Tang Xiaoxiao's foot had already left the ground.
Lin Yue saw it happen in the strange, slowed clarity that fear sometimes lent to a moment—one heartbeat she was frozen against Mu Qingge's side, and the next her body had simply decided, without her permission, to answer.
He crossed the distance without thinking about it.
His hand closed around her wrist.
Firm. Cold. Absolute.
"Let go," Tang Xiaoxiao said, and her voice broke apart even as she said it, thin and pleading, nothing like the voice she'd used all evening. "Please, let go, that's... that's my mom, that's her voice, I know her voice, let me—"
"It isn't," Lin Yue said.
"You don't know that!" Her free hand clawed weakly at his fingers, without real strength behind it, the desperate motion of someone who wanted to be stopped even as she fought to be released. "You don't know what she sounds like, you never met her, how would you know—"
