Against the Algorithm

Chapter 33: The Lines We Draw Quietly

There was a pause.

And then the final blow.

"He was meant to rape her."

Everything in him froze.

The kind of stillness that comes before catastrophe.

Before storm.

Before war.

His vision blurred with white, his knuckles pale against the wood of the desk, his pulse pounding so loudly in his ears it nearly drowned out the rest. They had tried to destroy her. Tried to break the one thing in his world that he would raze heaven and earth to protect. All for money. For control.

Sicheng inhaled slowly—once. Then exhaled. And when he finally spoke again, it was not with fire or rage or the roar of violence. It was with ice. "Find out where they are."

"I already did."

"Good." His tone dropped, razor-sharp and lethal in its precision. "Because I'm going to burn everything they've ever touched. Legally. Financially. Publicly. And when I'm done, they won't be able to afford a lawyer, let alone a lawyer willing to defend them against the assault I'm about to bring."

A beat passed.

Then, quieter.

Darker.

"They came for my girl. They wanted her broken. And now, I will break them." He hung up. And the silence that followed was thick with the weight of war. He didn't hesitate. Not even for a second. By the time he picked up his phone again, the contact he pressed wasn't one saved under any cryptic label or coded name. It was simply marked #OneHarpy . And as the line rang only once before connecting, he knew she'd either been awake or had simply answered because it was him.

"Cheng'er?" came Lu Wang Lan's voice, smooth, cultured, and instantly alert— mother, not society queen, not powerful benefactor, but mother, in the sharpest, most instinctive sense of the word.

He didn't ease into it. Didn't soften the edges. His voice was clipped, controlled—but there was something beneath it. A current. The kind that made the skin crawl even in the calmest room. "You need to sit down." She did. And he told her. Everything. No pauses. No euphemisms. No sparing of detail. Because sugar-coating a trauma like this would be more of an insult than kindness—and because his mother was not the kind of woman who collapsed at ugly truths. She was the kind of woman who sharpened herself with them. He told her who had hired the man. Why. What they were after. What they had intended to do to Yao. And by the time the words meant to rape her left his mouth, the silence on the other end of the line was so chillingly precise, he could hear his own pulse.

Then—

A sound.

Not a gasp. Not a cry.

But something far more dangerous.

The hiss of breath through clenched teeth.

When she finally spoke, Lu Wang Lan's voice was low. Even.

But lethal.

"They sent a man to break her, " she repeated, slow and deadly. "To strip her of her independence. Her mind. Her safety. So they could take what my family gave her?"