62: Chapter 63 Unexplained Heartache

However, beneath the calm surface, undercurrents had quietly gathered into a surging dark tide.

One evening a few days later, Yin Tianxue had just finished a long international video conference. Rubbing her aching temples, she was about to ask her assistant to bring in a cup of coffee. Suddenly, the notification sound for her private email rang. It was an unfamiliar email with no sender name, only a string of garbled characters, and a blank subject line.

Yin Tianxue frowned, thinking it was spam. She clicked it open casually, intending to delete it.

The body of the email was blank. There was only a video attachment with a cold string of numbers as the filename.

As if guided by some unseen force—perhaps due to her sensitivity to the subtle, unsettling atmosphere between Yu Bo and Shen Nian over the past few days, or perhaps due to some ominous premonition—Yin Tianxue's hand holding the mouse hesitated. Instead of deleting it immediately, she double-clicked the video file.

The player popped up. The footage was shaky and the lighting was dim, but it was enough to recognize the scene—the entrance of a certain hotel at night.

Yin Tianxue's heart inexplicably skipped a beat. She recognized that place; it was the very hotel where Yu Bo had stayed during his last business trip.

The video began to play. There was no sound, only images. A mere ten seconds, yet it felt like a long and cruel silent film, etched frame by frame into her eyes and deep into her heart with absolute clarity:

First second: Shen Nian lunged toward Yu Bo, grabbing his lapels with both hands. Her face was upturned and covered in tears, her lips moving as if saying something.

Second and third seconds: She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him desperately, her arms tightly encircling Yu Bo's neck.

Fourth and fifth seconds: Yu Bo's body was stiff, his hands hanging at his sides, his head tilted slightly back as if resisting. His face was filled with shock and caught off guard.

The crucial sixth to eighth seconds.

Yu Bo's hands, which had been hanging at his sides as if to push her away, suddenly snapped up. Instead of pushing her, he fiercely and forcefully clamped around Shen Nian's waist and back, pulling her even tighter against him! At the same time, his head, which had been tilted back, lowered—no longer avoiding her, but actively leaning down to deepen the kiss! The lines of his profile were taut, his expression unreadable, but the embrace and the way he lowered his head were full of power, even carrying a sense of ferocity.

Ninth and tenth seconds: The video cut off abruptly, frozen on the image of the two of them in a tight embrace, kissing passionately. Yu Bo's "response" was unmistakable, and Shen Nian's involvement was equally evident.

Ten seconds. Only ten seconds.

No context, no aftermath, no sign of how Yu Bo might have pushed her away later, how he fled in disarray, or how he suffered in self-reflection. There was only these ten seconds of a kiss filled with tension, passion, and even despair.

Yin Tianxue sat blankly in front of the computer, as if all her strength and blood had been drained in an instant. Her hands and feet were ice-cold, and her heart felt as though an invisible hand were squeezing it tight. It stopped beating for a moment, then began to pound frantically and chaotically against her chest, bringing sharp pain.

Her mind went blank, her ears buzzed, and all that remained before her eyes was the frozen image on the screen—her fiancé, Yu Bo, holding another woman tightly and kissing her passionately. And that woman was Shen Nian.

Time seemed to freeze. The office was terrifyingly quiet, save for the faint hum of the computer's cooling fan and her own heavy, almost suffocating breaths.

She didn't know how much time had passed—maybe a minute, maybe a century. Yin Tianxue suddenly snapped back to reality. After the massive shock came overwhelming waves of pain, anger, a tearing sense of betrayal, and a coldness that seeped into her very marrow.

She remembered Yu Bo's unusual behavior after returning from Jiangcheng, and his subtle avoidance of Shen Nian... It turned out that none of it was groundless, and it wasn't that he was being paranoid. It turned out he really had... such a sordid entanglement with Shen Nian!

And she, like a fool, had been kept in the dark, even thinking at one point that Shen Nian was a "good person" and that she was just overthinking things.

"Heh..." A very soft, almost broken sneer escaped Yin Tianxue's throat. She looked at the jarring image on the screen; her gaze shifted from initial daze to emptiness, and then converged into a frozen chill.

She didn't cry, not a single tear. When extreme pain reaches its peak, it instead presents a strange sense of calm.

With trembling hands, she closed the video window as if closing a Pandora's box. Then, she picked up her phone from the desk and found Yu Bo's number.

Her finger hovered over the dial button for a long time, so long that her knuckles began to turn white. She wanted to question him, to hear his explanation, to vent her pain and anger at the top of her lungs. But in the end, that surging emotion was suppressed by a deeper, colder sense of exhaustion.

Question what? Explain what? The images in the video were clear. Yu Bo's momentary active response was like a red-hot branding iron searing her heart. Any explanation at this moment would seem pale and weak; any defense would just be a quibble trying to cover up the truth.

She threw the phone back onto the desk with a dull thud. The strength in her body seemed drained. She slumped in her large office chair, staring blankly at the cold light fixture on the ceiling. Those ten seconds of footage played on a loop in her mind like a silent mime show; with every replay, it felt like a blunt knife sawing repeatedly at her heart.

Pain, anger, disappointment, a sense of betrayal... various emotions intertwined and surged, nearly swallowing her whole. But what chilled her most was the absurdity of being played for a fool. She had been kept in the dark like an idiot, and had even grown wary of Shen Nian because of Yu Bo's "warning"—little did she know that the one she should have been wary of was perhaps the very person who warned her.

He clearly had such an entanglement with Shen Nian, yet he could still act so "normal" and "avoid suspicion" in front of her. His acting was truly excellent. So good that she almost believed he really had no feelings for Shen Nian and it was truly just for business cooperation.

Yin Tianxue closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths, trying to calm the violent heartbeat and the feeling of suffocation that threatened to burst from her chest. I can't lose control, she told herself. At least not now. This was the office, she was Yin Tianxue, the "Princess" of Tiansheng Group. She couldn't lose her composure and break down here over a failed relationship.