Shen Qiao shook his head. “He’s not cruelhearted—he never had a heart in the first place. He treats everyone in the world with the same callousness, and he’ll never be particularly gentle toward anyone. But I didn’t understand that part. I thought that even the hardest of hearts could be thawed one day. I took him for a friend, and I believed that he should do the same. But that belief was unrequited.” “If you took him for a friend, shouldn’t he take you as his friend too?” Shen Qiao laughed. “No. In this world there are many, many situations where
