Ren looked down at his slender, medicine-stained hands. The logic was undeniable, cold, and brutally practical—the exact kind of survival math that had kept him and his mother alive in the slums for twenty years.
He let out a quiet, resigned sigh, his shoulders dropping. "What is it that you actually want me to do, Mother?"
A slow, scheming smile spread across Old Lady Lin's wrinkled face, making her look remarkably like the very street sharks she despised.
"Making a proud, ruthless woman like that fall for you is actually not that hard, son," she whispered, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial purr. "When she was high and mighty in her noble estate, a hundred pretty men couldn't catch her eye. But right now? She is wounded, cast out, and completely alone. She doesn't have a single person she can trust to watch her back. So... become her support."
Ren's breath hitched slightly as his mother looked him dead in the eye.
