Winter in F City was colder than Ye Zhiyao had ever remembered.
Snow had fallen all night long soft and silent, as if someone had planned this farewell in advance, just for her.
Before dawn broke, the lights outside the hospital's emergency wing flickered out one by one. The air was thick and still, like a sealed coffin. Even breathing felt unnecessary.
When they wheeled her into the operating room, her consciousness was already slipping.
She could only remember that at the moment the car accident occurred, her sister Ye Wan was in the passenger seat, her eyes as cold as a knife; her brother Ye Ze stood at the scene, his face filled with unmasked satisfaction.
She had thought they were her family.
She had trusted them with everything.
But she was nothing more than the final pawn in a carefully constructed betrayal.
"Did you really think he loved you?"
Ye Wan's voice echoed again and again in her ears.
"Gu Chengyun never cared. You were just a pawn—and he's always known you weren't really one of us."
Zhiyao laughed. It was a soundless laugh, just a tremble of her lips. But tears spilled from her eyes like something long repressed.
Not one of them?
Not really a Ye?
She had spent her whole life trying to be the "good daughter," desperately seeking approval from a family that was never hers to begin with.
All the coldness, the distance—it hadn't been her imagination.
And Gu Chengyun—the man she had loved with every piece of herself—was fake too?
They said it was him.
He had given the silent order.
He had pulled her protection from the Gu family's project.
He had let it all happen: the abandonment, the betrayal, the crash.
She had imagined so many possible endings to their story.
A fight.
A breakup.
Maybe—just maybe—he'd take her hand and walk her out of the prison that was the Ye family.
But she never imagined this:
Death.
The stretcher was cold beneath her. Her heart felt like it was being stabbed over and over again.
Someone was shouting:
"Her blood pressure's dropping!"
"Get the epinephrine—now!"
The voices blurred, like they were underwater. The world tilted, began to fade, thick and dark like sinking into ink.
"Do you hate him?"
The voice was close.
In her ear.
Her lips moved, barely.
Just a whisper of breath:
"I hate... Gu Chengyun."
And something inside her—some final thread—snapped.
Her hand slipped off the edge of the bed, soft as falling snow.
Cold as frost.
Outside, the snow had stopped.
So did her world.
That last sentence would become the nightmare Gu Chengyun would never escape.
—
But what Ye Zhiyao didn't know was this:
At the exact moment her heartbeat flatlined, deep inside the hospital's records department, an old, long-forgotten DNA report was quietly retrieved.
Ye Zhiyao shared no biological relation to the Ye family.
She wasn't one of them.
Just a misplaced child in a life that was never hers to begin with.
She had tried so hard—too hard—believing that effort could earn love. But in the end, she was just a footnote they could erase without a second thought.
She'd lived so carefully.
So politely.
But she'd always been standing in the wrong place.
No one cried when she closed her eyes.
But if fate ever gave her one more chance—
She didn't want to be the quiet, obedient girl anymore.
She wanted to see clearly.
And live.
Really live.