Captive to the Beauty Mark

(The rating just opened and will rise. Be sure to read the author’s note at the end of Chapter One.) Eighteen years ago, during the rainy season in Southeast Asia, she took his mud-covered hand, protected him, and made him feel needed. He committed her face to memory, along with the beauty mark beneath her left eye and the words she said: “My name is An’an.” When they parted, she left him a lily-of-the-valley hair clip. He tied the ring his mother had left him around her neck. It was all he had to give. Eighteen years later, she joins Doctors Without Borders, believing that if people need her, she can heal the hole in her heart Everyone says they dote on her, yet no one has ever truly chosen her. He, meanwhile, has long been the uncrowned king of Southeast Asia, a man who holds absolute power. Countless “lookalikes” surround him Women with faces like hers, with a beauty mark beneath the left eye, with “Ahn” in their names… He never touches them. He simply collects them like fragments, trying to piece together the face he remembers. Fate brings them close enough to pass each other on a rainy day in Manchester. She only hurries by, but he spends dozens of sleepless days and nights searching in the wrong city. When they meet again, the Southeast Asian sun blazes overhead. Because of her beauty mark, she is sent to his bed as a “gift.” When a drug leaves her suffocating and near death, he kneels beside the bed and hoarsely speaks the name he has kept in his heart for eighteen years: “An’an.” “I know this is imprisonment. But if I don’t lock you up, you’ll leave.” “Everyone says they love me. But I want to know, will anyone ever choose me?” He once thought love meant possession. Only later did he understand that love meant letting her go. All her life, she had been waiting for someone to choose her. Only later did she realize that person had always been there.