Chapter 30

“Why would Su Tan be angry?” Wen Jiu asked.
“My brother says girls are very precious. No one’s allowed to touch them. Not even family,” Su Yaoyao replied, her voice soft and gauzy, like a piece of sky fallen to earth and wrapped around you.
Wen Jiu and Qin Yao exchanged a look.
For the first time, a crack appeared in Her Young Lady’s lively, coquettish expression. “Su Tan isn’t wrong in principle, but you’re twenty-one already.”
“We’re all girls here, and we’re your good friends. We’re not groping you, just tapping your face a little is perfectly fine. You’re twenty-one; you really don’t need to keep listening to Su Tan on this.”
“But… but my brother will get mad,” Su Yaoyao murmured, lips pressed together, barely daring to voice even that much, let alone call it a rebuttal.
Qin Yao knew perfectly well how soft and easy to bully she was. The reason they’d started hanging out years ago was because, at a banquet in Haicheng, Qin Yao had stepped in to punish the people who were picking on her.
But several years had passed, and Yaoyao was an adult now. Somehow, she seemed worse than back then.
She’d originally thought Yaoyao had been dragged abroad against her will. Looking at her now… there was a real chance she’d come “willingly.”
What Qin Yao realized, Wen Jiu realized too.
Wen Jiu was pretty sure Su Yaoyao had been thoroughly brainwashed.
“You’ve been living up on the sixth floor this whole time, didn’t you feel like your freedom was being restricted?” Wen Jiu asked, then quickly added, “Did Su Tan ever do anything weird to you? Like… kissing you, hugging you, that kind of thing?”
The partition in front had already been raised and the soundproofing switched on. With just the three of them in the backseat, they could say whatever they wanted.
Su Yaoyao blinked her innocent eyes. “Younger brother said it wasn’t safe here. But he still has to work, so he can’t always take care of me. That’s why I have to stay put on the sixth floor and not cause him trouble.”
“Younger brother says a lot of strange things, but he hasn’t done anything strange yet. He says he doesn’t want to be my brother anymore, but he was the one who said he’d always be my brother, and that’s why he drove away.”
“If he doesn’t want to be my brother anymore, does that mean sister can come home?” Her line of thinking took a hard turn, and suddenly her eyes lit up; the joy of that thought made her whole person seem to glow.
She happily ran even further off-topic. “Sister is Lin Yu, she’s Mom and Dad’s real daughter. I really like sister, but my brother hates her.”
“I’ve been trying to find sister, but the phone I used to contact her got hidden by brother.”
If someone else had said all this, Wen Jiu might have thought they were being fake and manipulative. But because this was Su Yaoyao, somehow it all felt… perfectly natural.
The everyone-falls-for-her Young Lady really was… too cute.
She was, without a doubt, the one person in the Su family who most wanted Lin Yu to come home.
Speaking of Lin Yu, Wen Jiu needed to hurry back to China too. In the book, Lin Yu and Su Yaoyao’s timelines ran simultaneously. If she went back too late, Lin Yu might already be getting crushed by Su Heng.
Putting aside the original novel’s POV for a moment, just listening to all this in one breath made Wen Jiu feel like the problem lay squarely with the two Su brothers.
Aside from being a little love-brained when it came to Chu Yan, Qin Yao was perfectly normal. Her brows moved up and down as she frowned. “That’s… impressive, in a terrifying way.”
“Do you have a phone?” Wen Jiu asked, thinking about loading her up with some novels.
Su Yaoyao pulled a fully charged phone from her bag. She didn’t use it much, mostly just for calls.
“My phone has my location on it. If I get lost, my older and younger brother can find me with it,” she said guilelessly. She really didn’t guard herself against people.
“But my brothers won’t look at my private stuff, so you don’t have to worry they’ll see anything you put on my phone.”
Wen Jiu: ??
Qin Yao: !!!
Having live location on at all times was already insane, if they were also reading her messages, it would be straight-up horror. She was twenty-one, a full-bloom flower, not an eighty-one-year-old who needed a tracking bracelet.
Qin Yao suddenly felt that even she hadn’t gone this far when chasing Chu Yan. At most, she’d just have a little lackey follow him around, and that hadn’t even worked. She’d never imagined there were people out there way more extreme than she was.
She did some quick self-reflection and concluded that, fine, her own behavior wasn’t exactly saintly either.
But she was absolutely going to double-standard this: if other people did it, they were wrong; if she did it, it was fine.
She rolled down the window and, without hesitation, chucked Su Yaoyao’s phone outside. It smacked right into a trash can in the alley; the lid bounced, then snapped back down, and the phone disappeared into the garbage.
“Yaoyao, why did you smash my phone?” Su Yaoyao asked timidly.
She was like a delicate little white blossom drenched in a thunderstorm, which only made people want to bully her more.
Qin Yao shook her head in exasperation, then reached over and rattled her by the shoulders. “Su Yaoyao, seven years ago you were just a kid, getting bullied until your eyes were red was one thing. But now you’ve grown up. Even if you don’t get angry, you still have to fight for your own rights. I just threw your phone away, at the very least, you should be asking me why!”
The way she was now, forget the brothers who already had twisted feelings for her, even any random man would want to push her around.
And she was an adult; we all know exactly what “pushing around” could mean.
Qin Yao had no intention of watching her good friend mysteriously vanish one day. Su Yaoyao had to learn how to protect herself.
Su Yaoyao’s eyes turned red at the corners, the tear mole beneath them growing all the more striking and sultry. She bit her lip and grabbed onto Qin Yao’s sleeve. “Yaoyao, I’m mad. Why did you throw my phone away?”
Her dewy eyes reflected Qin Yao’s face. “Yaoyao, I did it, you don’t have to be angry anymore.”
Qin Yao had been irritated before. After hearing that, she was furious.
The dignified eldest daughter of the Su family, and she had the personality of a chronic people-pleaser.
This was all the Su brothers’ fault. In her heart, Qin Yao firmly stapled the original sin label onto both their heads.
She closed her eyes, took a breath, then shoved Wen Jiu forward. “Wen Jiu, I’m giving you a mission: teach her. Start by teaching her she can’t keep pleasing everyone all the time.”
Her Young Lady folded her arms and turned her head away, refusing to look at Yaoyao any longer.
Wen Jiu pointed at Qin Yao and said to Su Yaoyao, “This is what it looks like when someone’s mad.”