“You can’t handle me at my best.”
• • •
Celia smirked when the young man stumbled out of bed the next morning. She pushed the covers off her naked body and reached for the early morning alcohol left at the bedside when he brought back a folder of papers.
“I am trying to break apart the mafia group my family is part of.”
She paused her drinking straight out of the bottle. “You’re betraying your parents?”
“My parents are both dead, but in a way, yes, I’m betraying them.”
“Why?”
“I don’t agree with what they’re doing. With what I’m doing. I want to ensure they are brought to justice like they should’ve been years ago.”
She screwed the cap back on and dropped the bottle. “You are part of the mafia, so you should know better than anyone how impossible that will be.”
“It is not impossible.” The devilish smile returned to his face. “I have already made efforts toward it. I purposefully reestablished lost relationships, so that I can have all the most powerful families in one place when I take them down. That’s the only reason why I bothered extending an olive branch to the Chen family after they killed my mother.”
She raised an eyebrow. “That must’ve been difficult.”
He chuckled. “It was less difficult than I thought.”
“And how do you intend to enact this master plan? By yourself?” Celia reached for the folders to flip through the pages.
“I have already contacted the best of the best. Trustworthy law enforcement. The best lawyers of Hong Kong and the US. With a bit of a helping hand from an important group of people.”
Celia’s hand froze. She stared at the profiles of the Guo family. On paper, they were just another family, part of Infinite, but one look at the photographs clued her in on their true nature. An undercover family with a husband and wife who worked for the government and children looped in to appear as normal as possible.A doctor and a businesswoman. What perfect careers.The handpicked clothes, the purposeful body language, and the eyes that glowed of warmth. Perfect mediocrity that could not possibly exist in the world.
“How in the world did you manage to get them to help you?” Veiled admiration tinged her voice.
“I didn’t.” He lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. “My mother set the stage. Unintentionally. When she found out the truth about them, she spared their lives and convinced the other families that the Guo people were failures. Not government agents.” His voice quieted. “They couldn’t have been happier when I reached out to them. It was a debt unpaid.”
She continued reading his plans. He moved to Hong Kong because their main businesses were operating out of the United States. “My perfect excuse was to grow our side of the business here, which I have, but really it just makes it harder to trace to me if things start to move,” he explained.
“And the children of the other families? Your stepsiblings? Your younger brother? What’s going to happen to them?”
“As long as Lang Lang is kept out of the crossfire, I really don’t care what happens to the rest.”
Well, he’s certainly not the best of humanity.Celia could not help musing to herself at the icicles that dripped from his words.But the best of humanity is just so boring…She leaned forward invitingly.
He snatched the folder from her hands and gazed into her eyes. “Are you interested?”
A part of her didn’t want to answer, but Celia never turned down entertainment. She grinned. “It sounds not boring.”
And not boring it was.
Sniping from a rooftop. Poisoning drinks and leading the victims away. Seducing married men and opening her body for easy photographs for Hui Ye to use. Lying without the slightest sense of guilt. She utilized every bit of technique she developed in her career—killing, questioning, fishing, and blackmailing.
She was many people at once and no one at once—Andrea, Avery, Olivia, Meghana, Sally, and June. He provided her everything she needed to transform into another woman, showing her an entire warehouse with clothes, wigs, makeup, and accessories.
“Do you like to create women for your fantasies?” she once teased him as she cycled through another identity.
“There’s a more personal reason to this. My mother made most of the clothes here.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t your mother make most of the clothes you own?”
He nodded. “She loved designing clothes.” And said nothing else.
