Then, without warning, one of the women stiffened violently in her chair. Her teacup slipped from her fingers and shattered against the floor.

A piercing scream tore through the dining hall.

She clutched her stomach tightly, her face draining of color as pain twisted across her features. "It hurts—!" she gasped, doubling over. "Ahhh—my stomach—!"

Chaos erupted instantly.

"What’s wrong?!" Lu Meiqi cried out as servants panicked around them.

Old Master Lu shot to his feet so abruptly that his chair nearly toppled behind him. "Call the doctor!"

The woman doubled over further, her entire body trembling. Panic spread like wildfire. The other two pregnant women recoiled in fear, instinctively pulling away from the dishes still laid out on the table. The same terrifying thought flashed through everyone’s mind at once: poison.

Second Madam’s expression sharpened. "Stop everyone from touching the food!"

The servants froze immediately.

Lu Shaohan moved faster than anyone else. By the time the woman nearly collapsed beside the table, he had already reached her and caught her in his arms. Her body shook violently against him as she pressed both hands desperately to her stomach, her cries growing more hysterical.

"Prepare the car!" Lu Shaohan ordered.

Old Master Lu’s voice thundered across the hall. "Seal the kitchen! No one leaves the residence!"

The dining hall descended into complete disorder. Servants rushed in every direction while security guards were already detaining staff near the kitchen wing. The remaining two pregnant women clutched their own stomachs nervously as they were hurried toward the exit, despite insisting they felt fine. No one was willing to take any chances.

Lu Shaohan lifted the trembling woman and carried her directly outside. Old Master Lu followed close behind, and the entire household surged toward the parking area. Within minutes, a convoy of black vehicles sped out of the Lu Residence gates, leaving the mansion behind.

What had once felt like a home now felt like a battlefield pretending to remain civilized.

The convoy of black vehicles tore through the city streets, their engines snarling as they wove between lanes at speeds that pushed the limits of both law and sanity. Inside the lead car, the air had thickened to the point of suffocation.

In the backseat, the pregnant woman could not stop shaking. One of the Lu family doctors leaned over her, trying to steady her pulse and slow her ragged breaths as the vehicle swayed through traffic, but every bump sent a new wave of pain rippling across her face. Her fingers clawed at the leather seat, and every few seconds a sharp cry escaped her lips, cutting through the low hum of the engine. Old Master Lu sat across from her, his jaw set, his expression carved from stone and shadow.

Beside the woman, Lu Shaohan remained silent. One hand braced her shoulder—steady, impersonal—while the other held his phone in a white-knuckled grip. His mind, however, was not on the chaos unfolding around him. It was already turning the pieces over, fitting them together, finding the edges that did not align.

Too sudden. Too convenient. And the timing—that was what gnawed at him.

He glanced at the screen. Missed outgoing calls. Su Wan. No answer. He dialed again, pressed the phone to his ear, listened to the empty rings stretch into dead air. Then he tried Li Chen. Nothing. Mo Chen. Also unreachable.

The temperature inside the vehicle seemed to drop.

One of the security men in the front passenger seat caught the subtle shift in Lu Shaohan’s expression through the rearview mirror. "Young Master?"

"Track Madam Lu’s current location."

The order came out calm—so calm that the security man felt a prickle run down his spine. He immediately tapped into the estate’s internal systems, pulling up the tracking network that monitored every Lu family vehicle, every authorized movement, every permission log. Several seconds passed. Then his brow furrowed.

"Young Master... Madam Lu’s phone signal is unavailable."

Lu Shaohan’s gaze lifted slowly, almost lazily. "And Li Chen? Mo Chen?"

Another quick check. Another frown. "Also offline."

A beat of silence. Then Lu Shaohan let out a soft breath—not quite a sigh, not quite a laugh. Interesting. Very interesting.

Because in a family like theirs, during a morning of poisoned breakfasts and collapsing heirs, the disappearance of key personnel was never an accident. Not after yesterday’s attack. Not with succession tensions simmering beneath every polite word. And certainly not now, with a woman carrying Lu blood trembling in the backseat and doctors whispering about possible foul play.

The security officer kept digging, scrolling through movement logs from the Lu Residence. Then he stopped.

"Young Master... they didn’t use any Lu family vehicle. Not the residence fleet, not their personal car. That vehicle hasn’t moved all day." 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Silence filled the moving car, heavy and sharp-edged.

"Then how did they leave?" Lu Shaohan asked quietly.

The man hesitated. "A taxi."

That changed everything. A taxi meant no internal tracking, no estate surveillance, no instant route tracing without pulling in city traffic systems. A taxi meant they had planned this—or at least, they had not wanted to be found.

Old Master Lu, who had remained utterly still until now, slowly turned his head toward his grandson. His voice was low, graveled with suspicion. "Where is she?"

Lu Shaohan did not answer immediately. Because for the first time since the chaos began, something uncomfortable had lodged itself in his chest—not emotion, exactly, but a cold awareness of how neatly the pieces fit. Su Wan leaves the residence. Her people vanish. Their phones go dark. And moments later, a pregnant woman collapses at the breakfast table.

The sequence was too clean.

The security officer lowered his voice. "Young Master... should we classify Madam Lu as a potential suspect?"

The question landed like a stone dropped into still water. Even the doctors paused, their hands hovering over the pregnant woman’s wrist. Everyone understood what that classification meant: if suspicion formally shifted onto Su Wan, the balance inside the Lu Residence would fracture. Alliances would realign. And Su Wan—whether guilty or innocent—would become a target.

Old Master Lu’s eyes narrowed. "She had motive."

The words hung in the air, heavy with implication. Two other pregnant women still in the house. Inheritance instability. Public humiliation. Household tension that had festered for months. From the outside, the motive was clear enough.

Lu Shaohan looked down at his dark phone screen, at Su Wan’s name still unanswered. His face revealed nothing.

Then he spoke, softly. "Find her first."

Two words. Simple. But dangerous. Because whether she had poisoned that woman or not, Su Wan had just stepped into the eye of the storm. And in the Lu family, the storm did not forgive.

The moment the convoy of black vehicles screeched to a halt outside the hospital emergency entrance, the atmosphere, already taut with suspicion and fear, exploded into full-blown chaos.

Doctors and nurses, who had been standing by after receiving advance notice from the Lu family convoy, rushed forward with a stretcher even before the vehicle doors had fully opened.

The pregnant woman inside had nearly lost consciousness by then, her face drained to a frightening pallor and her hair damp with sweat.

One trembling hand still clutched desperately at her stomach as weak, intermittent cries of pain escaped her lips between shallow, panicked breaths, and the medical staff wasted no time in transferring her onto the stretcher before rushing her through the emergency corridor at a full sprint.

The Lu family followed close behind, with Old Master Lu’s expression remaining terrifyingly cold as several hospital directors personally hurried over the moment they realized who had arrived.

A senior doctor, after a quick assessment of the woman’s deteriorating condition, ordered the operating room to be prepared immediately, his sharp tone leaving no room for delay.

When a young nurse asked about the baby, another doctor answered that the woman was only seven months along, which meant an emergency premature delivery might be necessary—a risky prospect, but not impossible.

The woman let out another weak cry before the emergency room doors finally swung shut behind the medical team, and afterward, a heavy silence crashed across the corridor like a physical weight.

The remaining two pregnant women sat nearby, surrounded by servants and security personnel, both visibly shaken, and one of them had already started crying quietly.

For the first time since entering the Lu Residence, the reality of their situation had become terrifyingly clear: they were not safe, and not even carrying Lu family heirs guaranteed safety inside that household.

Meanwhile, Lu Shaohan stood silently near the emergency room doors while calls continued moving rapidly through the hospital, with the woman’s family already notified, doctors preparing emergency neonatal support, and entire hospital floors being quietly cleared for privacy upstairs.

The Lu family’s arrival alone had already turned the entire hospital tense.

Then, without warning, one of the emergency room doors burst open again, and a nurse hurried outside to request immediate surgical authorization.