His Scheme Turned Into Obsession

Xia Yuning provokes Li Chengzhou to get herself out of a secret underground syndicate, and he takes notice of her at once. The days she disappears afterward leave a mark between her and her fiancé, something neither of them can talk through cleanly. Li Chengzhou is practiced at reading people and bending them to what he wants, and he uses that unresolved gap to pull her toward him a step at a time. He treats it at first as a game, a conquest to be finished and set aside once he tires of it. He holds back the truth of where she was during those missing days and uses it as leverage whenever she tries to pull back toward her fiancé. Somewhere in the middle of managing her, the calculation stops being calculation. What he built to trap her turns into something that cuts into him instead, and the plan he set in motion keeps running even after he no longer wants it to.