Chapter 3

The sky was turning dark when I left Sloane's place.

I had barely walked two blocks when a man driving a Porsche Cayenne rolled down his window and asked if I wanted to grab dinner.

After coldly dismissing him, I walked slowly down the damp street.

The sweltering evening was thickly overcast, the air heavy with the damp, cool promise of impending rain.

Passing a shop window, I saw my reflection in the glass.

A clean, delicate face, exquisite features, and lips painted with a nude-pink gloss.

Just a few days ago, Sloane had thrown an arm around my shoulder and sighed. She told me she had spent six figures on a nose job in Beverly Hills, yet it still couldn't compare to my natural one.

She said whenever we went to underground bars together, every man's eyes were glued entirely to me.

I knew I was considered beautiful now.

Whenever I drank at clubs, high-ranking mobsters would send over astronomically priced bottles of Ace of Spades for me. I had lost count of how many times I was asked for my number on street corners.

Last week, a talent scout even shoved a business card into my pocket, saying his agency was desperate for a face like mine.

But before I met Julian, none of this had anything to do with me.

When I was little, both my parents ran fringe businesses for the Pierce family. No one cared if my hair was a mess.

By high school, I wore black-rimmed glasses as thick as my fingers. My naturally curly hair was a rat's nest, and my mouth was full of shiny metal.

Hillbilly, four-eyes, brace-face.

Those malicious nicknames, along with the open mockery from girls from high-society mob families, were my daily routine.

Because of that, I was insecure to my very bones. The more I was mocked, the more terrified I was to change. I hid myself in oversized, worn-out hoodies, which only made me look even more ridiculous and pathetic.

I had secretly liked a few boys, but the moment they found out, they avoided me as if I'd insulted them, calling me horrible names behind my back.

Occasionally, I wanted to try to change my appearance, but my parents were too busy to care. They figured as long as a girl grew up healthy, that was good enough.

They were always covered in road dust themselves, too busy to care about their own clothes, let alone mine.

So I endured my repressed teenage years under a constant barrage of cold mockery and eye-rolls.

That was until I met Julian on the dark web's cross-family anonymous forum.

He was first hooked by my voice over the headset and insisted on adding my dark web ID. We teamed up for a few games, and the more we talked, the closer we got.

Not long after, he confessed his feelings to me in a private message.

I hesitated for a whole night.

Julian had always been a big deal on the forum. I knew his family must have serious status on the streets.

The moment he spoke, he offered to buy me the latest seasonal Chanel, which I rejected time and time again.

Furthermore, although his encrypted space had no photos showing his face, there were many pictures taken from behind on private yachts and in haute couture suites around the world.

His V-shaped torso, broad shoulders, and long legs, set against the incredibly luxurious furnishings in the background, all flaunted his status.

I knew it was my voice he liked. Looking the way I did, he wouldn't even give me a second glance if we met.

But at that time, I truly fell for him.

Julian had a sweet mouth.

Whenever I was in a bad mood, he would sing to me over voice chat to cheer me up. He would even drop heaps of casino chips in the cross-family public channel, paying everyone online to shower me with compliments.

Under that kind of full-court press, I finally gave in.

I hid all my identifying information and routed my IP through three proxy layers, terrified he would track me down.

I once nervously tested him. "What if I look really ordinary, maybe even a little ugly? What then?"

He replied instantly: "Baby, how could someone with such a sweet voice be ugly? Stop giving me a hard time."

"Baby, when will you finally let me see you? I'm going crazy missing you."

"Darling, once this business deal is done, move to my district. I want to hold you in my lap every single night."

Staring at those explicit, sweet words, I was silent for a long time before finally deciding to completely reinvent myself.

From that day on, I started a hellish transformation like a madwoman.

I didn't care when my eyes stung and watered after laser surgery. I didn't care about enduring sleepless nights of pain during my orthodontic adjustments. I didn't utter a single sound while enduring the intense pain of chemical hair straightening and radiofrequency skin treatments.

No matter how much my timid parents tried to stop me, scolding me for putting myself through hell for nothing, I was like a woman possessed, refusing to give up.

I had only one thought in my mind. I needed to become beautiful.

Aside from my appearance, I gritted my teeth and enrolled in the family's strictest mafia socialite etiquette training.

The instructor was an army veteran. In my very first class, she struck me across the shoulder blades with her crop, saying I walked like a "mule hauling cargo."

Over those six months, I couldn't count how many nights I practiced until my legs cramped, sitting in the corner of the training hall crying.

Then I would think of him and force myself back up.

Nearly a year passed, and I became a completely different person.

I ditched the stupidly thick lenses and removed the cold metal braces. That messy, dry hair was styled into silky, sexy, dark tumbling waves.

I learned to draw a perfect winged eyeliner, slipped into waist-cinching silk dresses, and armed myself with a lethal charm.

During this time, Julian said he wanted to come find me multiple times, but I always made up excuses to stop him.

I always felt I was still missing something, still not good enough for him.

It wasn't until the young shooters at the family gun range started staring at me with greedy eyes, some even secretly stuffing suggestive notes into my locker.

It wasn't until I walked down the corridors of the underground casinos and young masters from other families began blocking my path, their eyes hungry as they begged for my number, their voices hoarse as they called me mesmerizing.

Only then did I realize I had truly changed.

I finally gathered enough confidence to face Julian. I booked a flight to the address he gave me, agreeing to meet him the day I landed.

But...

To him, all of this was nothing more than a cheap game to kill time.

Those times he said over voice chat, "I miss you so much I can't sleep," or "Let's get a British Shorthair cat together later," or those bedtime stories he read to me in the middle of the night... I thought they were all real.

Looking back, I realized I didn't even know his last name.

I only found out he was from the Marchesi family after Sloane coaxed it out of her fling in his crew.

From beginning to end, he never truly cared about me.