But I don’t tell Ares any of this. I wouldn’t have the chance to, anyways, because he finishes his last skewer and stands up.
“I need to head back,” he says. “You want me to wait for your driver with you?”
“No, that’s fine,” I tell him. I can’t stop second-guessing his intentions. Does he genuinely care about whether or not I get back home safe? Or is he just making sure I do so that I don’t follow him? “You go ahead. I can wait by myself.”
But there’s one last thing I need to do. As Ares gathers up our used skewers and dirty napkins and turns around to toss them in the trash, I unclasp the custom-made Van Cleef bracelet around my wrist and drop it into his bag.
When he comes back, I’m already re-applying my lip gloss as if nothing’s happened. As if I haven’t just planted my bait.
8
Chanel
Exactly ten minutes after Ares leaves, my phone buzzes over the table, Jamie’s name lighting up my screen.
Perfect timing.
I hastily wipe the cumin powder and grease from my fingers, then pick up the phone, sandwiching it between my ear and shoulder. “Hello?”
“Okay, so, like, that took me waylonger than I thought—the guy might as well be a spy or something—but I’ve got what you asked for,” Jamie says.
Finally.My heart skips in anticipation. “Yes? Tell me everything you know.”
“To start with...” She lowers her voice, and I brace myself, breath catching in my throat, waiting for the bombshell to drop. Maybe he’s under witness protection. Or he’s an assassin, if those even still exist in the modern world. Or he’s on the run from assassins—“He’s a Virgo.”
“I’m sorry?”
“He’s aVirgo,” she repeats, like it’s a life-altering revelation, no less significant than if she were to discover that Ares Yin was secretly descended from a royal family.
“Huh.” I absorb this for a moment, and store the information for later. “Okay, I won’t lie, that is kind of surprising.”
“I also found one of the girls he supposedly had a fling with two summers ago,” she adds. “Do you want to search her up?”
My body’s reaction surprises me—the intensity of it, the immediate sour taste filling my mouth. I feel myself recoil, the muscles in my stomach clenching instinctively as if someone’s just threatened to punch me. “Sure,” I say, because this should be helpful. Finding out his type, whatever it is. It shouldn’t bother me at all.
“Type in Suzy Liu, with threeUs,” she instructs. “Her profile’s the one with her wearing a blue sundress on a balcony—you see it?”
I take a deep breath and do as I’m told. After a few seconds, her feed loads on my phone screen. Bright pops of color, flashes of smooth, sun-kissed skin, generic but aesthetic photos of picnics at the beach and brunches with friends, the neatest arrangement of freckles I’ve ever seen on a human being.
“She’s really pretty,” I comment in an attempt to be objective. I scroll slowly down through all fifty-seven of her posts, taking as much care as someone defusing a bomb to not let my fingers brush the Like button by accident. She’s pretty in a different way from me—not overly dolled up, not trying too hard. Just subtle eyeshadow that suits her softer features and whatlooks like naturally wavy hair, fluffed by the ocean breeze. No fillers. No filters, even.
Isthatwhat Ares is into? I make a note to start switching up my makeup style.
“What else did you find?” I prompt. “What about his family?”
“Right, right, I’m getting there,” she says. “I had to ask a friend—well, that might be a bit generous, let’s just say an old classmate—to dive into old hospital records, but they managed to find him. He was born in the States, in New York, and his mother was an economics professor.”
“His motherwasan economics professor?” I say, catching the past tense. “What’s she doing now?”
A pause. “She’s not doing anything now, because she’s dead.”
“Wait. What?”
“Yeah, she died giving birth to him,” she says, not unsympathetically, but with the causal tone of someone rehashing the plot of a movie. “Kind of depressing.”
I feel my heart clench. I almost don’t hear what she says next, because I’m suddenly picturing Ares as a child. Alone. Helpless.
“...and his father’s based in Beijing, but he seems to fly out all the time. His father also has another son called Luke. The mother was a former assistant of his, but they never married, and she suddenly transferred to one of the company’s other offices around the same time she would’ve been pregnant, so I’m assuming it was a one-night stand kind of situation.”
