[Substitute Wife + Queen of the Underworld + Scheming Tutor + Forbidden Tension + Identity Reversal]
On the day of my interview for a tutoring job, I caught the boss pinning his secretary to his desk. I pretended to be blind and signed the contract.
His wife lived in the villa. She was twenty-six and had studied dance. When she smiled, she was gentle and sweet, like a little white flower.
Later, she took me to the “Beauty Parlor.” The front was a massage parlor, but the back was an underground casino. She changed into a slit cheongsam and took the seat at the head of the gambling table. When someone’s head was smashed and blood splattered across the carpet, she didn’t even turn around. “Drag him out. Don’t get my bed dirty.”
That night, she crouched beside the massage table, curled up and clutching her waist. Cold sweat soaked through her back. When I pressed against the old injury on her side, I felt a layer of hardened scar tissue. It was where her husband had pushed her down the stairs while drunk.
She looked up at me, her eyes damp. “Xiao Ye, you can still run while you have the chance.”
I didn’t run. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t.
She’d had plastic surgery and changed her face before marrying into this family. She was investigating the car accident from seven years ago, in which the witness had become a vegetable. She’d endured it for seven years, until she’d learned every last detail of that man’s finances.
I helped her use acupuncture to rouse the patient in the coma, controlled the casino floor with my needles, and searched old files at the sanatorium late at night. She brought me hot milk and peeled eggs for me. Beneath the moonlight, she leaned against the doorframe and smiled at me: a smile soft and cold, like a drop of honey congealing on a knife’s edge.
Later, I realized that the biggest piece on the board in that game wasn’t some real estate tycoon or underworld boss. It was her. And the person who should never have made a move was me.
She’d played this game for seven years. The only thing she hadn’t accounted for was that my feelings for her were never part of the plan.
Now she wants to call it quits, but I don’t want to stop.
