Ding Jia didn't remember telling her bodyguard to move. One second she was staring at her own front door lit up on a stranger's photograph, timestamped four minutes prior, and the next she was already moving toward the car, phone clenched so hard in her fist that her knuckles had gone white.
"Drive. Now." Her voice came out steadier than she felt, years of delivering lines under pressure finally earning their keep in a context she'd never wanted to need them for.
The ride home took a couple of minutes that felt like hours. She kept her eyes locked on the second photo the entire drive home: the brass numbers on her own door, the angle low and close, like whoever took it had been standing exactly where she usually stood before entering her home. She refreshed her messages twice, hoping uselessly for a third photo, some further clue, anything. Nothing came. The silence afterward was almost worse than the message itself.
She'd always receive something from that fan. They'd gone past normal, but it was still within the limits she could tolerate. But now… it was something that she couldn't ignore anymore. This was her territory. Her home where she should be feeling safe.
Her building's lobby looked aggressively, deceptively normal when it entered her sight. Marble floors, soft lighting, the night-duty guards and receptionist glancing up with polite confusions at the sight of her practically running for the elevator with two bodyguards in tow.
"Ms. Ding? Is something wrong?" One of the guards said.
She'd been living in this building for quite some time and with her personality, she quickly became familiar with most of the staff in the building.
"Has anyone been on the eighth floor in the last thirty minutes? Anyone at all—delivery, maintenance, a visitor, anything." She could feel her heart throbbing nervously but her voice never cracked despite it.
He blinked, clearly thrown by the intensity. "Not that we've seen, no."
She heard some clicking sounds in the reception area. "Upon checking our logs, no one arrived or left the building for the past hour, Ms.Ding."
As a resident, it was simple information he could answer without hesitation, given the elite profiles living within the compound — every entry and exit tracked, every visitor logged, the kind of security people paid a premium for precisely so they'd never have to ask this question and hear anything but a clean answer. "Should I check the hallway camera on your floor?"
"Please."
It took longer than she could stand, watching over his shoulder as he scrubbed back through the security footage on a monitor that suddenly felt like the most important screen in the world. Eighth floor, hallway camera, thirty minutes ago. Twenty. Ten. Five.
Nothing.
Not nothing as in an empty hallway—nothing as in static, a clean five-minute gap where the timestamp kept counting but the picture simply showed a black static screen, resuming afterward as though nothing had ever interrupted it at all.
"That's never happened before," the guard said, who was standing at the side frowning hard at the screen, all traces of his earlier politeness gone. "We'll get someone to check all the security cameras around the area." Then he pulled out his phone and called.
"I'll call building IT first thing tomorrow. I'm sorry, Ms. Ding, I don't have an explanation for this." The receptionist sincerely apologized.
She didn't have an explanation either. Worse, the explanations she could think of weren't one she could say out loud to a building employee without ending the conversation in an entirely different, much less helpful direction.
It could be either the police or the mental hospital. Neither is the best place she would prefer to stay in at the moment.
Her private bodyguards accompanied her from the elevator up to her floor.
Her own floor, when she finally reached it with both bodyguards flanking her like she was walking into a war zone instead of an apartment hallway, looked serene like it always did. Just a painting at the end of the hallway, with a view of the night sky and city lights and marble walls.
Then her gaze landed on her door. Just brass numbers under a hallway light, looking back at her the same way they had in the photograph, except now there was no one standing where the camera had been.
She stood there too long, finger hovering an inch from the lock, unable to make her hand finish the motion.
A door opened across the hall. Arthur trotted out first, sniffing curiously at the unfamiliar number of strangers crowding the corridor, and Luo Yang followed a step behind him, dressed down for the night, expression somewhere between mild irritation and detached curiosity at the sight of two armed-looking men standing guard in front of her neighbor and outside their apartment at nearly eleven at night.
It wasn't the first time he'd seen those guards. But this was the first time he'd seen them look quite this alert.
"Is there a reason my hallway currently looks like a security checkpoint?" he asked, not unkindly, but not particularly warmly either.
She hesitated, weighing how much to say. The truth sat right there, ready to spill out. But the words stalled somewhere behind her teeth. They'd jogged together a handful of mornings. Shared one dinner, mostly because she'd nearly collapsed in his hallway after seeing a corpse she wasn't supposed to recognize. He was her neighbor. Occasionally tolerable company on a dog walk. Nothing more, and certainly not someone she owed an explanation to about the worst experiences of her life.
"Building security's running an extra check tonight," she said instead, voice smoothing out into something almost convincingly bored. "Nothing serious. My management's been a little overcautious since the recovery. They'd post a guard at my bathroom door if my manager let them."
It wasn't a complete lie. It just wasn't the truth either, and she suspected, from the brief flicker of something assessing in his expression, that he knew the difference.
"Overcautious management doesn't usually leave two men standing in a hallway looking like they're expecting a break-in," he said, glancing once at the guards, who had the distinct posture of men who had, in fact, been told to expect exactly that.
"You'd be surprised what passes for standard procedure once a tabloid camps outside your building for a week." She managed a small, dismissive laugh, reaching for her door again like the matter was already closed. "Sorry if it's disturbing your night."
He studied her a beat longer than was comfortable — not unkindly, but with the same patient, faintly clinical attention he probably gave an unconvincing plot point in someone else's story. Whatever he saw, he apparently decided it wasn't worth pressing tonight.
"It's fine. Arthur's already decided this is the most interesting thing to happen all week." He nodded toward the dog, who had abandoned all pretense of guarding anyone in favor of sniffing one bodyguard's shoes with great enthusiasm.
"If your 'overcautious' security plans on standing out here much longer, you're welcome to wait it out inside my unit instead of in the hallway. Strictly so I don't have to listen to Arthur whine at the door about new people he's not allowed to greet properly while I'm working on my manuscript."
"I wouldn't want to impose."
"You're not imposing. You're solving a dog problem." He was already turning back toward his open doorway, unbothered, leaving the offer exactly where it landed, nothing she had to read anything into. He was simply preventing a problem, and trying to work at the same time.
"The door's open if you change your mind. I'll be working regardless."
She glanced back at her own door once more — brass numbers, hallway light, two guards now murmuring quietly into their radios about footage that apparently still wasn't resolving — and decided, that waiting somewhere with fewer working theories about ghosts in her own head or her stalker breaking in inside her home sounded considerably more bearable than waiting alone.
"...Just until they sort out the cameras," she said, following him in. Before she entered Luo Yang's apartment, she gave a quick brief look at her bodyguards. They quickly understood her instructions and nodded. One of them immediately moved and pressed the pin to her apartment, settling in to keep watch on the door directly rather than just the hallway in general.
Inside, Luo Yang didn't ask anything. He made tea with the same brisk, unceremonious efficiency as before during her last visit, set it down on the low table, and returned to whatever he'd been working on at his desk without further comment, leaving her to sit in a silence that wasn't warm so much as simply uninterested in being anything else. She appreciated that more than she expected to. No questions she'd have to dodge. No kindness she'd have to decide whether to trust.
Lin Lin texted twice while she sat there.
Lin Lin: Handling it, don't panic, see you at the agency tomorrow.
Lin Lin: Security's pulling the footage gap apart frame by frame tonight. Try to actually sleep.
And she answered both with more composure than she currently possessed, before finally setting the phone face-down and staring at the warm cup in her hands instead.
She simply drank her tea, let Arthur's solid, indifferent weight settle against her side on the couch, and convinced herself that this was a normal crisis in her career as a public figure. That was the thought she'd chosen to go this time.
Across the room, Luo Yang's pen scratched steadily against paper, indifferent to all of it, and for reasons she didn't examine too closely, she found that indifference was easier to sit inside than concern would have been.