Chapter 14: Rosie Comes Running

"Stop joking, Vivian." Rebecca's smile stayed perfectly in place, but her eyes had gone winter-cold. "If you actually had a recording, you'd have released it years ago. You wouldn't have waited until now." She lifted her chin, steady again, recalibrating. "Let go of me, or I'm calling security."

Vivian raised an eyebrow.

Released her chin.

And smiled. "Go ahead."

The confidence did it.

Rebecca had been eighty percent certain the recording was a bluff. Now she was sixty. Now fifty.

Because that was the thing about Vivian Rong, she had never once in her life bluffed without something to back it up. And the particular quality of her smile right now, unhurried and faintly amused, was not the smile of someone running a gamble.

Rebecca's hand stayed at her side.

Vivian watched the calculation play out behind her eyes and felt something loosen in her chest, not quite satisfaction, but close enough.

She leaned in one last time, fingers pressing just slightly harder against Rebecca's jaw.

"I didn't come here just to return what you gave me yesterday," she said quietly. "I came to tell you something. I'm back, Rebecca. I'm back." Her voice dropped to something soft and absolute. "And I'm going to peel back every pretty layer you've built over the last five years, one by one, and show everyone exactly what's underneath. Everything you took from me, I'm taking it back. Every single piece. With interest."

Something moved through Rebecca's expression. A flicker she couldn't entirely suppress, not quite fear, but something adjacent to it.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said stiffly.

Vivian looked at her for a long moment. Then her expression shifted, lighter suddenly, almost casual, the way it did when she was about to say something that would land exactly where she intended it to.

"One more thing." She tilted her head, studying Rebecca's face with an expression of mild, genuine interest. "Your forehead's been dark for weeks, hasn't it? And your love line" She clicked her tongue softly. "Not looking good. Someone's been watering the grass on your side of the fence, Rebecca. I'd keep an eye on that."

Rebecca's carefully maintained composure cracked at the edges. "Daniel is not that kind of person"

Vivian laughed, light, unbothered, not unkind.

She didn't confirm it. Didn't deny it. Just let the words sit in the air between them like smoke.

If Sebastian Stonewell wasn't that kind of person, he wouldn't have been doing exactly that in the Rong family guest bathroom with Rebecca while Vivian's birthday party was happening one floor below.

Men like that didn't change. They just found new directions.

She'd said enough. Whether Rebecca believed her or not was Rebecca's problem, not hers.

Vivian's gaze drifted sideways, just briefly and she said, almost as an afterthought, "The first two slaps were interest."

She met Rebecca's eyes.

"This is the principal."

"What"

Rebecca's ankle turned.

One moment she was standing, and the next she was pitching sideways, arms out, balance gone, tumbling off the curb and into the road with a sharp cry. A black sedan locked up its brakes and screeched to a stop two meters short of her, close enough that the heat of the engine was a presence in the air.

The color left Rebecca's face completely.

"Ah!"

The paparazzi, who had been hovering on the edges of the scene trying to make sense of what they were witnessing, came surging back to life. Shutters fired. Cameras swung. Every lens in a twenty-foot radius found Rebecca Rong sitting in the road, designer dress crumpled, expression stripped of every carefully applied layer.

In the strobe of the flashbulbs, Vivian crouched down to eye level.

Unhurried. Composed. Looking at Rebecca the way you'd look at something you'd already decided the outcome of.

"We understand each other now, don't we." It wasn't a question. Her voice was low and even, each word placed with deliberate weight. "I'm back. And from this point forward, every move you make against me, I will return it. Doubled. Without hesitation." A pause. "Don't test me."

Rebecca said nothing.

The stopped car sat behind her, hazard lights blinking. Camera flashes burned white across her vision. Her bodyguards came crashing through the crowd, her assistant right behind them, all of them rushing to pull her up and shield her from the lenses.

Rebecca let them. Jaw tight. Fists clenched at her sides.

She watched Vivian straighten up, turn her back, and walk away through the parting crowd, calm, unhurried, head up, as though she'd simply completed an errand.

Vivian Rong.

Rebecca's hands shook as her assistant draped a jacket over her shoulders.

She would wait. She would be ready.

Vivian hadn't won anything yet.

---

Across the street, in the open courtyard of the Midtown shopping plaza, a small figure in a yellow checked shirt had just spotted something through the crowd.

A familiar silhouette. A particular way of walking, head up, steps unhurried, the easy confidence of someone who belonged wherever she went.

The little boy's eyes went wide.

His feet were already moving before his brain caught up, short legs pumping, arms swinging, weaving through a forest of adult knees with single-minded, joyful determination.

Mom.

It's Mom!