石器盒子

The shutter sound rang out continuously. Xu Youning huddled herself up, like a small injured animal, in the corner and some drops of cold water were running down her thin cheeks. She clenched her teeth and hugged herself, but she still trembled from the cold.

After taking some pictures, Kang Ruicheng helped Xu Youning up. He stared at her and felt satisfied to see the woman look so embarrassed, then putting the wet hair on her forehead aside and saying, “I don’t believe that Mu Sijue will not worry about you.”

Xu Youning growled silently. “Fuck you!”

“Brother Cheng,” one of his men came over and handed a phone to Kang Ruicheng, “the pictures have been sent, but... Mu Sijue did not make a call.”

Kang Ruicheng was not in a hurry. While playing with his mobile phone, he asked Xu Youning with interest, “How do you think Mu Sijue will react?”

Xu Youning also wanted to know how Mu Sijue would react, but she could still remember the scene where he indifferently said: “What do you think?” His biting words made her afraid to be hopeful that he would be concerned.

After 10 minutes, Kang Ruicheng’s patience wore out gradually, as he phoned Mu Sijue.

“Doot—doot—”

The phone rang twice and Mu Sijue answered the phone unhurriedly. But he did not speak first, just like the way that he could keep calm and refrain from making a call, as if he was not threatened.

“How calm you are!” Kang Ruicheng smiled, putting Mu Sijue on the speakerphone and saying, “Mu Sijue, I’ve caught Xu Youning.”

“I saw the pictures.” Mu Sijue then asked calmly, “What do you want?”

Kang Ruicheng glanced at Xu Youning and said straightforwardly, “I want the contract in your hands. A contract in exchange for her life. Actually, you get a good deal.”

Xu Youning stared at Kang Ruicheng’s cell phone, with her heart beating fast.

At that moment, she could not feel her own trembling body with cold anymore, but was fully absorbed in the conversation, for fear of missing any reply of Mu Sijue.

“Are you threatening me?” Mu Sijue had a trace of anger in his indifferent voice. It seemed that he was angry because someone dared to offend him, not because Kang Ruicheng had kidnapped Xu Youning.

Xu Youning was stunned. Did Mu Sijue miss the point? Shouldn’t he haggle with Kang Ruicheng about ransoming her?

“To be exact, I’m threatening you with Xu Youning’s death.” Kang Ruicheng glanced at his watch and began to count down without expression. “You have only 10 minutes left to think about it.”

Kang Ruicheng brought the discussion back on track. Xu Youning held her breath, and her heart almost jumped out of her chest.

She would know the answer to the question that Kang Ruicheng helped her ask Mu Sijue 10 minutes later, right?

In fact, 10 minutes was too long. As soon as Kang Ruicheng finished speaking, Mu Sijue sneered. “Kang Ruicheng, have you forgotten your head in City G? She’s just a person who runs errands for me. Why do you think she can be comparable to a deal that concerns my status?”

Mu Sijue spoke clearly in his extremely attractive voice. His answer floated to Xu Youning’s ears with the cool wind of the night, which made her freeze. Suddenly, she felt that she was completely surrounded by the boundless chill.

“Run errands...?”

She had been with Mu Sijue for so long. However, in his eyes, she was still just a person who ran errands for him?

When he tried to find the person working undercover, he said that she was the only one he could trust, and they had once spent much intimate time together. What did it mean to him?

Kang Ruicheng apparently did not expect that Mu Sijue would be so straightforward, and he took a meaningful look at Xu Youning. “As far as I know, Xu Youning is your woman. Mu Sijue, I know that you are a man who treasures relationships. Can you really leave your woman alone?”

“I have so many women by my side. Since you like Xu Youning only, who is the most unimpressive one of my women, she is for you now.” Mu Sijue didn’t hesitate for a moment. He was so unconcerned about her, as if he was giving Kang Ruicheng an insignificant toy.

“So, you don’t want to give me the contract in exchange for her, right?” Kang Ruicheng asked.

“She is not comparable to that contract.” Mu Sijue took a dismissive tone toward Kang Ruicheng’s question. It seemed that Xu Youning really did not matter much to him. “I’m very busy. You...”

“Even if I abuse her, it doesn’t matter to you?” Kang Ruicheng interrupted Mu Sijue, then said meaningfully, “I don’t mean physical abuse, but sexual abuse...”

Xu Youning grabbed her clothes and stared at the phone screen without even blinking her eyes. She still held on to a last shred of hope, but before she could think about anything, Mu Sijue’s voice was heard.

“I asked her to be by my side only for the sake of my taste for different women. Since you like to follow suit, do as you like.” Mu Sijue’s voice did not show any trace of his feelings. “Tell her that I will take good care of her grandma.”

After that, Mu Sijue hung up the phone. Kang Ruicheng’s phone went black, and it was deadly quiet again in the ruins.

Xu Youning was stunned with her eyelashes fluttering.

She was caught by Kang Ruicheng, but Mu Sijue was not worried at all. He even said that she was for Kang Ruicheng now. Was it because she was not comparable to that contract?

If she hadn’t heard that with her own ears, Xu Youning would not have believed that Mu Sijue was really so ruthless.

“Damn!” Sure enough, she shouldn’t have any illusions.

After some time, some sounds could finally come from Xu Youning’s throat. She pretended to say easily, “I told you, I’m not as important to Mu Sijue as you might suppose.” She spoke with some effort in a barely audible voice.

After speaking, Xu Youning thought that she should smile. But before she raised the corners of her lips, she had been overwhelmed by a sense of loss, and the hot tears blurred her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

Sadly, she found herself to be like a joke.

Before meeting Mu Sijue, Xu Youning had been a fanatic for undivided affection.

She could not bear that a man should develop a romantic relationship with more than one woman at a time; much less that she should be one of those women.

As a result, she could easily decide to leave Kang Ruicheng and carry out the task when she was most fascinated with him, and then she naturally gave up Kang Ruicheng over time.

Mu Sijue... She probably owed him a lot of money in her previous incarnation. When he said that she could be one of his women, she forgot her preference for a one-woman man as well as her bottom line. She did not even want to waste any seconds and immediately became “one” of his women.

She knew that she would stay with Mu Sijue a little longer, and that Mu Sijue would not pull any punches after her identity was revealed. Therefore, she just wanted to cherish every second she spent with Mu Sijue. She did not expect Mu Sijue to fall in love with her.

But after all she had been through, she was still just a person who ran errands for Mu Sijue.

At that moment, everything in the world was dark in Xu Youning’s heart. There was neither hope nor a future. It was also meaningless for her to struggle to stay alive.

After a long time, Xu Youning realized that the word “despair” was used to describe how she was feeling.

However, this moment was by no means the one of greatest desperation in Xu Youning’s life.

When seeing some drops of crystal tears running down Xu Youning’s cheeks, Kang Ruicheng was not really unmoved, so he put a blanket around her shoulders. “Do you still want to go back to him?”

“...” Xu Youning said nothing.

Kang Ruicheng made an analysis. “It is a good chance for you to leave him. You’ve already known how important you are to Mu Sijue, and you can’t make any change even if you go back to him. Besides, Mu Sijue will soon find out who you are. If you don’t want to be hunted down by Mu Sijue, I can make it look like you have been killed. As long as you change your identity and don’t appear before Mu Sijue, you can still live a free life.”

“I don’t know...” Xu Youning was utterly confused. She could never make a decision at this moment, so she shook her head. “Can you give me some time to think about it?”

“Yes.” Kang Ruicheng turned around and left the small shabby room.

Xu Youning sneezed, only to find that her fingers and toes were frozen. She dried her hair and changed her clothes, and then got out of this suffocating, cramped space.

The room lay in ruins, and beneath her, the earth was bare of grass. She was enveloped in boundless darkness, which made her feel more depressed and desperate.

Xu Youning sat down by the door and looked up at the sky. Unexpectedly, she could see the stars.

Over the years, she had been running around, constantly carrying out tasks, killing people, or being hunted. She kept changing her identity and traveling to different countries. She had not only witnessed the greatest prosperity, but also been exposed to the darkness that ordinary people dared not imagine.

She had thought that from the moment when she followed Kang Ruicheng, she had been plunged into eternal darkness, but when she looked up, there was still a magnificent starry sky.

Perhaps she should think about this event in a different way. She was just an undercover woman lurking around Mu Sijue. If Mu Sijue actually gave up the contract to save her, she would be in a dilemma.

It was better if Mu Sijue disregarded her. One day, her identity would be revealed, and she would have to leave at that moment. Knowing that she was nothing to Mu Sijue, she could easily decide to leave him without hesitation.

From this point of view, Mu Sijue’s ruthlessness was not necessarily a bad thing. There was no need for her to be upset, and she thought that she should keep absolutely calm.

Because she was in the worst situation, it was even more necessary to make the decision that was best for herself.

Thinking about that, Xu Youning wiped away her tears and stood up resolutely.

The cold could be driven out, and her depression and sadness could also be removed and forgotten.

She was not a little girl who could have the right to be sad because of love, and if she was not alert enough, she would be killed.

Xu Youning gradually became clear-headed, and it occurred to her that tonight, something would happen to Kang Ruicheng’s goods.

From what Kang Ruicheng looked like just now, he seemed to know nothing about that. When the news came out after a while, she would be the first person to be in trouble.

She had to think about the countermeasures in advance.

...

Not far from her, Kang Ruicheng was standing and smoking. Seeing Xu Youning stand up, he put his cigarette out and came over. “Have you got the answer?”

Xu Youning still did not have any idea, shaking her head and looking at Kang Ruicheng. “What do you think? Should I go back?”

Kang Ruicheng stared at Xu Youning for a while, and seeing that she was really confused, he sighed seemingly helplessly. “A Ning, you’d better not...”

He wanted to tell Xu Youning not to risk going back to Mu Sijue, but before he finished speaking, the phone suddenly rang. The abrupt and pressing ringing seemed to signal that something unexpected had happened.

Kang Ruicheng went a little further and answered the phone, and a trembling voice came from the receiver. “Brother Cheng, the shipment to Poland was attacked. All the goods have sunk to the sea floor.”

“Who did it!” Kang Ruicheng’s roar almost shook the entire ruins.

“It... it could be... Mu Sijue.”

“Mu Sijue?”

A flame of anger welled up in Kang Ruicheng’s heart. He hung up the phone, turned around, rudely pulled Xu Youning close to himself, and grabbed her by the neck. Her cruelly stared at her, as if he was about to tear her to pieces...