Bo Jingzhou's grip hurt a little. Shen Wanci turned her head, trying to evade it, but how could she ever match the strength of a man's hand?
Seeing that she said nothing, Bo Jingzhou leaned closer. Fury churned in his eyes, but he forced it down with all his might—from his expression alone, it was impossible to detect the fire seething within him.
If anything, his voice was even gentler than usual.
He drew near to Shen Wanci, his voice slow and restrained. "What is Feng Jianhui that you'd go looking to an outsider for help? Is the title of Madam Bo not useful enough? Or are you too proud to use it?"
"Bo Jingzhou, you're hurting me." Shen Wanci was still trying to break free of his grip, but several attempts came to nothing. Instead, the thin calluses on the pads of his fingers rubbed that patch of skin until it burned and stung—she couldn't even tell whether the skin had broken.
Knitting her brows, she said impatiently, "We're about to get divorced. Who I go to for help is none of your business!"
"Divorce? You can bear to? Half a month ago, when you stripped naked to seduce me, didn't you say you wanted to spend the rest of your life with me?"
Such a thing was playful banter in bed, but said openly it became a bald, naked humiliation.
Shen Wanci felt as though she'd been viciously slapped; the color drained clean from her face. Yet she showed not the slightest fragility before this man—instead she curled her lips in provocation. "That's right. After all, these three years of marriage you've worn that look of having no desires at all. For the sake of my happiness in the second half of my life, I had to verify whether you were impotent. Lucky I did—it let me make up my mind that we absolutely had to divorce."
Bo Jingzhou's grip tightened. "That time before the wedding didn't satisfy you enough?"
"Wasn't the wine spiked with drugs that time? To be on the safe side, I even used a heavy dose. It just goes to prove that without the drug, you really can't."
Shen Wanci was truly drunk. Before her, Bo Jingzhou's face had multiplied into several, a blur—she couldn't even make out his features, let alone his expression.
She heard herself spitting the words out one by one, answering entirely on instinct. As for what exactly she was saying, even she had no idea.
And in Bo Jingzhou's mind a nerve was stretched taut, the fire in his heart blazing fiercer and fiercer, until he ground out, almost through clenched teeth, "Shen Wanci, you're really something!"
He shoved the car door open and got out, pulled the limp Shen Wanci down off the seat, and took the elevator straight up to the hotel on Ye Lan's upper floors.
He was the owner of this place, and he had a private suite upstairs.
The elevator stopped on the 24th floor—this entire floor was his domain, requiring a fingerprint scan to enter. Bo Jingzhou hauled Shen Wanci into the room and, without the slightest courtesy, tossed her onto the bed.
He looked down from above at the woman curled into a ball on the bed, drowsy and half asleep. His expressionless face grew darker still. Unhurriedly, he stripped off his suit jacket, then went on to unbutton his shirt, baring the man's taut, solid muscles.
A scion of an aristocratic house, he was elegant even while doing this sort of thing, without the faintest trace of impatient lust.
Bo Jingzhou had not originally intended to do anything to Shen Wanci, but this woman…
She was simply begging to be taught a lesson!
Shen Wanci, who had been dragged the whole way like a twisted sack of cloth, was now dizzy and nauseated, wanting only to vomit. But her whole body was limp; lying there, she couldn't summon an ounce of strength.
She felt as though both her cheeks ached terribly. Thinking of Bo Jingzhou's brutality just now, she felt so wronged that tears spilled out.
It is often at such moments that the heart grows fragile, and one more easily recalls those people… the ones never willingly mentioned in sober, waking hours.
Seeing her cry, Bo Jingzhou softened a little. He bent down, kneeling on one knee on the bed, and was about to lift her and carry her to the bathroom when he heard Shen Wanci murmur a name: "Yucheng…"
Because of those two syllables, the atmosphere in the room turned oppressive in an instant.
Even a single spark would have set off a violent explosion.
Bo Jingzhou looked at her, his eyes deep and black. After a long while he spoke slowly, "What did you just call out?"
His voice was indifferent, not cold or savage—but those who knew him understood best that a Bo Jingzhou like this was more terrifying than one in a towering rage.
Shen Wanci kept her eyes closed and made no sound, as if she'd fallen asleep—and she truly had.
Bo Jingzhou gripped her chin and forced her awake. "Shen Wanci, whose name did you just call?"
The woman was roused in a daze, still groggy. Her tear-filled eyes looked at him, her voice hoarse. "Yucheng… I should have listened to you back then and not married Bo Jingzhou. I regret it—I regret it so much…"
Bo Jingzhou's gaze fell on Shen Wanci, the depths of his eyes unfathomable. "Regret?"
No one answered.
In the quiet room there was only the woman's low sobbing—whether because he'd hurt her or because she felt wronged, there was no telling.
The man's palm slid back and forth over her slender waist, the pressure heavy, leaving the skin flushed red wherever it passed. "Three years and no regrets—but the moment Nie Yucheng comes back, you regret it?"
Stimulated by the pain coursing through her body, Shen Wanci grew a little clearer-headed, though her mind still swam.
It took her a good while to register who the man before her was. She suddenly knit her brows and shrank to one side. "Bo Jingzhou, don't touch me."
The fury Bo Jingzhou had restrained again and again was utterly ignited by that sentence. Ignoring Shen Wanci's resistance, he grabbed her by the ankle, pulled her over, and pinned her beneath him. "Won't let me touch you? Then who are you saving yourself for? Nie Yucheng? Or that man you bought a bag for?"
"……"
"Shen Wanci, you've really come up in the world—using my money to keep a man. And if you're going to keep one, you couldn't even pick a decent one." His finger traced down the side of her face, following the line of her neck, humiliating words tumbling out one after another. "If you'd been this enterprising from the start, maybe I'd have taken you to bed long ago—and you wouldn't have had to strip naked and throw yourself at me only for me to not spare you a glance."
Bo Jingzhou leaned down against her lips, the vicious mockery in his words not softened in the least by the intimacy of the touch. "That man's over forty, isn't he? You've been lonely for three years—can he even satisfy you in bed?"
Shen Wanci's lips moved, as though she'd said something, but her voice was too faint, and the man, in his towering rage, didn't hear a word of it.
Brows drawn in evident misery, the woman turned her face to the other side. Expressionless, Bo Jingzhou reached out and gripped her chin, wrenching her face back. "What? Don't want to see me? Or did I hit the—"
"Urgh!"
At that moment Shen Wanci could no longer hold it in—she opened her mouth and vomited all over Bo Jingzhou—