It’s Ares.
He’s here, somehow, standing just a few feet apart from a man twice his size.
A bell rings, and the man lunges at Ares like a wild animal. Before I can properly react, can even process the fact that Ares ishere,at the same place Long Ge had sent the gift box from, Ares darts out of the way, swift on his feet, and shoves the man from behind. The man stumbles to his knees, and Ares closes in immediately, grabbing the collar of his shirt to hold him there while he strikes at his ribs. The man grunts, squirming free long enough to aim a swing at Ares.
Misses.
Tries again.
They exchange kicks and jabs like boxers, but it’s nothing like a professional boxing match. It’s unregulated, ruthless, nothing off-limits. The only goal seems to be to knock the other person flat to the ground, whatever it takes, however much they break or bleed.
I can’t tear my eyes away.
Ares has always been intimidating, but in action, he’sterrifying. A chill shudders through my body. His gaze is utterly unfeeling as he swings his fist straight into the grown man’s face with a loudcrack, punches again and again, his hand coming away stained with crimson.
Fresh blood gushes from the man’s broken nose like running water.
One final, solid punch to the stomach sends him tumbling straight to the ground, where he lies, eyes bulging and gasping like a fish, struggling to rise again. I clap a horrified hand to my mouth, my stomach turning. I’d thought I was already aware of how sheltered I was. Well protected, privileged, comfortably shielded from the world by my parents’ money and connections.
But it’s only now that I realizejusthow sheltered I am. I’ve never even witnessed true violence before. I’ve never seen this amount of blood outside movie screens and hospitals.
The crowd starts counting down, their voices bouncing off the gray walls.
“Five... four... three.”
Ares looms over the man, both his fists still raised, ready to attack should his opponent crawl back onto his feet again—but he doesn’t need to worry about that. The man seems to havegiven up, his limbs splayed over the concrete, his eyes shuttering closed.
“Two...”
Sothisis what Ares has been doing. This is why he’s been showing up to school with new scrapes and bruises. It feels like a missing puzzle piece slotting into place, but it’s still not enough for me to construct the full picture.
“One.”
Half the crowd erupts into cheers, while the others shout out in protest. But all their faces are flushed, bright with bloodlust. As the man is dragged off to the side, leaving a trail of red behind him, the spectators turn to each other and start chattering excitedly. I catch the wordswinning streakandsure bet,but none of it makes any sense.
My gaze slides back to Ares, who remains standing at the center of it all, alert and erect, his breathing barely labored. Even though he’s just won, there’s no trace of pleasure or triumph in his expression. Only a kind of grim satisfaction, the look of someone on the verge of completing an almost impossible task.
I don’t understand it, don’t know why he’s here, but now I’m more certain than ever that it’s connected to Long Ge. Everything is connected to Long Ge.
Before Ares can spot me, I step back, slipping into the shadows of a narrow corridor. There must be more clues. Information I can find. I make my way carefully down until I reach the end, where there are only two rooms—storage, to my left, and to my right, a door marked with the same dragon symbol. My fingers close around the doorknob, but it won’t budge.
Locked.
As I’d anticipated.
I slide one of the bobby pins out of my hair and bend it carefully into a pick, sticking the end into the lock. I work as fast as I can, listening for footsteps, my heart slamming in my chest as I wriggle the pin, trying to find the right angle, until I hear a softclick.
And just like that, I’m in.
The room looks like the world’s most depressing office. Windowless, a single standard desk and chair, no decorations whatsoever. I work my way through the drawers, sliding each one open, not even sure what I’m looking for. I rifle through bound folders, contracts, sheaves of statistics, hundreds of documents for what seems like dozens of different companies—
Until I come across my mom’s face.
I suck in a sharp, horrified breath. My pulse is beating so loud in my ears that I’m terrified it’ll give me away, that it’ll echo all the way down the corridor and those men will hear it and come running. Trembling, I pick up the photo of my mom from the bottom drawer. She’s smiling in full glamour, her already gorgeous face edited to look flawless. I vaguely remember seeing it before; it’s from an old campaign for a perfume brand, taken years ago.
But it’s not the only photo of her.
The entire drawer appears to be some kind of secret shrine dedicated to my mom. Newspaper clippings, extracted from over the decades. Magazine covers. Paparazzi shots of my mom crossing the street in Shanghai, waiting at the airport, sipping a lemon water outside a café I recognize, lounging on a beachwith a shawl draped over her body to prevent any unwanted tanning, the camera zooming in so far you can see the sunscreen smudged on her nose. A torn page from what might’ve been a textbook or yearbook, my mom’s handwriting curling over it:Have a good holiday, Long Ge! I hope we’re in the same class again next year.An old hair tie. A single origami star, not even folded very well, one of the corners dented. And letters, the first few written on yellowing essay sheets, the type teachers hand out at school, with the gridded lines starting to fade, the more recent ones written on glossy letterhead paper. But they all begin the same way.
