"I want it, Shen Antu, calm down, I love you." Xie Duo snatched his pistol and threw it under the bed.
Shen Antu knelt in front of the bed, his eyes full of madness: "You don't love me, you only love my disguise. If you knew everything about me, you would hate me. I don't want you to hate me..."
"Shen Antu, look at me."
"I don't want this..."
"Shen Antu, Shen Lin, look at me!"
Shen Antu couldn't hear anything, so Xie Duo had to hold his pitifully small chin again, staring into his eyes and saying word by word: "Repeat what I just said."
Shen Antu's eyes, which had been darting around in fear, froze, like a bird that had fluttered around and was finally put into a cage.
He was rewinding the tape in his mind absentmindedly, and when he came to a certain word, his brain program automatically stopped.
"you love me… "
"Very good, this is a reward." Xie Duo leaned over and gave him a kiss. Shen Antu felt that it was not enough and stretched his neck for more, but Xie Duo avoided him and sat up straight. "If you want more, tell me what happened back then. I want to remind you that only honesty will be rewarded."
Shen Antu lowered his head deeply. After two minutes of silence, he compromised: "What do you want to hear?"
"All of them." Xie Duo patted the edge of the bed and ordered, "Get up and lie down next to me."
Shen Antu hesitated for a moment, took off his dirty down jacket and wet boots, climbed into Xie Duo's bed, and lay down beside him carefully, but kept a certain distance, for fear that the coldness from his body would chill him. He was so docile that it made people feel distressed, so Xie Duo had to use force to bring him into his arms.
"Let me tell you from the beginning." As if unwilling to face it, Shen Antu buried his head in Xie Duo's chest, with his hands held in Xie Duo's hands to warm them, and a quilt with Xie Duo's body temperature on his body. He thought in a trance that there was no safer place in the world than here.
"My mother is Shen Lijun, and my father is Shen Kaiping. You probably checked my background. You are very familiar with Shen Kaiping, but you may not know my mother. She..."
Shen Antu paused.
"She was a stupid, money-hungry, snobby woman, but she loved me."
Shen Lijun came from the countryside. She was brought by her relatives to work in a bar. At that time, she had just turned 18, was young and beautiful, and was at the most beautiful time of a flower that was about to bloom. Her relatives encouraged her:
"Marry a rich man and you will be rich."
Shen Lijun had never been to school, but she had the keen sense of a lower-class creature. She remembered this sentence and quickly figured out the rules of climbing up.
Shen Kaiping was still the leader of the gang at that time. Because he was handsome and flamboyant, and his ruthless methods seemed to have become his special advantages, women in the nightclubs all wanted to climb into his bed, and Shen Lijun succeeded once. Shen Antu didn't know whether to say that her luck was too good or too bad, because she got pregnant just this time.
Shen Lijun was just like all the other women who tried to get ahead by having children. After having a child from a one-night stand with Shen Kaiping, she wanted to use the child to become Mrs. Shen. At that time, she had a "colleague" who also did everything she could to get pregnant with Shen Kaiping's child, three months earlier than Shen Lijun. One night, she broke into Shen Kaiping's room with a bulging belly, and not only did she fail to become Mrs. Shen, she was also beaten by Shen Kaiping until she had a miscarriage.
Shen Lijun, who had lived at the bottom of the food chain for a long time, smelled some danger, so she quietly escaped and returned to the countryside with Shen Antu, who was only two months pregnant. After giving birth to the child, she took the child out again.
She had to leave. Life in the countryside was too hard. Women were born to be accessories for childbearing. If Shen Lijun didn't leave, she would soon be forced to marry the idiot next door - because other healthy men in the village would despise her as a slut.
Shen Lijun has seen the glamorous life in big cities, and she doesn't want to live a hard life anymore. She wants to be rich and become a wealthy wife, so she moved to a new city and took on a new identity. Now she is a high school girl whose parents have both passed away and who has to drop out of school to work in order to support her younger brother.
"I'll show you photos of my mother when I have the chance. She looks really young. In order to deceive those rich people who are overflowing with sympathy, the age difference between us changed from 18 to 15, 10, and finally to 8, and no one suspected it." Shen Antu laughed softly.
"Although she has never been to school and is not very smart, she is inexplicably good at socializing with men and is liked by men. Her status prevents her from marrying into a wealthy family, but it also allows her to get what she wants—she becomes a mistress kept by a rich man."
Shen Antu's voice became low.
"Because of her identity, I was bullied and isolated by my classmates countless times when I was a child. I begged her to find a good job and live a stable life, even if it meant less money, and to stop being a mistress. Then she scolded me, saying that I was a white-eyed wolf and that she did this for my own good. If she changed her job, let alone a good school, I'm afraid she wouldn't even be able to feed me three meals a day."
"Your mother is right." Xie Duo interjected.
Shen Antu looked up at him, with a malicious smile on his lips: "I thought so at the time, until I knew that her savings had reached eight figures, and she had three villas and two luxury cars in her name. She still lectured me like that. She just loves money. I said she is a stupid, greedy and snobbish woman. She thinks she can deceive men, but in fact she is just deceived by men. She is only overly clever when it comes to money."