Chapter 109: Admitting It Part 1

One shock after another hit her, making the massive lie Xu Yinian had spun to cover up last night’s absurdity feel increasingly precarious.

Ignoring Jiang Ke at the door for a moment, Xu Yinian tried to force her nervous, stumbling voice into a semblance of calm. “No… it’s not that… The sweater did it.”

But it was clearly too late. The two women, already simmering with suppressed rage, had seen the flash of sheer panic on her face when she was busy guessing whether the marks had been left by Shen Yi.

Her explanation, riddled with the stutters of a guilty conscience, lacked any credibility. Instead, it sounded like a clumsy excuse to protect the culprit.

Xu Yinian was definitely hiding something.

…Someone touched her.

Paranoid, dark thoughts sprouted rapidly. The mere possibility that those were “hickeys” sent them into a frenzy of jealousy.

They were the darlings of fortune, born at the top of the pyramid, where everything came to them with ease. Only with Xu Yinian did they ever taste the bitterness of the unobtainable.

Yet, they didn’t dare use their usual methods of coercion or ruthlessness. They were completely dominated by a girl who seemed weak and incapable of resistance.

Xu Yinian didn’t understand. She had told them the truth—so why did it seem to have no effect? Why did they only seem to get angrier? She was being scorched alive in this intensifying heat.

Shen Ruoshuang had already guessed seven or eight tenths of the truth. Jiang Ke and Bai Ran were the “good sister” and “good friend” Xu Yinian believed them to be. Surely, they were using some excuse to mask their dark desires for her.

Ji Yan was also coming to her senses. She recalled Jiang Ke’s abnormal behavior during the “Truth or Dare” challenge at the mixer when she heard Xu Yinian had a “girlfriend.” Finally, she noticed the perverted obsession hidden behind the facade of a younger sister.

The hearts of both women tightened simultaneously.

Which one was it?

Both were obsessed and relentless; they were determined to pry the truth from Xu Yinian’s lips.

Before they could speak, Jiang Ke knocked again. This time, her voice rang out from the hallway, calling a fatal, “Sister!”

It was like pouring oil on a fire, turning the Shura Field into a localized inferno.

That blatant form of address immediately tipped off Shen Ruoshuang and Ji Yan, who had assumed the person at the door was just some random student conducting the bed check.

Speak of the devil. No wonder Xu Yinian had reacted so violently to the sound of someone checking the dorms.

The mist-covered lashes of the roommates trembled. All warmth vanished from their eyes, replaced by a bone-chilling, chaotic gloom as they stared toward the door.

“Since she’s here, if Yinian won’t talk, why don’t we just ask her sister?”

Though her innate, pathological germaphobia was screaming at her to scrub away any trace someone else had left on Xu Yinian, Ji Yan only said this to scare the girl and gauge her reaction.

Neither woman moved to open the door. They didn’t let a single micro-expression on Xu Yinian’s face escape them.

With just one look, their hearts sank. Xu Yinian looked even guiltier than they had imagined.

It was a total misalignment of frequencies. The possessive jealousy radiating from Shen and Ji was based on one suspicion, while Xu Yinian’s frantic scrambling was about something else entirely.

She wasn’t afraid of the marks on her neck. She was afraid of something far more lethal.

Last night, Xu Yinian had been at the Shen family main residence with Shen Yi, nearly getting caught. She had lied to Shen Ruoshuang, saying she had spent the night with Jiang Ke. She never expected Jiang Ke to run into them, and they hadn’t coordinated their stories at all.

Now, they were planning to interrogate Jiang Ke!

Xu Yinian could already see the scene: Ke-ke, standing there clueless under their aggressive questioning about “last night,” accidentally exposing the truth in an instant.

As expected, one lie requires countless more to cover it…

As a lifelong “good student,” Xu Yinian hadn’t told as many lies in her entire life as she had in the past few weeks.

“What’s the matter? Are you that afraid of your sister coming in?” Ji Yan narrowed her eyes. She practically chewed on the word “sister,” her tone dripping with irony.

“N-no… I’ll go open it.”

Xu Yinian snapped out of her daze, biting her lip and shaking her head. As if to prove she wasn’t afraid—and perhaps to seize a bit of control over the situation—she hurried to the entryway and pulled the door open.

Jiang Ke stood alone in the hallway. Her expression, which had initially been a deliberate, puppy-like display of pining and dependence, was slowly sinking. She was clutching her phone, about to call Xu Yinian.

A strange, dark shadow—one unfamiliar to Xu Yinian—flickered in the girl’s eyes, partially obscured by her bangs.

Sensing the door open, Jiang Ke looked up sharply. The moment she saw her “sister,” her downturned lips curved upward instantly, as if she had rehearsed the motion a thousand times. The darkness vanished so quickly it seemed like a mere trick of the light.

“Sister!”

She was about to say more when her gaze suddenly froze.

She saw the ambiguous, vivid red patches on Xu Yinian’s snowy neck. They were scattered in clusters, as eye-catching as hickeys.

Because Xu Yinian had a mother who was a perfectionist regarding her care, she would never have been allowed to wear winter clothes that hadn’t been pre-washed. Xu Yinian had only suffered from this “sweater problem” during the years when her father was ill and moving between treatments, a time when she was neglected. Those memories were a blur.

Even Xu Yinian herself had forgotten the specific timing of those incidents; Jiang Ke certainly didn’t know about them.

Jiang Ke’s eyes turned red instantly. It was a momentary collapse of sanity under extreme provocation. But years of masking her feelings in front of Xu Yinian allowed her to reel in the crumbling madness the second it appeared.

When she looked up again, her eyes were brimming with tears. “Who bullied you, Sister?!”

Jiang Ke’s reaction was entirely outside the expectations of the two women behind Yinian. Their certain gazes faltered.

…It wasn’t her?

The large group of Student Union members usually seen during a bed check hadn’t arrived yet, but students were still moving in and out of the corridor. Many were now looking over, drawn by the commotion.

Xu Yinian was dying of embarrassment. She instinctively raised her hand to cover the misleading marks, which only made her look more suspicious. Fearing a crowd, she quickly pulled Jiang Ke inside and slammed the dorm door shut.

Her voice, soft and devoid of any real temper, carried a hint of helpless shame as she addressed all three of them. “It… it really is just the turtleneck… I have an allergy! It’s been like this since I was a kid.”

Where did their minds even go? Why won’t they just believe me?