The bait arrived at 9:16 p.m.
Lâm was halfway through grip exercises when his phone lit up with an unknown number.
No greeting.
Only a video.
The first frame showed his old miss.
He did not press play.
That was the first victory.
The second message came before his thumb moved.
Still protecting him, or did Minh get tired?
Lâm's hand tightened around the therapy ball until pain flashed white.
There it was.
Not threat.
Invitation.
Anger opened a door in him and showed him exactly what he wanted: Minh walking through Thälmann boys with controlled hands becoming less controlled, Khánh's smile gone, Hùng's shoulders folding, Quân's clean jacket on wet concrete.
He wanted it so badly he felt sick.
The third message arrived.
Clinic route changed tomorrow? Ask Hạ Yên. She knows why.
Lâm stopped breathing.
The room narrowed.
His injury. Minh's rage. Hạ Yên's name.
Three hooks, one line.
Lâm knew the name because Minh's worst days had a way of dragging the same adults into the room. Hạ Yên was the school consultant who had once pulled Minh behind a closed door, the clinic-side woman Minh never explained fully, the person whose messages made Lãnh Phong move without wasting insults. Lâm did not know her world.
He knew enough to understand her name did not belong in a stranger's bait text.
He almost called Minh.
Almost.
Then he saw Huyền Kha's calm face in memory, though he had never stood close enough to earn that memory honestly. He saw the kind of person who did not need people to obey, only to react.
Lâm opened a blank message.
His fingers shook.
Not because of the injury.
Because he was choosing against the part of himself that wanted revenge to wear Minh's face.
He typed:
Rehab route compromised.
Thälmann involved.
Hạ Yên may be real target.
Do not come alone.
He read it twice.
No insult.
No plea.
No blood.
Facts.
He sent it to Minh and Thuận.
Then he added:
Forward this to Hạ Yên if you can.
Minh did.
Hạ Yên did not read it.
That was the first wrong thing.
Minh read it instantly.
That was expected.
Thuận read it thirty seconds later and replied:
Stay visible. Do not move routes.
Minh sent one screenshot back.
Unread.
One minute.
Two.
Five.
The therapy ball rolled from his hand onto the floor.
For the first time since the rehab room, Lâm wanted his hand to fail completely so he could blame the shaking on something simple.
His phone stayed silent.
Hạ Yên did not answer.
The bait message was written by someone who understood young men badly and well at the same time.
Badly, because the insults were obvious. Coward. Broken hand. Friend hiding behind doctors. Words chosen by someone who thought cruelty was only volume.
Well, because one attached photo showed Lâm's clinic waiting room from an angle only a recent visitor could have taken.
Lâm's throat tightened before rage arrived. Fear came first. Fear for his mother, who had sat in that room. Fear for the receptionist who had joked about his bad handwriting. Fear for every ordinary person Huyền Tinh could turn into background damage because they knew Minh would look.
Then came the uglier part: relief.
A target meant direction. Direction meant no more sitting with a useless hand while everyone spoke carefully around him.
He typed three different replies and deleted all of them.
The first was anger.
The second was strategy pretending not to be anger.
The third was a plea for Minh to do what Lâm could not admit he wanted.
He sent none of them.
Instead he took screenshots, marked the angle of the photo, checked the clinic camera placement from memory, and sent Minh only facts. His thumb shook over the final message before he added one more line.
Do not make me your reason.
He stared at it for a long time.
Then he sent it before cowardice could dress itself as concern.
The message sat there after it sent, small and final. Lâm wanted to call it wisdom. It felt more like cutting off his own hand a second time, this one invisible, this one made of the revenge he was refusing to borrow from Minh.
Afterward, he put the phone face down and counted his breaths to twenty. On seventeen, he almost picked it up to add one more warning. On nineteen, he understood the warning would be fear trying to disguise itself as strategy.
The bait photo kept pulling his eyes back.
Lâm enlarged the background until the pixels broke. A corner of a poster. A reflection in the clinic glass. The guard's cigarette hand. He wanted the image to become evidence, but every zoom also brought back the feeling of being watched while helpless.
That was the design.
He understood it and still felt it working.
His thumb hovered over Minh's contact. There were so many ways to phrase the truth badly. They found my clinic. They are watching me. Please come. Please don't come. Hurt them. Don't hurt them because of me. Every sentence gave Minh a different leash.
He opened a blank note instead and wrote three columns.
Facts.
Feelings.
Instructions.
The feelings column filled fastest and helped least.
I hate them.
I want my hand back.
I want Minh to scare them.
I don't want Minh to become someone who scares me.
He stared at the last line until the words blurred.
Then he copied only the facts into the message: time, angle, likely sender, clinic route, Thälmann involvement. He added the warning about emotional fuel because Lãnh Phong's influence had infected all of them now, turning pain into something that had to be managed like a weapon left on a table.
When Minh replied with Understood, Lâm knew he had not understood fully.
No one could.
But he had slowed down.
Tonight, slowing down was a form of love.
Minh did not answer again after Understood. Lâm both hated and respected that. A longer reply would have comforted him and weakened the warning. The silence meant Minh was trying to obey the facts instead of the wound. It also meant Lâm had to sit alone with the feelings he had deliberately left unsent.
When sleep finally came, Lâm dreamed Minh arrived covered in blood and thanked him for the reason. He woke before answering. The room was dark, his hand hurt, and his phone had no new message. For once, no message felt like mercy.