The World Ends In 27 Days

The elevator doors opened onto the executive floor at 2:43 in the afternoon, revealing Hanchuan waiting outside his office.

He had been standing there for nearly four minutes, despite knowing perfectly well that there was no practical reason for him to leave his desk before Zhiyi stepped off the elevator.

After all, Zeyu had sent him a message from the parking garage confirming that Zhiyi was breathing normally, that the paramedics had cleared her and that they were on their way upstairs. Technically, Hanchuan could have remained behind his desk until they arrived.

Technically.

In reality, nothing could have kept him from laying eyes on Zhiyi the moment she reached his floor.

She had been out of his sight for a few hours.

A few hours.

That was apparently all it took for her to nearly die.

Again.

It didn’t matter that his conclusion was unreasonable. If anything, the events at the boutique had only reinforced something Hanchuan had already been struggling with since they woke in this life: Zhiyi should never be far enough away that he couldn’t physically reach out and touch her.

So he had abandoned his desk, walked into the corridor and waited.

The call from Zeyu had left something cold lodged beneath his ribs. Hearing him say that Zhiyi couldn’t breathe had returned Hanchuan too quickly to another room, another life, another time when he’d held her against his chest and listened to her lungs fail.

Intellectually, he knew the two situations weren’t the same, but his body hadn’t cared.

The second the elevator chimed, Hanchuan’s attention went immediately to Zhiyi’s face.

Her color was normal.

Her eyes were focused.

She was standing without assistance.

It was only after establishing those three things did his mind finally register everything else.

The dark-blue dress reached the floor, falling in a clean line from a fitted waist. It wasn’t elaborate, there were no jewels or decorative pieces demanding attention. Her hair was still the way she had worn it that morning, and there was no makeup on her face.

But none of that helped him.

Hanchuan stopped thinking.

Zhiyi stepped out of the elevator beside Zeyu and looked at him, her big eyes studying him just as much as he had been studying her.

But Hanchuan continued to stare at her.

Sure, he knew what she looked like.

He had known every version of her body that seven years of survival could produce. Too thin. Feverish. Sunburned. Half frozen. Covered in mud. Dressed in three coats and two pairs of trousers. Wrapped in blankets. Wearing one of his shirts because hers had torn.

He had known her hair tangled from weeks without enough water to wash it. He had known the scar along her hip that he had to stitch up and how her face changed when she was exhausted. He knew precisely how she looked when she first woke and which cheek developed a crease when she slept against a folded sleeve.

But apparently none of that had prepared him for a dark-blue evening dress.

"Hanchuan?"

He heard his name, but he ignored whoever was calling him in favor of continuing to look at her.

Zeyu leaned against the elevator wall behind her, watching with an expression Hanchuan didn’t like at all.

Zhiyi glanced down at herself like she was trying to figure out what she did wrong to have him staring at her like that. "The dress fits," she said, spinning around as if to prove her point.

"I can see that," Hanchuan said, his voice coming out hoarse.

Her gaze returned to him. "Zeyu selected it," she continued.

"I can also see that," Hanchuan continued.

None of that make sense to Zhiyi and she cocked her head to the side as she tried to figure out a solution to a problem she didn’t understand.

On the other hand, Zeyu’s mouth twitched as he tried to hold back his laughter.

Hanchuan ignored him and finally forced his attention back to what mattered. He crossed the remaining distance and stopped in front of Zhiyi, looking more carefully at her face.

The faint exhaustion beneath her eyes was the only visible evidence of what had happened.

His fingers closed around her left hand and lifted it up so that he could better see it. Her palm was open, and the four red crescents that marked her skin was like red flags in front of a bull.

As he ran his thumb once beneath them, Hanchuan could feel his anger rising. He had never developed this temper before until somewhere around month seven of the first heat, but there it was, simmering under his skin, ready to erupt at the next idiot who pissed him off.

"The dinner isn’t necessary," he said after a moment, his eyes never leaving those red marks. Zhiyi understood immediately, but that didn’t change anything.

"You said it would be useful," she reminded him, her voice soft as she smiled slightly at him.

"It would," he agreed. But just because it would be useful didn’t mean that he was willing to put Zhiyi at risk for it.

"Then the circumstances haven’t changed," Zhiyi replied.

"You stopped breathing," he reminded her, just in case she had forgotten that small part. He could assure her that he wasn’t going to be forgetting it any time soon.

"That has been corrected," she assured him back.

Behind her, Zeyu made a strangled sound that might have been a laugh. When Hanchuan looked at him, he raised both hands in immediate surrender.

"Don’t involve me. I learned today that questions are dangerous," he said. His words might have been teasing, but there was a dark look in his eyes that hadn’t been there when he left the office that morning.

"Not all questions," Zhiyi corrected, turning toward him.

"Yes, thank you. We’ve established the exceptions," Zeyu assured her with a warm smile.

Something passed between them then—some understanding formed during the hours Hanchuan hadn’t been there to witness. He couldn’t identify it, and he disliked that almost as much as he disliked the ease with which Zhiyi had turned to Zeyu.

Hanchuan placed his hand against the small of her back. "Let’s go inside."

She went with him immediately, and some of the tension in his chest eased beneath the familiar certainty of her response. Zeyu followed without waiting to be invited and for once without a smartass comment.

Ordinarily, Hanchuan wouldn’t have noticed. Zeyu had been entering his office without permission since they were teenagers. But today, it was considerably more irritating.

Jingwei, Shichen and Qinghe were gathered around the conference table inside, surrounded by papers, tablets and the building surveys Shichen had brought back from his inspections. Their conversation stopped the moment Zhiyi entered.

Shichen blinked silently while Qinghe looked from the dark-blue dress to Zeyu and then back again. Even Jingwei allowed his attention to linger for a second longer than he usually gave any other female.

Zeyu walked past them wearing an expression of insufferable satisfaction. "Yes, I chose it."

"No one asked," Jingwei sighed, closing his eyes for a second before opening them again. But instead of looking at the mission in front of him, he couldn’t help but continue to look at Zhiyi.

"You were going to," he countered.

"I really wasn’t," Jingwei assured him.

"You wanted to."

Jingwei’s expression remained unchanged. "No."

Shichen ignored them and looked at Zhiyi again. "It suits you."

"Thank you," she said, nodding her head just a fraction of an inch.

Qinghe drew breath, but before he could speak, Zeyu pointed at him. "Think very carefully about whatever you’re about to say."

His eyebrows rose. Hanchuan caught the warning immediately, as did Jingwei, and neither of them asked for an explanation. Qinghe looked between the three of them before apparently deciding that he could survive without satisfying his curiosity for another few hours.

Hanchuan pulled a chair away from the table and positioned it beside his own. "Sit."