26
Ares
The receptionist doesn’t even try to welcome him when he limps into the office.
Fair enough. He knows he doesn’t belong here. He’s too young, his hair is too long, his skin too tattooed and bruised. Meanwhile, the receptionist looks like a walking résumé, with her no-nonsense bun and Yale-issued tote bag and the shiny company badge pinned to the front of her wrinkle-free button-down shirt.
“Could I please see Long Ge?” he asks.
She makes a sound that he’s pretty sure is a scoff, though she’s professional enough to keep it quiet. “Do you have an appointment with him?”
“Yes, I do, actually,” he says.
She regards him with open skepticism. He doesn’t blame her. He can barely believe he’s here. All his searching, all the fighting, just for a chance to track Long Ge down—only to be invited over by the man himself.
“He’s in a meeting right now, but I’ll let him know you’ve arrived.” The receptionist nods to the seats by the water cooler. “Feel free to wait there.”
He does, though the seats are horribly uncomfortable, shaped in a way that sends a judder of pain through the roughly stitched cut in his side. Not like he’d be able to get comfortable anyway.
Despite being owned by the same person, everything about this place is the opposite of the Cave—neat, orderly, sterile. Safe. His eyes pass over the complimentary tea bags offered at the entrance, the two pots of mandarin trees with shiny red packets hanging from the branches for good fortune. One of the office walls is made entirely of glass, so that when the sun sweeps in through the windows, it floods the entire level, burnishing all the glass panes and glossy posters promoting this year’s annual gala dinner.
It’s exactly what he expected after scrolling through images on the company website at three in the morning to verify if the company truly did belong to Long Ge. He hadn’t stopped until he’d come across Long Ge’s photo in the About Us section.
He waits a whole hour before the man appears. A faint rustling accompanies his movements as he walks through the headquarters—people standing up behind their desks, stopping halfway in the corridor, setting down their papers.
“Morning, sir.”
“Would you like some tea, sir?”
“Sir, we just need you to sign....”
Long Ge stops before Ares. He looks like a harmless, ordinary middle-aged man, except for that scar on his cheek, andthe sharp, inquisitive look in his eyes, behind the thick glasses. “Oh, good. You’re here.” He extends a hand. “I’m Long Ge. Nice to meet you in person.”
Ares stands up, feeling wrong-footed, somehow. Cautiously, he takes the man’s hand and shakes it once. It’s all too civil and normal, these polite greetings and handshakes. But what can he do? Lunge across the space, scream at him, “Give me my brother back!”while around them white-collar workers fill out tax forms and make phone calls about preparations for the gala? “Yes, hi, I know,” he says, trying to match the man’s businesslike tone.
Long Ge smiles. “Follow me.”
He leads Ares into his office, an impressive space that leaves no room to question Long Ge’s position in the company. The city unfolds beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, the skyscrapers peeking out over the autumn-brushed trees. Ares can see the CCTV tower from here, the seemingly gravity-defying glass structure shaped like a giant pair of pants, all the cars racing each other around the ring roads. Beijing moves at such a restless, breathless pace, forever marching doggedly on and on into the future; you either try to keep up with it, or you get left behind.
“I’ve heard a few interesting things about you,” Long Ge says, sitting back in the white swivel chair. He gestures for Ares to do the same across the desk. Ares notices his own chair is much shorter. Either the person who’d sat here before him has uncommonly short legs, or it’s a power thing.
“You have?” Ares says.
“Caused a bit of a commotion at the Cave the other week,didn’t you? But a good fighter, Sangui tells me. Many of my men were betting on you to go all the way.”
Disoriented, Ares finds himself unable to muster a response. Like his brain has forgotten the conventions of the English language, grammar abandoned, logic gone. “I... It wasn’t—”
“But that’s not even the most interesting part about you,” Long Ge says. He leans back, still smiling wide, his eyes twinkling. “Why don’t you tell me more about your friend Chanel Cao?”
His chest seizes. A sick sensation, spreading fast through him. “Chanel Cao?”
“You’re very close, aren’t you?” Long Ge says.
He doesn’t know where Long Ge is going with this, but he thinks back to Chanel’s expression last night by the lake, those large, frightened eyes in her lovely face. Frightened, because of Long Ge.
“No, not very,” he tells Long Ge, feeling a desperate, almost dangerous urge to protect her, the same feeling that had overtaken him when he saw her cornered at the Cave. “She’s just a classmate.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Long Ge says pleasantly, picking up a ballpoint pen on his desk, pressing it twice with a quick, light clicking noise, then setting it down again. “Would ‘just a classmate’ accompany you to get that new tattoo? You were acting like quite the couple, Zaizai told me. And I saw a photo of you on Chanel’s phone with my very own eyes.”
