Four Years Ago

Click. Click. Crystal-studded silver stilettos struck the polished marble in a steady tempo. A staffer waiting in the lobby flicked a glance toward the sound.

She was a young woman beautiful enough to turn any head. In a sexy black tube dress that bared both shoulders and half her thighs, she was a rare East Asian face among the many women who had passed through the place that day.

For the past hour the opulent, high-toned lobby of the Blatz Hotel had surged with women made up like dolls. They trailed thick perfume and moved with coquettish steps, and every face was steeped in expectation and greed. This woman was a little different. Unease rippled over her expression, as if she had come somewhere she had no business being. The staffer approached her wearing a look that said as much.

"Are you here for the party?"

She swallowed hard and nodded.

"May I see your invitation?"

Rigid, she drew a white envelope no bigger than her palm from the clutch in her hand. The staffer ran his eyes over the card inside.

"Follow me."

She stepped into the elevator after him and worried her lip, unable to keep still.

Twice a year, a patronage party was held in the guise of a charity event. On paper it brought together figures from major corporations and "scholarship students" in difficult circumstances, a place to discuss financial support and the possibility of employment. In truth, it was also a party at which the wealthy ruling class of politics and business chose the sugar babies who would warm their beds.

Sugar babies were mostly young women between nineteen and twenty-five, looking for a "daddy" to look after them as an easy way through burdensome tuition and living costs. The ordinary sugarship, in other words, was a contract: possess a young, attractive woman for a set period, and in return lift some of the weight from her life.

Playing the innocent. And yet she's already come this far.

The woman's dark expression was reflected in the elevator mirror. Seeing that face, the staffer sneered.

Young women arrived at these parties wearing every mask of purity, all lofty and aloof. By the time the night was over, it was ordinary to watch them disappear into the limousines lined up in front of the hotel on the arm of whichever middle-aged man had priced them the highest.

The elevator stopped at the top-floor sky bar. Through the doors as they slid open, the glittering rooftop lounge spread into view. Cool air slipped into her nose, and the dreamlike sound of a jazz band came out to meet her.

"Enjoy your evening."

Even as he sent a jeering look after her back, the staffer put on his kindest voice.

Zena let out a sigh that seemed ready to die and swept the room in a rush with unsteady eyes. Catering staff carrying trays of appetizers moved from place to place, and the bartenders were busy behind the bar, turning out the drinks that had been ordered.

Beneath the white canopies set about the lounge, the elegant sofas and outdoor beds were already filled with guests. Men in fine suits or tuxedos and women in flashy, deeply cut dresses held glasses and traded smiles, each of them taking the other's measure.

Zena's gaze, after wandering the air for a long while, stopped in one place. She quietly closed her palm, opened it again, and started forward.

As she moved, several men narrowed their eyes and looked her over. A body of near-perfect proportion, set in exquisite contrast against a face that looked almost innocent, drew the moisture into their mouths. Where East Asian women were rare, she was unmistakably an appetizing commodity.

Don't shake, Zena Lee. You can do this.

She could feel, with perfect clarity, how many gazes had fixed on her. Judging by the eyes glittering over the rims of glasses, they were already stripping the clothes off her in their heads. The dress clung so tight she could barely breathe, but she crossed to a man seated at the bar with a graceful step.

Liam Carlson.

Co-owner of Hunter & Carlson, the world-renowned eco-friendly high-tech architecture firm, and a man who boasted a glittering history with women. Every time Liam attended a sugar party, women fought fiercely to be the one he chose.

Thirty-four, and handsome. He was generous about supporting his sugar babies financially, and he neither obsessed over them nor kept them on a leash. He was also a man of such vigorous appetite that rumors had him keeping several sugar babies at once.

In a room made up mostly of middle-aged magnates with creased eyes and generous bellies, a young man with a hard, fit build stood out like a crane among the flock. Liam lifted one corner of his mouth and watched the woman coming toward him. When she finally stopped in front of him, satisfaction settled into his expression.

"Mr. Carlson."

"So you came. I thought you wouldn't."

His gaze held on her face after her hair, then traveled slowly downward. Under a look that examined her as carefully as a work of art, Zena bit down on her lip.

"Better with your hair down. Long black hair falling naturally is his taste."

Zena, who had been standing stiff, lifted a hand and pulled free the pins holding her updo. Hair spilled down in soft waves and stopped above her waist.

"Mr. Hunter is—"

"In a hurry, are we."

Liam laughed at the name that had spilled straight out of her mouth.

"Here."

He called to the bartender lingering behind the bar.

"A shot that suits the lady. Nothing too strong."

"Thank you, but I don't need a drink."

"Drink it. It'll help you loosen up."

The refusal never made it past her throat. Zena tipped back the shot the bartender set in her hand and drank it in one swallow. Hot liquid ran down her parched throat. She set the empty glass quietly on the bar and turned her eyes to Liam.

"You look like you've just come through a war. Think you can carry out the mission with your face locked up like that?"

Taking in Zena's pallor, Liam let a scoff color his voice.

"There's no reason to play coy when the man himself isn't even here."

A reply more brazen than he had expected slipped from between her lips. Those pretty lips would look even better if he smeared the lipstick with a fingertip, he thought, rolling his tongue along the inside of his mouth.

"Fine. He's gone down to the room. Go."

"…What?"

The resolve on Zena's face collapsed, and bewilderment took its place.

"I dragged him here, so he's full of complaints. He went to the room."

With an indifferent expression Liam emptied his glass and gestured to the bartender for another.

"We've never even seen each other's faces. You're telling me to walk into his hotel room out of nowhere?"

A voice as lifeless as her bloodless face came from Zena. Liam Carlson glanced at her eyes.

"Why? Can't you?"

She said nothing.

"Going easy on your friend, and all I'm asking is this. It's an extraordinarily generous condition. Don't tell me you don't know that."

The man's expression was placid and his voice calm, but his gaze quietly gave away his displeasure.

"I'm not forcing you. Your friend Ryan O'Connor will rot in a cell for a good long while, though."

Liam did not find her situation regrettable, or pitiable. Young as she was, she was an adult. He had been the one to suggest she attend the sugar party, but dressing to provoke a man and walking in here had been her choice.

"And if Mr. Hunter doesn't want me?"

"Then you'll have to make him want you. Did you think wiping away ten million dollars in damages would be easy?"

A loss he would never recover anyway. Ending it by punishing the suspect and locking him away was dull. And if what came back, in exchange for overlooking one trivial human being he would forget the moment he turned around, was a fresh amusement, then he could shut his eyes and let it pass. Liam gave a shrug and dropped his gaze to his wristwatch.

"If you're giving up, I'll be on my way."

Before an answer could leave Zena's mouth, he turned his back. Her face fissured like a shard of broken glass. In a rush she caught the edge of his suit.

"I—I'll do it. I'm not giving up."

Just thinking of what she had to do made her mind go faint, but if she threw this chance away, Ryan's life was over.

Zena turned her face, stiff with tension, toward Liam.

"Where is the room?"

A faint, quiet smile settled at the corner of Liam's mouth, then vanished.

"Good thinking. Remember—it's the only chance you've got to save your friend."

Willis Tower, the Trump Hotel, and with them the Hunter & Carlson Castle, adorning Chicago's brilliant skyline. The building, which had swept the Emporis Skyscraper Award and the Proggy the moment it was completed, had become a landmark of the Windy City.

The skyscraper that two world-renowned architects had staked their names on and raised as their own headquarters flaunted an eco-friendly design to match its glittering stature.

A vast structure whose headquarters staff alone numbered in the hundreds, it held their creativity and their sense of beauty in full. People interested in architecture never stopped coming, and it was a trendy landmark often used for film shoots and commercials as well.

"I have to see Mr. Liam Carlson."

"Without a prior appointment, I'm afraid that's not possible."

"Mr. Carlson's schedule is completely full, so it's hard to get an appointment. I'm not in a position to just wait with no plan…"

On his way out of the lobby for a business meeting, Liam noticed a woman arguing with the front-desk staff.

She had come with no appointment, insisting she had to see him, and she was begging, desperately, for leniency toward her friend Ryan O'Connor, who had been referred to the Chicago prosecutor's office as a theft suspect.

Ryan O'Connor, twenty-three, hired four months earlier as a maintenance employee at the Hunter & Carlson Castle.

He had photographed the blueprints for a project Liam Carlson had underway, again and again, on his phone, and sold them to an employee of a rival firm. By the time he was arrested, the market value of the leaked information had exceeded ten million dollars.

Liam lifted his wrist to check the time, then led her to a private lounge set off to one side of the lobby.

"I'll give you five minutes."

There was no reason to spare time for someone he didn't even know. Still, Liam felt a strange curiosity at the woman's eyes, and at the air around her.

Tapping one long leg crossed over the other, he watched her lower herself carefully onto the sofa opposite. Even in plain clothes, a narrow waist and smooth legs she couldn't hide stole the eye.

"Please. I'm begging you to go easy on him. I don't know how much damage he did to the company, but however many years it takes, I'll pay it back myself."

At her words, Liam laughed.

"Look here, miss. How old are you, exactly?"

"Twenty-two."

"A student?"

"I'm studying special education at NEIU."

"The damages from the information that friend of yours leaked come to a full ten million dollars. Am I meant to take that as an offer to pay it in his place?"

"T-ten million dollars…?"

She clearly hadn't imagined a sum like that. The color drained clean from Zena's face.

"What's your relationship to Ryan O'Connor?"

"We're… friends."

Still not free of the shock of that figure—ten million dollars—Zena answered in a voice that had shrunk another degree.

"Ordinary friends don't step forward like this. Lovers, maybe."

She was silent.

"Are the two of you in love, then?"

Zena's brows drew softly together.

"He's someone I have to save, even if I end up rolling in the mud to do it."

"Is that right? Well, either way, fine. After you graduate, if you don't touch a cent of the salary you'd make as a special-education teacher and save for twenty years, you might put away a million. Paying back the principal alone, with no interest, would take about two hundred years."

Watching despair pass across her face, Liam felt a peculiar pleasure. The brave figure from a moment ago—the one who had come looking for him with no plan, just to save her "friend"—was nowhere to be found now. At his ease, Liam waited for her mouth to open.

"If you go by salary alone, yes, but…"

She seemed to answer with fair composure, yet she couldn't find another word to join to it. The hand trembling in small spasms already wore the look of surrender.

"You don't want to count salary alone. So you're thinking of making some kind of investment? Unfortunate. I don't have much patience for waiting with no end in sight, staking it all on a young lady's luck."

Liam deliberately set a crease between his brows, the better to pretend he was in a difficult position.

The small face watching him, wan and pale, stirred his instinct rather nicely. She wasn't without a side that sat somewhat apart from his taste, but she had a charm that made it hard to look away.

Well, well. Not bad at all…

As Liam stared at Zena, rolling his tongue along the inside of his mouth, a faint light passed for an instant through his eyes.

Ha. Yes. That would do.