The cool beauty forcibly bids for top A: Chapter 47

Click! Click! Click!

Shen Yanzhou’s Maybach pulled up steady before the Shen Group building. Reporters lurking in all directions like sharks that had smelled blood instantly swarmed forward.

Camera lenses and microphones banged against the car windows. Bodyguards struggled to push open a gap in the crowd. The moment Shen Yanzhou stepped out, countless microphones carrying malice were thrust straight at his face.

“Mr. Shen! Is it true what the tabloids reported this morning, that a top Alpha was seen entering and leaving your mansion?!”

“Mr. Shen, have you really been keeping an Alpha at home?”

“Mr. Shen, your wedding with young master Fu Sihan is approaching yet this scandal broke out. Is that wild man’s bedroom skills better than young master Fu’s?”

Word by word, crude and unbearable, as if they wanted to skin him alive and tear out his tendons.

In the pushing and shoving, the scene grew increasingly out of control.

“Ouch!” The young female reporter at the very front was suddenly shoved by a colleague behind her, her foot stepping into empty air. She was about to crash heavily onto the asphalt when a pale, elegantly boned hand grabbed her arm and pulled her up with force.

The young reporter looked up and abruptly crashed into a pair of clear, rippling silver eyes.

The distance was too close. She could almost see Shen Yanzhou’s thick eyelashes trembling slightly, a few strands of silver hair just covering the corner of his eye, making the lingering, imagination-provoking redness at his eye corner even more obvious.

She clearly smelled the top Alpha scent on Shen Yanzhou that he couldn’t hide no matter what, but still couldn’t help her moral compass following his face. What scandal, what keeping an Alpha, what the fiance being cuckolded… Did Mr. Shen even need to keep an Alpha?

It was just a matter of crooking his finger.

She just didn’t know which Alpha had such good fortune.

Seeing that she had steadied herself, Shen Yanzhou immediately let go. This movement pulled at his sore and weak waist, and pain almost squeezed out a bit of tear light from the corner of his eye.

“All of you step aside. I don’t want anyone having an accident below the Shen Group building.”

“I won’t accept any interviews.” His gaze swept over this group of frenzied hyenas before him, and he spoke coldly.

Right at this moment, two rows of well-trained security personnel rushed out from the first floor lobby of the Shen Group, forcibly tearing open a narrow passage through the frenzied crowd.

Shen Xici quickly rushed down, stripping off his suit jacket and throwing it over Shen Yanzhou’s pale, beautiful face, blocking it completely. Then he tightly protected his shoulders and led him inside the company.

As Shen Xici walked, he said with heartache: “Brother, didn’t I tell you on the phone this morning not to come to the company today no matter what!”

Shen Yanzhou and Shen Xici walked into the private elevator.

Shen Yanzhou leaned against the cold elevator wall and asked: “What exactly is the situation?”

Shen Xici lowered his head, took out a tablet from his briefcase, tapped it open, and handed it to Shen Yanzhou: “This morning past five, several anonymous media outlets suddenly uploaded photos of Brother and that man at the same time.”

Shen Yanzhou took the tablet. Though the photos were blurry, you could clearly make out that the location was the entrance of his villa. Thirty Million had him pressed against the door, kissing him passionately.

Shen Xici spoke with difficulty: “Brother’s long hair is too recognizable, and it was right at the doorstep. In the photos, the two of you are kissing… the posture is so intimate. This is completely solid evidence. We can’t even easily issue a statement to deny it.”

Shen Yanzhou’s face was expressionless. His fingertips slid across the screen, wanting to tap open the comment section and scroll down.

But Shen Xici reached out, pressing against the edge of the tablet, trying to pull it away: “Brother, don’t look. It’s all nasty comments stirring up trouble!”

“It’s fine.” Shen Yanzhou said faintly.

Shen Xici released his hand with red-rimmed eyes.

Shen Yanzhou scrolled through the comment section. It was full of unspeakable filth:

[Usually putting on such a pure and chaste act, didn’t expect he’d play so wild in private. Truly insatiable.]

[What high and mighty flower, what clean and noble young master. I say it’s all a manufactured persona! Who knows how slutty he is deep down.]

[But honestly, Fu Sihan is also very handsome. Could it be he’s an impotent husband? Can’t satisfy Mr. Shen, forcing him to go keep wild men?]

“Hah.” Shen Yanzhou tossed the tablet back to Shen Xici.

“What the outside world says about me, I don’t care. How is the company right now?”

“Brother…” Shen Xici was burning with anxiety, “The moment the Hong Kong stock market opened today, Shen Group’s stock price started diving. The board is in quite an uproar!”

With a ding, the elevator doors opened at the floor where the CEO’s office was located.

Shen Xici followed closely behind Shen Yanzhou, speaking extremely fast: “Those few old directors who were usually already dissatisfied with Brother are now joining forces to apply pressure. With such a huge scandal that has seriously damaged group interests, they will absolutely use this opportunity at the day after tomorrow’s board meeting to initiate impeachment, wanting to pull you down from the CEO position.”

As the two were walking toward the CEO’s office, what greeted them was suffocating chaos.

The directors of the PR department, legal department, and finance department were all blocking the entrance to Shen Yanzhou’s office, each and every one of them sweating profusely in anxiety.

Seeing Shen Yanzhou walk over, everyone surrounded him like they had grabbed a lifeline.

“Mr. Shen! The PR department’s phone lines have been blown up. The Fu family is also demanding we give them an explanation!”

“Mr. Shen! Several cooperating bank presidents are waiting online, inquiring about our capital chain risks…”

“Mr. Shen…”

“Mr. Shen, what should we do now…”

Countless voices intertwined together, like an airtight net, making it somewhat hard for him to breathe.

Right in the middle of this despairingly noisy racket.

Buzz… buzz…

Shen Yanzhou’s private phone in his pocket vibrated violently. He reached out and took out the phone.

On the screen, the two characters “Grandfather” were jumping.

He pressed the answer button and put the phone to his ear.

There was no small talk on the other end of the line, only the dull sound of a cane heavily striking the floor, and the old man’s voice of extreme disappointment and fury: “Shen Yanzhou, get back to the old house.”

Two hours later, inside the study of the Shen family old house.

Cough cough cough… The white-haired old man leaned on his dragon-head cane, his whole body trembling with anger. “What the news said, is it true or not?!”

“Yes.” Shen Yanzhou replied.

“You…!” The old man suddenly struck the floor heavily with his cane. “Outrageous! You, the dignified head of the Shen family, actually carrying on this kind of shameful business behind your fiance’s back! Get rid of that person immediately. You may not care about face, but the Shen family still does!”

The old man stared at him dead on, turbid eyes flashing with suspicion and ruthlessness: “Don’t tell me, not only did you keep him, you still want to continue being with him?”

Shen Yanzhou pressed his pale lips together and said nothing.

“You actually really developed feelings for that wild man?” The old man seemed to have heard some enormous joke, laughing from extreme anger, his withered face skin twitching fiercely. “Shen Yanzhou, how are you exactly the same as your good-for-nothing father?!”

Hearing the word “father,” Shen Yanzhou’s fingers at his side suddenly tightened.

“Your father back then was a blind waste! Ignoring so many well-matched top Omegas, he just happen to fell for a woman living at the very bottom, reeking of poverty from head to toe!” The old man gnashed his teeth in furious cursing, his eyes full of undisguised contempt. “Besides that seductive vixen face of hers, she was completely worthless!”

“What was wrong with my mother?” Shen Yanzhou took a step forward, looking at that mean, aged face. “My mother, in order to marry my father, in order to give birth to me rightfully and properly, what did your Shen family do to her?!”

“You sent her to an underground laboratory, dug out her original gland, forcibly altered her genes! You turned her from a healthy Beta into an Omega! You made her year after year have to take those body-destroying rejection drugs!”

“Don’t mention my father to me, and definitely don’t mention my mother. You’re the least qualified.”

“Insolent! You’ve gone against heaven!” The old man was so enraged by this treasonous speech that blood rushed to his head, roaring out, “Kneel down for me!”

Shen Yanzhou looked at the furious old man, the corner of his mouth hooking into a cold smile: “The dead are to be respected. I only kneel for the dead. Does Grandfather want me to kneel right now?”

This statement was treasonous to the extreme, just one step short of directly pointing at the old man’s nose and cursing him to death.

“You… you dare talk back…” The old man clutched his chest, gasping for breath in large gulps, his finger pointing at him trembling nonstop, “Get back to your room! Think it through properly! Before you’ve thought it through, you’re not allowed to step one foot out that door!”

The old man caught his breath, his eyes full of viper-like sinister ruthlessness and calculation: “Shen Yanzhou, don’t forget, you only hold thirty percent of the shares! Do you really think your current CEO position sits as steady as Mount Tai?!”

“That line again.” Shen Yanzhou wearily closed his eyes.

It was always that line.

Shen Yanzhou didn’t look at the old man one more time, turned around and left.

“Where are you going?” The old man angrily pressed.

“Back to my room.”

Everything in the room still remained as it was when he left.

Shen Yanzhou closed the door behind him, took off his suit jacket, casually threw it onto the chair at the foot of the bed, and collapsed powerlessly face-up onto the wide bed.

The mattress was soft enough to swallow him whole, but the soreness in his waist and the discomfort in his chest were hard to relieve. He turned to the side, his gaze inadvertently landing on the silver-edged photo frame on the nightstand.

In the photo, he was only five or six years old, his small face fair and pink like a peeled egg, a pair of silver-gray eyes smiling into crescents, revealing two tiny tiger teeth, snuggled softly in his mother’s arms, while his father gently encircled both mother and son from behind.

Looking and looking, Shen Yanzhou’s eye sockets instantly went red. He stretched out a pale finger, gently tracing over his parents’ faces in the photo.

“I miss you so much…” he hoarsely murmured.

“Dad, when you made that decision back then to be with Mom, was it also very hard?”

“And Mom…” Shen Yanzhou’s finger stopped at the corner of the woman’s mouth. A scalding tear fell without warning onto the glass frame.

“You clearly suffered so much, were tortured by them to the point where you almost lost your life, so why… why could you still feel that being with Dad was a very happy thing?”

Shen Yanzhou closed his eyes.

“Ever since you left, it seems I… rarely had times when I felt happy.”

“Sometimes I also think, when you left back then, why didn’t you just take me with you?”

Shen Yanzhou hugged the photo frame tightly to his chest, “But…”

Shen Yanzhou slowly opened his wet silver eyes. In his mind appeared a face that was unruly and untamable yet completely obedient to him.

“I seem to have recently found something that could be called happiness again.”

“Although I know he sometimes pretends to be good, his words are very green tea, and even those corny pickup lines come out in sets…”

Shen Yanzhou thought of the risque words the man said that made one’s ears burn, and the corner of his pale lips unconsciously pulled into an extremely faint smile.

“But, it seems he really didn’t want to take anything from me… he just, wanted to come to my side.”

Buzz… buzz… The phone casually thrown on the bed suddenly vibrated.

Shen Yanzhou reached out and picked up the phone.

The screen lit up. It was a message from Thirty Million.

[Can you come back early tonight?]

[I have very important words I want to say to you.]

Shen Yanzhou’s fingers hovered above the screen, wanting to reply with something, yet replying with nothing. He turned to the side and pressed the power off button.

The things that belong to me really seem to be very few.

I once spent thirty million to buy something I thought belonged to me.

But very soon, this thing will no longer belong to me.

*

Shen Yanzhou slept on the bed for a whole day and night.

His stomach spasmed with waves of pain, and the gland at the back of his neck also throbbed faintly. He propped himself up with sore arms from the bed, his silver-gray long hair somewhat messily draped over his thin shoulders.

Running away was never his character.

He took a deep breath, his pale fingers finding his phone, long-pressing the power button.

The screen lit up, and messages delayed by a day and night flooded in crazily. Missed calls numbered in the hundreds, from Shen Xici, from various department executives, and also… from that person.

And a string of news notifications popped out one after another.

In these twenty-four hours, the frenzied Hong Kong media, unable to reach him personally and blocked by security outside the Shen Group building, had turned their cameras and microphones on those Shen Group employees working at the docks, the lowest of the low.

The video footage was somewhat shaky, the background a noisy freight dock. An old dock foreman wearing a reflective vest, with a fierce face yet nervous eyes, was being cornered by a group of reporters at the transfer station entrance.

“What do you think of the scandal about President Shen’s chaotic private life and keeping wild men?”

“Does Mr. Shen usually act this arrogant and debauched at the company too?”

Shen Yanzhou had originally expected to see a face of fear eager to distance himself, but the old foreman in the video pushed away the microphone almost poking at his face, his voice booming like he was shouting work chants:

“What wild man? What debauched? I don’t understand your messy words!” The old foreman spat, his face full of anger, “I only know that two years ago during the super typhoon, when the port was sealed off, it was Mr. Shen who came to the docks and rescued us old and young guys one by one! That day the rain was so heavy you couldn’t see the road. He was soaked through but didn’t leave first. He stayed there watching over the last lifeboat! And now you slander him based on a few lousy photos?”

The camera cut to the Shen Group employee cafeteria. A young female employee shrank back when a microphone was thrust at her.

Facing the camera, though somewhat afraid, her voice was resolute: “You always say he’s cold-blooded, say he’s aloof, but when my mother was sick and urgently needed money, it was Mr. Shen who specially approved the medical subsidy… and had HR give me paid leave.”

Shen Yanzhou leaned against the headboard and sighed. He really wanted to live just once without caring about anything, but he had never been a person without a sense of responsibility.

He shouldn’t, and couldn’t let private feelings affect the company, affect the employees in the company. They also had their own families, their own feelings. He shouldn’t be this selfish.

Shen Yanzhou’s fingertips slid rapidly across the screen, pulling up a number he extremely detested yet had no choice but to contact at this moment.

Beep…

The phone was picked up after only one ring.

“Hah, Mr. Shen, I was wondering when you would finally make this call.”

“Fu Sihan.”

“Shen Yanzhou, you really opened my eyes this time.” Fu Sihan twirled the wine glass in his hand on the other end, his tone unreadable whether it was anger or excitement, “Everyone in Hong Kong City knows what a huge green hat you put on me. But well…”

“My fiance is so young and beautiful, and usually always so cold and abstinent. This only makes those wild cats and dogs who don’t know death when they see it want to seduce you. This kind of thing, I can somewhat understand.”

Shen Yanzhou couldn’t be bothered to fake pleasantries with this trash, getting straight to the point: “Let’s make a deal.”

“Oh? What does Mr. Shen want to trade with me?”

“I want you to publicly admit that the man in the photos is you, and delay our engagement by half a year.”

“Are you crazy?” Fu Sihan laughed coldly, “Why should I take the fall for your wild man? Delay the engagement? Are you dreaming?”

“I need this half year to thoroughly clean up the board and fully take control of the Shen family. If you’re willing to help me with this, stabilize Shen Group’s stock price, half a year later, I will…”

The other end of the line fell into silence.

After a long while, Fu Sihan’s gloomy voice finally rang out again, “You’d better remember what you said today, Shen Yanzhou. If you dare go back on your word half a year later…”

“I’ve always been a man of my word.”

Finished speaking, Shen Yanzhou cleanly hung up the phone, changed his clothes, and drove toward the Hillside villa.

*

The lights of the Hillside villa looked especially soft in the night, like a warm lamp specially left on for him.

In the living room, Thirty Million stood at the kitchen doorway, wearing a light gray apron. Hearing the movement, he immediately turned around, his black eyes lighting up, unable to hide his excitement.

“You’re back?” The man quickly approached, “Didn’t sleep too well last night? Are you hungry? I’ll cook for you. I prepared the ingredients this morning.”

He reached out wanting to help Shen Yanzhou take off his coat, but his fingers paused midair, seemingly afraid of being too forward.

Shen Yanzhou looked at that familiar face, those eyes that always pretended to be good yet hid unruliness within, his face expressionless as he spoke faintly:

“The contract is over. You can go.”

Hearing these words, Thirty Million’s movements froze in place, his face paling bit by bit.

“Didn’t we agree, to wait until you got pregnant?” His voice trembled, yet he tried hard to maintain his obedient appearance, “I can wait longer, don’t rush…”

“Mn, I’m pregnant.”

“But I clearly never entered your reproductive cavity, how could you possibly be pregnant? Why? Did I do something wrong? Did I hurt you last night, or did I upset you somewhere? Tell me, I can change. I’m very serious about learning anything, I learn everything very quickly…” The more he spoke, the more anxious he got, his pale fingertips digging fiercely into his own wrist, where faint old scars were visible.

“No reason, just roughly tired of it, it can end.” Shen Yanzhou said.

Thirty Million looked at Shen Yanzhou, as if confirming this wasn’t a nightmare.

After a long while, he finally let out a low laugh, his laughter full of nothing but bitterness.

“Is it because you know my identity and feel I’m dangerous… I want to tell you, I’m not anymore. I’ve already left that place. I only want to be with you…”

“No.” Shen Yanzhou interrupted him, “My fiance found out. About us.”

Thirty Million’s shoulders suddenly trembled, his voice so light it seemed it would shatter at any moment: “So, you still prefer him?”

“Like isn’t that important to me. Only suitable or not. There’s not that much like or dislike.” Shen Yanzhou said faintly.

The man pressed his lips tight, his eye sockets rapidly reddening. He suddenly raised his hand to cover his eyes, but tears uncontrollably seeped through the gaps between his fingers, his voice hoarse and rough: “Do you know I like you?”

“I know.”

“Then could you have even a little bit… even a little bit of feelings for me?” He covered his eyes, not daring to look at Shen Yanzhou, “Please don’t look at me like this. I know I’m very pathetic right now.”

“Stop talking. I’m afraid if I hear more I’ll break down, and feel that no matter what I do, you’ll never like me.”

Pure and spotless Shen Yanzhou, born bad seed Fu Sizhou.

Indeed, how could someone high and mighty like you possibly like me? It’s just that I really, really want to…

“I can accompany you through this year’s birthday. By that time, I’ll leave, okay?” he said softly.

Shen Yanzhou shook his head: “No.”

Thirty Million’s hand slowly lowered from his face, revealing those wet eyes that were still forcing a smile, speaking softly: “So that’s how it is. Even when you reject someone, you’re this clean and decisive.”

He took a deep breath, wanting to push all emotions back into his chest, turned around and took out two cards from the coffee table drawer, handing them to Shen Yanzhou.

“If my leaving will make you feel happy, the only thing I can seem to do is this.”

“I originally had nothing to stay for, so there’s no luggage to pack. This is for you. Your card, and this is my card. Inside is sixty million Hong Kong dollars.”

Shen Yanzhou took the cards. He knew that at a time like this, it was best to ask nothing, but he still asked: “Why did you let me spend thirty million to buy you back then?”

Thirty Million lowered his head and smiled: “This isn’t important anymore, is it?”

Because I already knew one day you would push me away, so I thought, when you abandoned me, would you feel even a little heartache because of that thirty million…

But it seems, not at all.

He turned around and walked toward the entryway: “I’m leaving.”

Shen Yanzhou watched that familiar back walking toward the door, and suddenly spoke:

“Don’t cut your wrists anymore. Love yourself a bit more.”

“If your heat comes, find an Omega. That way you’ll forget me very quickly.”

Just like I will very quickly forget you.

Thirty Million’s footsteps paused at the entryway.

Why do you torment me like this, when you clearly know I won’t… in the past, now, and in the future.

He didn’t turn back, only trying hard to swallow down his tears, speaking softly:

“Goodbye.”

I love you.

Whether in the past, present, or future.

The door gently closed, letting out a faint click.

Shen Yanzhou stood in place, looking at that tightly shut door, his voice so light only he could hear:

“Goodbye.”

Let’s never see each other again.