Chapter 17

There was another reason.

Leo Archer was only nineteen, at the peak of his career.

And my marriage to Julian Thorne wasn’t over yet.

If our clandestine relationship was exposed, it would be nothing but a stain on his life.

But that was such a trivial reason, not worth mentioning at all.

So I said nothing. I just sat in the car and watched until his back disappeared completely from view.

Then I pulled a cigarette case from my pocket and lit one up.

I didn’t smoke it, just watched it burn quietly between my fingers.

The curling wisps of white smoke blurred my vision.

The acrid smell of cheap tobacco seemed to drag me back many years.

My father was a despicable man.

He’d used his decent looks to marry into the Sterling Family, but he couldn’t keep his wandering eye from straying.

Fearing discovery, he found my mother, a masseuse.

The eldest daughter of the Sterling Family found out about me not long after I was born.

My father knelt on the floor, weeping and begging for her forgiveness, and barely managed to get back into her good graces.

So I grew up with my mother in that tiny massage parlor, tucked away in a tenement building.

While I did my homework at an old desk, my mother and her clients were just on the other side of a curtain.

Sometimes she’d call me in to pour her a glass of water, to soothe a throat made raw from her cries.

She paid me little mind. When she wasn’t with a client, she was glued to the mahjong table.

No one at school liked me. They’d whisper about me right to my face.

Saying that, just like my mother, I’d caught some filthy disease.

I struggle to find a single, precise word to describe those days.

But whenever I think of the past…

…the first image that surfaces is that window, glowing with a cheap, pink light, and the dark, lewd glances of the men who came and went, their eyes lingering on me.

My desire and ambition burned hotter than anyone else’s. I was desperate to climb higher, and then higher still.

And I was willing to pay any price to do it.

The cigarette burned down to my fingers. A sting from the hot ash brought me back to myself.

I dialed Grace’s number.

“The final stage of the equity acquisition plan starts tonight.”