Zhen Nuan's body had gone numb, but her mind was sharp and running. She remembered Yan Han's training. Follow the force, redirect it. She turned and kicked out into the dark.
Nothing connected. The man moved like he'd seen it coming — fluid, certain — and his hand closed around her wrist and pulled her forward.
She panicked. No technique came to her. So she bit him.
Her teeth sank into the back of his hand. She tasted mint soap. A faint trace of tobacco beneath it. The skin was firm.
He flinched. Just slightly. But he didn't let go.
She bit harder. He still didn't let go. She was about to say something threatening when a low sound came from the dark.
A laugh.
"Is it to your taste?"
She released him instantly and stumbled backward. Her calf caught the edge of a chair. Her balance tipped. She was going down — and then a hand found her arm and steadied her before she could fall.
She landed against his chest. His hands held her still.
He handled her the way someone picks up a stuffed animal.
Her heartbeat went strange.
"You were about to knock over the chair," he said, lightly. "So I came to catch you. What did you think I was here for?"
She said nothing.
The chair was behind her. He was in front — tall, close, the air between them dense and quiet. His voice came from just above her head.
She could smell him. Something clean and faint. She could feel the weight of his presence even in total darkness, unhurried and completely in control.
The dark made everything worse. Her senses were amplified. The texture of his hand still registered on her lips. Firm. Warm. She did not want to think about that.
Her face burned. She was flustered and couldn't move — too close, no room, no direction that wasn't him.
Then he said: "Stand still."
She nodded hard, remembered he couldn't see, and said "okay" out loud. Somewhere in the dark, she heard him smile. Then the dense pressure of his presence eased and she felt him move away.
She pressed her cold hands to her hot cheeks. Breathed slowly.
When she saw him actually walking off, a new panic rose. "Captain — don't leave me here alone."
His shadow paused.
"I won't go far," he said, patient. "What are you afraid of?"
She had no answer to that.
"I'm checking the switches. Back in a moment."
She stood alone in the dark. Her heartbeat settled, slowly. Then the lamp in the entryway flickered once, twice, stuttered — went out, came back — and finally held steady.
Yan Han stepped out from behind the foyer wall.
He was wearing a long windbreaker. Not Shen Yi's clothes. His jaw was clean-shaven. He had his gloves on.
Zhen Nuan found her voice. "Sorry. I thought you were an intruder. Did I hurt you?"
She had bitten pretty hard.
"Fine," he said. He flexed his hand, clicked his tongue. "Been a busy few days. Haven't washed my hands in two."
Zhen Nuan stared at him. Her expression went flat. "You didn't wash your hands after using the bathroom?"
He lost his composure and laughed — actually laughed, fully. "Made you uncomfortable, didn't it."
She pressed her lips together.
She thought back. His hands had been clean. She knew that. The mint soap had been fresh. He was messing with her.
She almost said so — almost mentioned that his hands had smelled good — and cut the thought off hard.
Because the thought opened a door to another one: the memory of biting him. The specific pressure of it. The warmth of his skin against her lips. The way her breath had come faster.
She shifted back half a step without meaning to.
He noticed. He said: "Get to work."
They walked through the living room. The trace team had left numbered markers at every point of interest. Yan Han moved through them without consulting any notes.
"Lamppost behind the sofa," he said, pointing. "Armrest. Back of the sofa. Small-volume spatter." He moved forward. "Coffee table. Rug. Drip pattern." He bent slightly. "Sofa leg — contact smear."
Spatter meant the injury happened there. A blow, and the blood pressure did the rest. Drip meant the victim moved afterward, bleeding as she went. Smear meant something — a body, a weapon — dragged across the surface.
Zhen Nuan watched him point to each location without hesitation. "How do you know exactly where each one is?"
"Looked at the trace team's photos before coming."
"You memorized all of them?"
He glanced over. "Is that strange?"
She nodded, not embarrassed about it. "I envy people with memories like that. Mine's terrible. I write everything in a notebook."
He smiled, almost gentle. "Don't be too hard on yourself. It's just how some people are wired."
She looked at him.
"..."
He kept walking.
He led her along the room's edge, stepping to mark each spot. One drip stain in the carpet near the reception area. A smudged bloody fingerprint on the decorative wall — the victim's. He spread his hand flat against the clean wall beside it and moved on.
Zhen Nuan traced the story as she walked. First blow in the living room. Light force. The victim stayed on her feet and moved.
Yan Han rounded the decorative wall to the other side. "Here. Steps, and this face of the wall — multiple spatter points. Heavy drip on the floor. A pooling stain." He nodded toward the staircase. "Some spatter reached over there too."
Second blow. Much worse. She went down here.
The far side of the wall opened into a sitting area with a fireplace.
He continued: "One drip on the carpet. Scattered smear marks near the hearth." He paused, then turned to her. "Your turn."
"Me?"
"Reconstruct it. Injury sequence, cause of death."
Zhen Nuan gathered herself and walked through it — the first impact, light, right side of the skull, victim still mobile; the second, concentrated at the crown and rear, fatal; the victim on the ground, blood slowing, pooling rather than dripping, meaning circulation had stopped before she was moved; and the third set of injuries, to the face, postmortem, disfiguring in intent.
Yan Han listened without interrupting. His eyes moved over her face as she spoke.
He'd heard what the others said about her. That she was pretty in a way that didn't demand attention — soft, not sharp, not trying. Xiao Hei had said putting her at a desk in the office would make the whole room easier to be in. Yan Han had dismissed it at the time.
He thought about it now. There was something in her face that made you want to guard it. She'd been protected, clearly — her eyes were clear in a way that had nothing to do with naivety, exactly, more like something that had never been touched by certain things. The men on the team, who spoke roughly by habit, didn't speak that way around her. Without anyone saying so.
He realized, somewhere during her reconstruction, that he'd stopped being skeptical of her. He'd come in with doubts and she had simply, quietly dissolved them without appearing to try.
He looked away. His mouth curved, faint and private.
Zhen Nuan was nervous with him watching. She kept her voice steady, finished her analysis, and spread the skull photographs across the coffee table.
"First round of blows in the living room — moderate force, right lateral impact. She could still move. She ran to the steps and took the second round — heavy, posterior and cranial, fatal. By the time she reached the fireplace, the blood was barely dripping. She was already dead." She tapped the last photo. "Third round — to the face. Postmortem. Disfigurement."
"Yes," he said, a half-smile at the corner of his mouth. "That's where I landed too."
She exhaled. "The weapon?"
He was already reaching into his pocket. She closed her mouth and waited.
He pulled out a cigarette case and set it on the table, then kept searching. The case was a deep sandalwood brown, elegant and old-fashioned, a single character stamped into the lid in bold brushstroke. Zhen Nuan frowned at it.
He followed her gaze and paused.
"Grabbed the wrong coat," he said, rueful.
Wrong cigarettes. No matches.
He checked both side pockets, then the inner breast pocket, and found a small ivory box — fine aloeswood incense. He stared at it briefly.
Zhen Nuan blinked. An expensive cigarette, and a more expensive incense, and no way to light either.
He searched the coat completely and came up with nothing. The restlessness of a man who really wants a smoke and can't have one crossed his face. He muttered: "Cursed night. Not getting a cigarette after all."
Zhen Nuan dug in her own pockets and produced a box of matches. "Here. I carry them for the alcohol lamp."
The matchbox had the c-lab logo printed on it in small clean type.
He looked at it like she'd handed him something genuinely welcome. Almost boyish. He took a cigarette from the sandalwood case and put it between his lips, then reached for the matches.
"Yunyan burns strong," she said quietly.
He paused. The cigarette was in his mouth. He raised an eyebrow.
Zhen Nuan looked at her hands and said nothing.
He waited a beat, then laughed, pulled the cigarette out. "This stays between us."
Like a joke. But she heard something else in it.
"Why do you have the wrong cigarettes?" she asked. "You don't usually smoke this kind."
"People get the wrong idea," he said simply. "One officer's habit reflects on the whole force. I keep what I smoke in public plain and ordinary."
She nodded slowly.
She'd seen him smoke three or four different brands since they met. All ordinary. All strong. No pattern to them, no preference visible. Now she understood — the sandalwood case was the preference. Everything else was just what was on hand.
He moved to put the cigarette back between his lips. She tapped the aloeswood box. "You're not going to blend any of this in?"
His hand stopped midway. The dark eyes went still. Whatever easy amusement had been there drained away, quiet and gradual.
"No," he said.
"It smooths the harshness. Better on the throat."
"No."
"Afraid of getting used to it?"
"That's not it."
"Then why?"
He folded the aloeswood box back into his breast pocket. A slow, small smile.
"It's too gentle," he said. "Like a woman."
The chandelier light fell from above him. His brows were sharp, his eyes very black, very still.
Zhen Nuan turned this over and didn't know what to do with it.
He shrugged at her expression, struck a match.
The sound was brief and bright — scratch, flare — and then he had flame.
Pale smoke curled up. She caught the smell of the burning wood: warm, dry, like sunlight. She liked it.
He bent his head to the flame. The light moved on his face, lit the clean lines of his jaw, the ridge of his nose — something bright and solitary both at once. He closed his eyes slightly on the first draw, the way smokers do, a small habitual furrow at the brow.
She watched him without meaning to.
The word that came to her was: striking. Not handsome exactly, though he was that. Something more specific. The match smell, the smoke, the warm dark — all of it threading together into something that settled into her chest and stayed there.
She caught herself. Heat rushed up her face. She shifted back, creating space between them without making it obvious.
He noticed. He moved the cigarette to his other hand, farther from her. "Sorry."
She didn't explain that it wasn't the smoke.
"Back to the weapon," he said, composure fully returned.
She pulled focus. "At least two distinct instruments. Based on the wound geometry."
The phrase "distinct instruments" made him smile. "That's going to make this harder to find."
She caught what he meant — she'd painted herself into a corner and had no good answer. Her cheeks went slightly pink. He had a way of seeing exactly where she was, exactly what she was thinking, before she'd finished thinking it.
She pushed through. "The wounds from the first blow are consistent with a surface that's smooth, narrow horizontally, and curved vertically. Elongated. I ran simulations on the mannequin. No match in my catalog."
He drew on the cigarette. "First attack location — living room, between the sofa and the table. They were talking."
She looked uncertain. "Why talking? What if the killer came from elsewhere and chased her?"
"Instinct under threat is to run toward open space. She wouldn't have cornered herself between the sofa and the table unless she was already standing there, comfortable, not expecting anything."
She went quiet. He was right. She spent too much time in the lab and not enough in rooms like this, thinking about how bodies move when they're scared. A good forensic pathologist needed more than pathology. She knew that and kept forgetting it.
"So they were talking," she said. "And she was in her robe. Someone she knew, or at least didn't fear."
"Someone she wasn't guarding against," he said, precise.
"They were mid-conversation and he attacked suddenly." She thought through it. "Unplanned. Impulse. He grabbed whatever was closest."
He blinked once in acknowledgment.
She looked around for something heavy enough, something the right shape — nothing in the room fit. "Did Guan Xiaoyu's team take it?"
"No. The killer took it." He tilted his chin toward the spot behind her. "It was there."
She turned. The corner between the long sofa and the single chair held a small square side table. Bare. She studied it. "You think there was a decorative piece on it?"
"The villa is expensive and matched throughout. That table is wrong for the room — too plain. Something sat on it." He tapped the coffee table with two fingers.
She looked again. The bare surface suddenly felt like an absence, a gap. She thought about the wound profile — the narrow smooth horizontal, the long curve vertical —
"The edge of a sculpture base," she said. "Something on a pedestal. Elongated, curved."
He lowered his cigarette.
A pause.
"Yes," he said.