Chapter 15: Nesting Instincts
The polished mahogany door of the safe room slid shut with a soft, definitive thump. The electronic lock engaged with a green gleam. Silence, deep and humming, swallowed him whole.
Wei Zhao stood in the center of the room, his back to the door, and just shook.
It started in his hands, a fine tremor he couldn’t stop, then traveled up his arms and into his shoulders. His legs felt liquid. He slid down the cool wood until he was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, the plush carpet doing nothing to stop the cold seeping into his bones. He wrapped his arms around his shins, resting his forehead on his knees. The scent of jasmine was still in his hair, on his skin, mixed now with the salt of sweat and something else, something metallic and sharp that was just Jian.
He replayed it. The look in Jian’s eyes in the twilight—not anger, but something worse. A kind of feral panic. The feel of the trellis biting into his spine. The words, growled against his throat. Mine.
A shudder racked him so hard his teeth clicked.
He’d fled here instinctively, to the one place in the penthouse guaranteed to be untouchable.A sanctuary. Now, wrapped in the sterile, soundproofed quiet, the events in the garden felt both hyper-real and distant, like a bruise he could press on. The physical ache was a dull, deep thing. The other ache was sharper, located somewhere behind his sternum.
Time blurred. The soft, golden light from the paper lanterns stayed constant. He might have dozed, his body and mind shutting down. A shift, a tiny flutter low in his belly, pulled him back. The pups. A slow, hot tear tracked down his cheek and soaked into the silk of his trousers.
He didn’t know how long he’d been there when a different sound permeated the hum of the climate control. A faint scrape outside the door.Then a knock. Not loud.Not demanding. Three soft, hesitant taps.
Wei froze, his breath catching.
“Wei.” Jian’s voice came through the reinforced door, muffled but clear. It sounded stripped.Hollow. “I know you’re in there. I… I brought you something.Food. Tea.”
Wei stayed silent, pressing his forehead harder against his knees.
A long pause. He could picture Jian on the other side, holding a tray, staring at the unyielding surface.
“I can leave it here,” Jian said, his voice dropping. “You don’t have to come out. You don’t have to see me. Just… please eat something.”
The concern in his tone, so at odds with the man from the garden, sparked a confusing flare of anger in Wei’s chest. He swallowed it down. It tasted like bile.
Then, a scent crept under the door’s seal. Not food. It was Jian’s scent, but warped. The usual clean, dominant cedar and rain was layered over with something acrid, sour.Distress. Real, palpable, alpha distress. It wasn’t aggressive. It was… supplicant.Lost.
Wei’s body reacted before his mind could. A sudden, visceral pull low in his gut, a warmth that spread outwards, clashing violently with the cold shock that had held him. It was an instinct deeper than thought, older than reason. A compulsion to soothe, to mend, to gather.Nesting.
His head snapped up. No. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
But the pull intensified, a physical craving. The sterile perfection of the safe room was wrong. It was empty. It needed… it needed softness. Security. His fingers twitched. The idea of the divan, with its piles of blankets and pillows, became an obsession in a matter of seconds. He needed to build. He needed to make a space where that aching, sour scent could be calmed, where the tremors in his own soul could settle.
It was infuriating. It was biological sabotage.
With a groan that was half-protest, he pushed himself to his feet.His legs held. He stared at the door, at the small digital panel beside it. The scent of Jian’s distress grew stronger, seeping into the room, wrapping around him, tugging at that primal cord.
His hand, moving almost of its own volition, reached out. His fingertip hovered over the release. He closed his eyes, took a breath that did nothing to steady him, and pressed it.
The lock disengaged with a soft click.
The door didn’t open. It was on a pressure seal. From the outside, Jian would have heard the sound. Wei took a step back, wrapping his arms around himself.
A long moment passed. Then, slowly, the heavy door was pushed inward.
Jian stood framed in the doorway of the wider penthouse hall, a simple wooden tray in his hands holding a bowl of steaming congee, a pot of tea, a small dish of pickled vegetables. He looked utterly wrecked. His shirt was rumpled, his hair disheveled as if he’d been running his hands through it for hours. His eyes were dark, shadowed, and they found Wei’s instantly, wide with a hope so fragile it looked painful.
The scent of his distress rolled into the room in a wave.
Wei said nothing. He just stood there, a silhouette in the golden lantern light, his own robe still loosely tied, the marks on his shoulders visible in the low light.
Jian’s gaze dipped to those marks, and a flinch went through him so violent the teacup rattled on its saucer. He looked away, jaw working. He took one careful step into the room, then another, and set the tray down on a low lacquer table. He didn’t straighten up. He remained bent over the table, his knuckles white where they gripped the edge.
“What I did,” he began, his voice gravel. “In the garden. It was…” He searched for a word, discarding each one as inadequate. “Unforgivable.”
Wei’s throat was too tight to speak. The nesting urge was a frantic drumbeat now. Fix it. Make it safe.
“I saw that trash, and I…” Jian finally turned to look at him, and his expression was one of pure, unvarnished self-loathing. “I acted like an animal. Worse than an animal. I used you.I hurt you. To prove a point to fucking ghosts.” He gestured vaguely, as if swatting at the tabloid rumors. “I became the very thing I promised you you’d be safe from.”
He took a step toward Wei, then stopped, seeing Wei’s slight recoil. The pain that flashed across his face was stark. He seemed to shrink, the powerful alpha rendered powerless by his own actions.
Then, he did something Wei had never seen, never imagined.
Jian Li dropped to his knees. Not a graceful descent, but a heavy, bone-deep surrender. He didn’t kneel before Wei, exactly. He shuffled forward on his knees until he was close, and then he bent, pressing his forehead against the slight, soft swell of Wei’s abdomen, right through the thin silk of the robe.
His broad shoulders trembled.
“I am so sorry,” he whispered, the words muffled against Wei’s body. “So sorry, xingan.” The endearment—sweetheart, darling—was a broken thing. “Not just for me. For them.” His hands came up, but they didn’t grab or claim. They hovered, just barely skimming the silk over Wei’s hips, a ghost of a touch. “They felt that. Your fear. Your… they felt it. And I caused it.”
A hot tear fell from Wei’s chin, landing in Jian’s dark hair.
“I will spend every second of forever making this right,” Jian vowed, his voice low and fierce with a new kind of intensity. “No more rumors.No more fear. I will tear down every paper that printed that filth. I will make the world see you as I see you. Not as a prize, or a scandal. As mine.” He said the word again, but this time it was different. Not a possession.A pledge. “My choice.My heart. The mother of my children.”
He lifted his head then, looking up at Wei. His eyes were red-rimmed, raw. “But only if you let me. You hold the key to this room. You hold the key to me. You can lock me out.For an hour. For a night. Forever. And I will wait. I will wait on my knees outside this door until you believe me.”
The silence that followed was thick, charged with the echo of his words and the hum of the air system. The scent of his distress was slowly beginning to soften, mingling with the scent of congee and tea and Wei’s own quiet tears.
Wei looked down at the powerful man brought low at his feet, forehead still warm against his belly, where the two tiny lives were quietly growing. The frantic nesting instinct began to quiet, soothed not by a constructed pile of blankets, but by this: a vulnerability offered, a fortress laid bare.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t know how.
But slowly, tentatively, his hand lifted from his side. It hovered for a heartbeat above Jian’s bowed head, this man who commanded boardrooms and moved markets, now kneeling on a carpet. Then, his fingers, trembling only slightly, sank into the thick, dark hair.
He didn’t pull. He didn’t push.
He just held on.