Meilei couldn’t talk as tears pricked her eyes, stinging painfully. Her mouth dried out, and she couldn’t swallow or breathe. She couldn’t move from the spot. Her worst fear, imagined as terror, kept her in place. She shook, legs turned to rubber, yet she still didn’t know how to talk.
A tear rolled down Meilei’s cheek, her lips wobbled, and she had to brace both palms on the desk to hold herself up. She was so close to an all-out freakout. Her lungs were tightening so badly she couldn’t catch her breath. Her mind raced.
Kai tugged his arm forcefully out of hers, causing her to topple forward, and her hands slammed the desk, stopping her further fall. She yelped in pain, and he glared her down with fury and loathing.
Kai stalked forward, unable to look at her anymore and adamant he needed to walk out before he did something physical to her, but Meilei couldn’t let him leave. She was grasping at anything she could to escape this nightmare. Hysteria taking over, and irrational behavior moving in.
Meilei broke down into a sobbing mess, grasping at the floor to try and get up, but her body failed her. She had no energy, caught in the throes of a panic attack crushing her lungs, and her vision began to black out. Moving in and taking over, she was powerless to fight it. Gasps and sobs wracked her body, and she mumbled incoherent words. She clawed the hardwood floor towards his feet as real fear gripped at her inability to inflate her chest, vision so blurred she could barely make out his feet. Choking on saliva and snot.
Kai turned and snarled down at the grappling mess of her on the floor. He sneered at the shameful display. He felt no pity, only a disgusted, detached wave of loathing. He calmed his expression, inhaled briefly to cool his demeanor, and then walked out and let the door slam behind him.
Tian picked up his cell, checked the time for the third time, then scrolled to his call list, seeing nothing new, and chewed on his lip before placing it down. His mood was reflective, and Kai was still silent.
It was after ten, and he knew he would have given Meilei the papers by now, but he hadn’t shown face, and Tian knew his friend. It was best to leave him alone until he sought you out instead of trying to find him. He wouldn’t be ready to talk until then and was probably holed up somewhere, drinking his mood back to some kind of level. He was worried that Kai was not in a good place after spending the entire previous day with him and seeing the aftermath of finding out Meilei had a daughter.
That also shocked him, and he didn’t know what Kai thought as he internalized it and jumped into action first. Tian knew if it were him, he would probably need a lot of processing time to come to grips with it and have a lot of anger for missing out on four years of his own kid’s life. He couldn’t even imagine the added trauma of your sister’s killer being the one who bore your flesh and blood. It was a cruel twist of fate. That was before he even saw the kid’s name.
He exhaled heavily, dragged his keyboard back in front of him, and worked on bullet points for an afternoon meeting. Even though Kai was the official CEO for now, he and Tian had been sharing all duties and learning the workings of OTS together for when he took the reigns, and Kai moved to the next venture. It was no secret that Tian would be the permanent boss, but he liked the support of his best friend as they salvaged a good business from the ruins of bad management first.
A chap on the door had him flick a glance up, his stomach doing a little flip, and he called for them to come in, hoping to see the familiar face.
Only it was Qian.
And his mood sank again.
“Morning.” Qian strolled in, rubbing a hand through his normally floppy light brown hair that made him look so much younger than his twenty-five years, and he softly smiled at Tian. He seemed to be in a normal mood.
“Where is he?” Tian asked, knowing getting intel from Qian was like pulling teeth. The boy was always so close-lipped despite their close relationship and the fact he was meant to be Tians EA. He took after Kai in so many ways.
“And the girl?” Tian had been sat on tenterhooks, wondering how it had played out. He had seriously considered intervening but knew Kai would have locked him out if he had shown face. He wanted to confront her alone.
“Yup. Stayed long enough to pull herself together, and then Huo escorted her out.” Qian was too busy focusing on what he was doing. His eyes were on the task, his mood was turning a little testy with the topic, and Tian momentarily stopped staring at him before flipping screens on his monitor. He opened the HR portal and checked the leave requests.
Scanning the list, he found both names on there with a request for emergency leave for the rest of the day. Daily permissions for leave, hour changes, and even vacation requests were always abundant in a company this size. He clicked and approved both so they didn’t have to wait in the queue for HR to get to them.
He blew out through his nose and sank back in his seat, knowing she was probably running scared about now. Kai wouldn’t have been soft in his delivery. He couldn’t imagine the showdown it had been given the lengths she had gone to conceal the kid. Nothing on her personnel file.. and tracking down her birth certificate and hospital records had been insanely tedious for Qian, given she had gone out of town to a small local hospital in a rural area. It’s like even then, she had been hiding the baby. However, Qian was a top-notch investigator, and it only took him a day. The paper trail for those places was practically nonexistent, but he could sniff out details in his sleep.
A misspent youth of playing computers and sports and growing up with social media and google at your fingertips. The boy was a product of his generation. He was highly skilled in tech, had the nose of a hound dog, and had the stamina of an athlete, given his years in martial arts.
“Where have you been then?” Tian turned in question, seeing the request for leave had been made more than an hour ago, yet Qian had been awol. He wasn’t with Kai, so where was he?