Chapter 26

1st October 2015: 20:33 pm.

I hated seeing him suffer, it made me feel weak. Useless. Something that I wasn’t accustomed to feeling since I’d fled my life back home in China. A life that I had said that I would never go back to. Poverty. Fear. Loneliness.

My parents were dead poor, even though Westerners deem all Chinese to be wealthy. There was a big class divide in China. The difference between the poor and the wealthy is too extreme. My parents could have been if they were educated, if they knew that there was more to life, but they didn’t and the result of that was nothing but pain and suffering.

I’d managed to get out of there, with the one skill that I knew so well: making men believe that they meant the world to me and that I would cherish them as if they were my own. I’d done it from the moment I’d smuggled myself out of China using the same skill, right through the moment that I’d arrived in London. I’d had a friend who’d suffered the same fate as I had back in China. She’d helped me change my ID, told me how to get ahead in this world. It was a different one to the one back in China. She’d told me how my life would change, and hers had the moment she started working for the big corps. My sugar daddy had been killed in a Triant war, and I needed a replacement.

As soon as I’d walked into Rogers Capital Management, I knew that Ted was the one. Not just to keep my bank balance happy, but every part of me too. I wanted to show him that he needed me just as much as I needed him.

A wife was a technicality.

I knew that getting pregnant would do the trick, as my friend had taught me that once a baby was in the picture then there was no turning back. She told me that I had to ‘use bait and then catch not a fish, but a shark’. The golden opportunity was there from the moment I’d seduced Ted. It wasn’t hard, because he was desperate. Lonely. And most of all, horny. It was written all over his face that he was in a loveless and sexless relationship with her.

I waited. I was patient with his constant back and forth about our relationship. One month it would be on and the other off. I would use his ‘come’ through artificial insemination. He thought that I was horny, that I loved giving BJs. I used them as a means to back-up and ensure that if I was ovulating and I couldn’t conceive naturally, I had his sperm to do it. That was all I needed to reach my goal.

I went to the doctors. I knew when I was ovulating and the best time to insert his sperm. After Emma got better, I thought that he would run into my loving arms. I kept proving my worth to him, but he wanted to end it. He said that he wanted to be a dutiful husband, but I knew that it was a lie. He just didn’t have a pre-nup and getting a divorce would be costly.

I had spent years trying to figure out a way for us to be together. My prayers had been answered when I’d heard him talking about Barbara finding Emma on the bathroom floor when she was only two years old. That was when I realized that the answer to my question had finally come.

Emma didn’t even realize that she had given me the answer.

We would both have what we wanted, but then there was something that was messing with the plan.

His phone rang, I watched him as he walked into the living room. I was annoyed, because I went to have a quick shower, but when I went to Elizabeth’s room he had closed the door.

Maybe I was being paranoid?

He’d just closed it, maybe because he wanted silence. I quickly thought back to him putting her to bed before, he’d always closed the door. This was nothing new. I was just being paranoid.

I sat patiently waiting for him to get off the phone. We had to talk. Now.

I checked in and Zhang wasn't there. He was like a ninja, always coming and going without a word. I hated it and the sooner that this was over and we could get on with our lives separately, the better.

“What is it?”

“The fucking money is just dripping out. No trace. No one knows what is happening.”

He was pacing up and down and panicking, we needed to be quiet. Elizabeth’s room was next door but judging by the state of her earlier, she was completely exhausted.

“What about Emma?”

“Who cares about her,” he spat out.

I shook my head, he didn’t get what I was talking about. “What about Emma? Do you think that she has anything to do with this?”

He slumped on the chair. “Emma’s too unstable to do anything like this. I mean, this is way out of her league. She did the kidnapping alone and… wait a minute.”

“What? What?”

I’d planned on having a nice relaxing dinner with him and then I would confess the truth. Give him the options of what could happen next with the same result: us being together. But this fucking money, our money, was being taken by someone and I needed to tell him about his enemies, the ones that I’d hidden from him so well. I had a feeling that my past had come back to bite us and one of them may have found a way to avenge us.

“Will.” Ted flopped his head back. I hated it when he spoke in riddles.

“She must be talking to him again. Yes, this is it. The kidnapping, the ransom. He must be up to something.” He stood up abruptly and he wasn’t making any sense. He just grabbed his coat and said, “Shit, I need to leave. Fucking brilliant!” And then he was out of our apartment.

“I was going to cook!” I screamed out. It was something that I rarely did, but I was going to make the effort today. I was going to cook, give him a nice relaxing bath and then I would tell him the options. But I was too late as he marched out of the door, still talking in riddles and leaving me with no answers.

***

I flopped down on the chair, wondering whether to get a sitter seeing as Zhang wasn’t in the apartment. Yet again.

“Does he know?” Zhang said as he came out of his room. When the hell did he come back?

“No,” I whispered as I turned to him.

“What now?”

Zhang was only a little taller than me, but five years my senior. He was a man of few words. He did what he had to survive back in China. He had helped me escape to the life that I had here. I was nearly attacked and he’d rescued me from the man that wanted to make me his wife; my parents had carefully planned this out in the name of tradition. I owed my brother, but as soon as I’d come to London he’d disappeared and I’d started to befriend someone new, someone who’d showed me a way to get out of poverty.

Then Zhang had re-appeared in my life once again, and it was as if he had been following me the whole time. I asked him why he left, but silence.

I’d asked how he’d found me.

Once again, silence.

The only thing that he did say was that he wanted money and a place to stay. I offered him a place to stay, but then I made it clear that as soon as I was Mrs. Rogers, he would get his payback and be out of my life once again. Zhang was a man of a few words. No one really knew what was going in his mind, which was part of the reason that I was worried that Barbara wouldn’t leave the station with him and my carefully thought out plan would fall apart, but he’d reassured me that he would keep to his side of the bargain as long as I kept to mine.

“You tell me,” I sighed, still thinking about the way that Ted had abruptly left the apartment.

He sat next to me. “You need to come out with a plan, and quick. This thing has gone on for long enough. I want out. One day you said and if it drags on any longer it will be two. I want out!”

That was the most he had ever said since I told him about it.

“I know you do.”

He sat down and held my wrist so tightly that I thought he was going to snap it in two. “I mean it. Out. You have one hour to figure it out. Or it is all over, Li.”

“But you agreed,” I pleaded as I wrestled with him for my arm back.

“I said I would do it. I never agreed for it to go on for more than one day. This is not how you said it would go down. I want to go back home. I can’t fucking stand this country. I need the money to go back to China and you’re going to get it for me,” he demanded, and then he dropped my hand and then left the room.

“Why?” I shouted as I followed him, whilst soothing my aching hand. That was the first time that he had mentioned it since we’d arrived here nearly seven years ago. I never for one minute thought that he wanted to go back home.

“That’s for me to know. And it’s none of your business. Just sort it. Soon!” He stood by the front door, ready to leave just as Ted had a few seconds ago.

Zhang scared me, by the way that his dark eyes cast over my body. The fact that he’d tried to physically harm me. I wasn’t just scared for myself, because this whole situation felt easy at first and now it felt completely fucked up.