Deep undercurrent

In the aging apartment building, the dusk light, like molten iron, pierced through the kitchen window, cutting the room into halves of interwoven brightness and shadow. Across the dining table, her younger sister Ivy Ashcroft was stirring the food in her bowl with suspicion, the tip of her nose twitching faintly like a small beast that had caught the scent of a trap. Lin Yuan sat opposite her, chewing quietly, his eyes as deep as a dried-up well. The two siblings had always been close, yet their relationship was laced with the sharp confrontations unique to adolescence. Now, a seemingly casual game of rock-paper-scissors was about to shatter the fragile balance of this twilight, plunging them both into a psychological vortex of control and submission. Ivy Ashcroft was blissfully unaware that tonight, her brother's fingertip traced...