came and went like a ghost, which was fair enough.

---

The doctor said Gouwazi was healing well, and another week of observation and he could go home if nothing went wrong. Gouwazi was delighted and kept asking the doctor whether, once the stitches were out of his mouth, he would turn into a genuinely handsome young man.

The nurses covered their mouths and laughed at him. They were very fond of Gouwazi, partly because he really was a good-looking boy and partly because he was so pleased with himself about it that it cheered them up.

Ning Shu used the last few days to see about her grandparents and buy a few things to take back, some health tonics and the like.

But she had not been out of the hospital long when two big men in suits took her by the arms in the street and marched her off.

Ning Shu struggled and shouted as she went. "What are you doing? Kidnapping, is it, in broad daylight? I'm telling you now, my family are so poor we can't get the lid off the pot. There's no ransom in me. Don't go making a loss on a bad deal…"

She had not finished before the two men put her down round the corner. Ning Shu stumbled forward a few steps, and when she looked up there was Lu Zheng's cold, handsome face.

A few more of these and she would have a heart condition out of it.

"You had people take me off the street. What do you want?"

Lu Zheng was in a black shirt, buttoned up without a gap all the way to the collar, and standing there in the noise of the street he still managed to look like a man apart from the world.

He kept his face cold and did not answer.

Ning Shu looked back at the two men dressed as bodyguards and said, "If you want to find me, find me openly. Having me brought here like this. Don't you think that's too much?"

"Too much?" Lu Zheng did not appear to think so.

There was no such phrase in his dictionary.

"I met you outside that shop in the hundred-and-eight district yesterday, and something about it has not sat right with me since." Lu Zheng said it with no expression. "That night the shop had its accident, which is stranger still. Does this have anything to do with you?"

Ning Shu took two steps back, on her guard. It had to be said that his instincts were very accurate.

"You're saying I set the fire?"

Lu Zheng shook his head. "You haven't the ability. I only find it strange."

"So because you find it strange you have somebody drag me off the street without the least idea whether I had anything urgent to do. Lu Zheng, don't you think you've gone too far?" Ning Shu was getting angry.

"How do you know?"

Ning Shu said, "What?"

The corner of his mouth went up. "So you know my name."

Oh.

In the heat of it she had said his name out loud. They were strangers.

Looking at the smile on his face, Ning Shu felt it was not that simple. She felt as though a trap had been set for her.

She had imagined it. She must have imagined it.

"I…" Ning Shu's mind went fast, looking for a way out. "I read it…"

Lu Zheng answered for her. "Don't tell me you read it in a fortune."

…

Was he living inside her head?

"I'm a fortune teller. I read it." Ning Shu held the line.

The smile at the corner of his mouth deepened and he turned the words over. "Oh. Really a fortune."

Before Ning Shu could say anything else, Lu Zheng said, "Read one for me, then."

Ning Shu asked, "What do you want read?"

Lu Zheng's eyes fastened on her. "Read how much fate there is between us."

"None! There isn't a scrap of fate between us!" Ning Shu said it straight away. "We're strangers, and we're never going to meet again!"

Lu Zheng made a cold sound. "Read something else, then."

Was there no end to this.

She set her teeth. "Give me your birth characters."

"Young master, birth characters are not given out lightly," the older steward said at once, quietly, at his ear.

Lu Zheng's face did not change. He only said, "Never mind the birth characters. Is there another way?"

"There is." Ning Shu said. "The lines of the palm can be read."

Lu Zheng put his hand out without a moment's hesitation.

Ning Shu drew a breath and took his hand, and her own was shaking. His palm was warm, and hers was wet through with sweat.

She had looked at the lines of that palm more times than she could count in the days when they were close. She knew which way every one of them ran.

The hand was still young now. Each finger was fine and pale, and only a well-off household on rich ground grows a hand like that.

Ning Shu looked at it carefully and then fobbed him off with the stock patter of any street fortune teller. "There's a fish shape at the start of your life line, which means you were weak and often ill as a child."

"I have grown up this far with neither illness nor trouble." Lu Zheng said it coldly. "So you're a fraud after all."

But Ning Shu's brows had drawn together. It was wrong. The lines on his palm plainly showed a weak constitution. But then it was wrong again, because the life line, which should have run straight into death, was cut across halfway by another line coming down, and that line broke off the road to death and sent out another one, which went towards a long life.

It looked as though somebody had untied his fate for him. More than that, they had changed it.

Ning Shu worked it out soon enough. A son of a great and wealthy house, born with a hard road in front of him, and the family pays a fortune to have a real master change it. That was ordinary enough.

So Ning Shu went on. "Your career line runs straight, so everything ahead of you will go smoothly."

Which it would. In the last life, once Lu Zheng had the Lu Group in his hands he took it straight to the top of the tide, and he was named among the most influential young men in business. There was nobody in the trade who did not know the name.

"That sounds exactly like the stock patter of a street fraud."

"Then don't believe it." Ning Shu let go of his hand as though that settled it.

"There's a heart line as well." Lu Zheng looked up at her and reminded her of it on purpose.

"That one… I can't read." Ning Shu said it with a guilty conscience.

"Can't read it, or won't say it?"

"Can't read it." Ning Shu held to it.

The sons of houses like his do not get to decide their own marriages. It would be some arrangement between families. When Lu Zheng had taken a liking to her in the last life and kept her in that house, the Lu family had not stopped him. He could do as he liked outside, but when the time came he would have to marry properly, and his wife would be the one the family settled on. There was no getting out from under it.

She had read it, in fact.

Lu Zheng's heart line was the longest of them, and it forked and bent downwards, which meant…

He was a man who loved for a long time.