The rain began at dusk.
At first, it was only a velvet-fine mist clinging to the streetlamps’ dim yellow halos. Then it gradually thickened, pelting the flagstones with a dense, restless sound, as if someone were whispering an indistinct name over and over beside her ear.
The entire alley had gone dark except for The Curio House. Its lamp was ancient, its brass shade wrapped in a pattern of withered vines. Light spilled through the frosted glass, glowing across the wet ground in a small patch of warm, almost unreal gold.
It was an antique shop that had been open for seventeen years. Its storefront was small, a narrow wooden door set between two brick buildings. Anyone unfamiliar with the place could easily miss it if they weren’t paying attention.
Inside, however, was another world. Tall wooden shelving stretched from floor to ceiling, each compartment filled with porcelain of uncertain age, faded oil paintings, rust-spotted pocket watches, and most striking of all, an entire wall covered in dolls.
The dolls varied in size and pose. Some sat quietly; others stood in profile. Every one wore an exquisitely tailored old-fashioned dress, and their features were so delicate that one could almost make out the faint traces of blood beneath their skin.
Their eyes were all hand-fired glass beads. Their colors varied in shade, but without exception they were bright and clear, as though someone had polished them again and again with a patience bordering on obsession.
Pei Yan sat behind the counter, a soft cloth pinched between her fingers as she wiped the cheek of a porcelain doll over and over. The doll stood roughly half a person’s height, dressed in a faded moon-white gown. Each eyelash had been implanted individually with real silk, the curve of its lashes precise to the point of cruelty. Its glass eyes remained fixed forever on the same direction—the door.
Her movements were slow, slow enough to resemble the completion of some ritual. Her fingertips glided over the porcelain with such a light touch that it was almost imperceptible, yet the concentration on her face made it feel as though what she held was not an antique but a living body in need of gentle care.
She kept her eyes lowered. Her long, thick lashes cast a small shadow beneath the light, concealing the true expression in her eyes.
A trace of sandalwood drifted through the air. It was not strong, yet it stubbornly seeped into every inch of the space, like an invisible layer of velvet wrapping the entire shop so tightly that not even air could pass through.
It was the scent of Pei Yan’s pheromones—cool, clean, and utterly without aggression. Yet without anyone realizing it, they made people lower their guard, as if an unseen hand were gently pressing down on their shoulders and guiding them inch by inch into sleep.
Everyone in the neighborhood said that Boss Pei was a rare gentle Alpha, courteous and gracious, never arguing with anyone. Even her pheromones were so mild that she hardly seemed like a prime Alpha.
Only a very few people knew what kind of patience and obsession lay behind that “gentleness.”
The antique shop clock struck nine.
Before the final echo had faded, the shop door was violently thrown open from outside.
Wind drove the rain inside and snuffed out the small candle by the door. The darkness wavered, then was barely held back by the main lamp in the shop. Pei Yan’s movements stopped. Her fingers froze in midair above the doll. She lifted her eyes, looking past the porcelain figure’s lowered lashes toward the silhouette in the doorway.
It was a woman covered in blood.
She stumbled against the doorframe and barely managed to steady her wavering body.
Her black trench coat had long since been soaked through with rain and blood, its original color impossible to make out. From her right shoulder to her elbow, a wound had ripped open so deeply that bone was visible. Blood dripped from her fingertips one drop at a time, striking the floor and blooming into dark red flowers, leaving a glaring stain across the previously spotless wooden boards.
Her long hair was drenched and plastered to the side of her neck. A few disordered strands hung before her eyes but could not conceal them—pale brown, almost translucent, now burning with near-manic vigilance, like a beast driven into a dead end and ready to bite back at any moment.
Xie Qingqiu.
She did not know that this body had already been branded as prey. Over the past seventy-two hours, the Joint Defense Bureau’s wanted notice had covered nearly every street corner and every pheromone monitoring station across half the city.
She had not closed her eyes in three days. The people behind her clung to her like shadows, impossible to shake. No matter how many detours she took, how often she slipped into crowds, or how she twisted and turned between sewers and rooftops, the scent of pursuit remained faintly wrapped around her from behind, biting down like a leech and refusing to let go.
And more terrifying than the pursuers was what was inside her own body.
Her exhausted body, nearly spent from fleeing, was warning her in a way she had never experienced before—it was too hot. Every space between her bones burned, as if something were about to break out from deep within her scent gland.
The heat had begun three hours ago. At first, there had only been waves of prickling numbness and tingling at the nape of her neck. She had thought it was an illusion caused by severe blood loss. It was only when the heat spread along her spine and into every limb that she realized something was wrong. This was not ordinary pre-heat symptoms.
Her secondary-sex report identified her as a “prime Omega,” yet no medical paper could explain why her heat came with such searing pain, as though her body were betraying her, trying to tear open a passage and release something within her that even she herself did not recognize.
Her gaze swept rapidly around the shop. Only after confirming there was no ambush did she press her back against the cold wooden door and gasp for breath. One hand clamped hard over the wound on her shoulder while the other reached inside her coat and closed around the dagger that still held the warmth of her body.
The feel of it beneath her fingertips calmed her slightly. At least this would not betray her.
“Don’t move.” Her voice was hoarse, as if scraped raw by sandpaper, and carried a tremor she could barely suppress. “I just… need somewhere to hide from the rain.”
Pei Yan did not move.
She did not even rise from her stool. She merely placed the soft cloth on the counter with extreme slowness, her movements so gentle it was as though she feared disturbing something.
Her gaze fell on the wound at the woman’s shoulder, then slowly moved upward and stopped at her flushed, feverish neck. Beneath a small patch of skin, the scent gland was faintly swollen, like a flower bud about to split open, covered in a sickly, almost translucent red.
Pei Yan’s pupils contracted for an instant. The expression that crossed her face was difficult to describe, like a collector glimpsing a long-lost one-of-a-kind piece amid a pile of junk, her breathing unconsciously growing half a shade lighter.
Then she lowered her lashes as if nothing had happened and picked up the soft cloth again, as though that fleeting glimmer of strangeness had never appeared.
“The rain is heavy outside,” she said, her voice low and unhurried, carrying a strange, unsettling calm. “Sit down and talk, Ms. Xie.”
Xie Qingqiu’s entire body went rigid.
“You’ve mistaken me for someone else.” Her knuckles turned white as she clenched her hand. The sound of her dagger leaving its sheath rang unnaturally clear in the silent shop. “My name isn’t that.”
“Is that so?” Pei Yan gave a soft laugh, the smile so faint it could hardly be called an emotion. “But the structure of the scent glands on your neck matches the ‘reverse-evolution anomaly’ described in the wanted notice down to the last detail. The Joint Defense Bureau has raised the bounty to three hundred thousand. Ms. Xie, your life is worth quite a lot now.”
The air instantly froze.
Xie Qingqiu’s pheromones flared without warning. They carried an intensely dangerous scent, mingling rust and ice, sharp as poison-coated needles stabbing deep into Pei Yan’s senses.
This was the aggressive pheromones unique to a prime Omega on the verge of heat, enough to make most Alphas lose control in an instant and struggle even to breathe. Yet Pei Yan merely drew her brows together slightly, as if she had smelled something less than agreeable but hardly unbearable. Not a single thing about her stance relaxed.
“What do you want?” Xie Qingqiu’s fingers had already hooked around the dagger’s locking mechanism. Her voice was pressed low, nearly forced through clenched teeth. “Are you going to report me? Or—”
“Neither.” Pei Yan rose to her feet.
Her movements were not fast, but they possessed a suffocating composure, like a predator that never had reason to hurry.
She was half a head taller than Xie Qingqiu, dressed in a perfectly fitted dark gray shirt with the sleeves rolled to her forearms. A slim but not frail wrist showed at the cuff, the bones sharply defined like part of some precision instrument.
She walked around the counter and approached the door one step at a time, each footfall landing in the gaps between the sounds of rain. Unhurried, she advanced as though the blood-covered woman in the doorway, who might lash out at any moment, were nothing more than another collection piece awaiting arrangement.
Xie Qingqiu instinctively raised her dagger, its tip aimed straight at the other woman’s throat.
Pei Yan acted as though she had not seen it. She walked directly to within less than a step of Xie Qingqiu and stopped, close enough for Xie Qingqiu to clearly see the deep, nearly collector-like gleam in her eyes as she examined a priceless antique.
The sandalwood scent nearly enveloped her whole body now, carrying an indescribable, heart-stirring calming effect. Xie Qingqiu clearly wanted to retreat, but several degrees of strength mysteriously drained from her limbs. Even the hand gripping the dagger slackened for an instant.
She realized it with a start and gritted her teeth, tensing her arm with all her strength before she could barely steady the blade.
“Your pheromones…” Pei Yan’s gaze slowly traveled over her battered, disheveled body. There was no rise or fall of emotion in her voice. “They don’t quite match the way you look.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means…” Pei Yan lifted a hand and touched the fabric beside the wound on her shoulder with two fingers, so lightly and reverently that it resembled the appraisal of a damaged yet precious antique. “You’re covered in wounds, as wretched as a stray dog, yet the aggressive pheromones you give off are powerful enough to make an entire special investigations team hesitate. Ms. Xie, are you prey—or someone’s hunting dog?”
Xie Qingqiu slapped her hand away and staggered back a step, her back slamming hard into the door. The movement pulled at her wound, making her suck in a sharp breath as a wash of white flashed across her vision.
“Don’t touch me.” She gritted her teeth. The dagger still pointed at Pei Yan, but its tip trembled faintly from exhaustion. “Whoever you are—if you want to keep me here, you’ll have to ask this knife whether it agrees.”
Pei Yan lowered her eyes to the dagger held against her throat and actually let out a soft laugh. It was so quiet as to be almost inaudible, yet it sent a chill down Xie Qingqiu’s spine. It was not the laughter of someone afraid, but something almost… delighted, appreciative, as if what lay before her was not a weapon but a long-missed collectible worth playing with.
“Interesting,” Pei Yan murmured, her gaze settling on Xie Qingqiu’s taut wrist as if speaking to herself. “In all these years, not a single collection piece has dared hold a knife to my throat.”
“What did you—” Xie Qingqiu’s pupils contracted sharply.
Before she could finish, a dizzying vertigo surged over her. The exhaustion accumulated over three days and the turbulent pheromones raging inside her erupted at the same time. Scalding heat surged from her scent gland into her limbs, as if someone had poured boiling oil into her veins.
Her vision went black. Her ears rang. The hand holding the knife suddenly lost all strength. With a clang, the dagger struck the floor, and her entire body began to pitch forward uncontrollably.
Pei Yan seemed to have anticipated it. Without the slightest panic, she reached out and caught the body that had abruptly gone limp.
The body was lighter than it looked, so light it scarcely seemed human. Pei Yan’s arm firmly supported her waist and back, clearly feeling the astonishing heat coming through her soaked clothing, along with the heart pounding wildly inside her chest.
The cold scent of rain mingled with the smell of blood and rushed over her. Beneath it was a faint, sweet scent unique to an Omega on the verge of heat, seeping little by little from Xie Qingqiu’s scent gland and tangling with the sandalwood in the air, merging into something eerily close to dangerous harmony.
Just before she lost consciousness completely, Xie Qingqiu vaguely heard a deep voice beside her ear, its gentle cadence like a whisper to a treasure finally found:
“Welcome home, Ms. Xie.”
At that moment, she did not even have time to distinguish how much danger was concealed in those words before the light before her eyes went completely dark. Only that lingering sandalwood scent and the almost frighteningly steady warmth of the person holding her remained as her final sensations before she fell into darkness.
Outside the shop, the rain still had not stopped. Beneath the brass lamp shade, the light remained dim and gentle.
Pei Yan lowered her head and looked at the unconscious woman in her arms. Her fingertips brushed ever so lightly across the reddened scent gland at her neck. In the depths of her eyes, that profound glimmer could no longer remain hidden.
She lifted Xie Qingqiu into her arms, turned, and walked toward the wooden door leading to the basement.
When she passed the wall filled with dolls, her steps faltered for a moment. She looked toward the doll in the moon-white dress. Its glass eyes still gazed at the doorway, as if silently watching this scene.
“Look,” Pei Yan murmured, a trace of tenderness in her voice that even she herself failed to notice. “I found the last masterpiece that should never have existed.”
The wooden door slowly closed behind her, shutting out the rain and also shutting out the fate Xie Qingqiu did not yet know was about to descend upon her—the fate called captivity.