Ficorpio
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
On the night of our wedding, my husband’s face darkened.
“Was it really your first time?”
Then he stared at me and asked, “How come the second I touched you, you started reacting like that?”
I let out a sigh.
My husband really did have the memory of a man too important to remember the inconvenient parts.
He’d forgotten that I used to work at a place with a reputation.
My first time had been on a couch in an upscale karaoke lounge.
And the man who took it was my husband.
Back then, Ethan Cross was in his thirties, fresh off a funding round that had brought in a hundred million dollars. He’d come to the lounge with a group of friends to drink, sing, and celebrate. He was at the height of that sharp, reckless confidence men get when fortune has just started smiling on them.
Once the room got lively, my floor manager lined up a few dozen girls for the clients to choose from.
At the time, Ethan was still awkward around women.
He picked me, but then got shy about it. He wanted to touch my hand, yet didn’t quite dare.
One of his friends, though, was clearly an old pro. He pointed at me and said, “Mr. Cross, a woman like her probably entertains who knows how many men every day. If you pay enough, she’ll sleep with you too.”
That was all it took to open Ethan’s eyes.
He handed me ten thousand dollars and told me to kiss him once.
I’d only gone to work in that lounge because I needed money.
Of course I kissed him.
After the kiss, Ethan told me to drink with him.
“One glass, one thousand.”
His friends burst out laughing, saying that a man who’d just raised a hundred million was still tipping like a cheapskate.
So Ethan changed it.
“One glass, ten thousand.”
I drank hard and fast.
By the time I’d swallowed enough booze to make over two hundred thousand, I truly couldn’t force down another drop. I stumbled to the restroom and threw up.
While I was in there, I overheard people talking about Ethan.
That was when I learned he used to be a poor engineering nerd, the kind of guy who spent all day researching AI and living like a ghost. Then he struck it big, got noticed by investors, and landed that massive funding round.
He was first-generation rich now, but he still had very little experience with women. That was why his friends had brought him there in the first place—to break him in.
And the reason he’d picked me was because I looked like his first love.
His friends laughed and said, “Then we won’t ruin Mr. Cross’s beautiful reunion with his first love.”
When I came out of the restroom, everyone else was gone.
Only Ethan was left in the private room.
He was drunk already. He crooked a finger at me.
“Tell me,” he said, “how much would it take for you to sleep with me?”
I told him, in my most righteous voice, that I only drank and sang with clients. I didn’t sleep with them.
He said, “One hundred thousand?”
Chapter 2
Chapter 2
I repeated myself. “I do not sleep with clients.”
Then he said, “I’ll give you a million.”
My heart lurched.
A million dollars.
Why else had I been suffering through this, smiling for men I hated and pretending I had no pride? For money, obviously.
And it wasn’t like I had much choice.
I had a forty-year-old mother above me and six little sisters below me, all waiting to be fed.
My mother had married at twenty and was determined to give my father a son—an heir, someone to carry on the family name and inherit our grand collection of pots, pans, and nothing. But she gave birth seven times in a row, and every single child was a girl.
She would’ve kept going, too, if my father hadn’t fallen off scaffolding at a construction site and ended up severely ill and paralyzed, with medical bills we couldn’t possibly afford.
That was why I’d started working nights at the lounge.
So I fluttered my lashes at Ethan and said sweetly, “Could you maybe give me a little more? Say… two million?”
His drunkenness cleared by half on the spot.
“No.”
A piece of meat that fat was already in my mouth—there was no way I was letting it fly off.
I scrambled to pull up my payment app, then dropped to my knees beside his feet and looked up at him.
“One million, then,” I said quickly. “Transfer it first, and I’ll take very good care of you.”
My husband’s name was Ethan Cross.
That night, he might actually have been a virgin. He was clumsy, awkward, and in so much pain he kept yelping.
I was even more inexperienced than he was. I yelped louder.
Still, after a whole night tangled up together, he woke up the next morning and told me to get out.
He said I wasn’t a virgin.
I was so numb I almost laughed.
Imagine that—a man with a polished education deciding whether a woman was a virgin based on whether she bled.
But I still wanted to hold on to that golden ticket.
So I pulled up an AI chatbot on my phone and gave him a quick sex-ed lesson.
“It’s completely normal for a woman not to bleed the first time.”
Ethan still told me to get lost.
He said I was dirty. He said a woman who worked in an upscale karaoke lounge couldn’t possibly be a decent woman.
He also said he’d only touched me because he’d been drunk out of his mind that night. Otherwise, it never would have happened.
I could only keep sighing.
There went my golden ticket. Sob.
Still, I’d done pretty well for myself that night.
Including what he spent on drinks, I’d made a total of 1.26 million dollars off Ethan.
I took the extra sixty grand and used it for my dad’s medical treatment.
The money wasn’t even gone before he died.
After he passed, my mother cried, screamed, and made the whole house miserable.
When I finally asked what was wrong, I found out she was pregnant with his posthumous child.
Chapter 3
Chapter 3
She sobbed and said, “Your father died too early. If he’d known there was finally going to be a son in my belly, maybe the shock of happiness would’ve kept him alive.”
I looked at the six younger sisters already crowding our house and tried to persuade her to terminate the pregnancy.
She refused.
She insisted on giving birth to this precious heir, as if there were some great family legacy waiting for him beyond a pile of old dishes and broken furniture.
I was at my wit’s end and half wanted to run.
But then my six little sisters looked up at me with those wide, pleading eyes.
“Rose…”
“Rose…”
My sisters were adorable—obedient, gentle, easy to love.
And I truly didn’t want them growing up only to follow my path, picking up shifts at some karaoke lounge just to survive.
So I took eight hundred thousand dollars and bought two neighboring houses in our small town.
My six sisters and I moved in together. We lived off my savings, and for a while, life was actually pretty comfortable.
But.
I’m the kind of person who always thinks ahead.
Savings run out eventually. And I was just an ordinary female college student. Once I graduated, I’d probably end up in some dead-end office job making a pathetic monthly salary.
So I made up my mind.
While I was still young, while my looks still had value, I was going to go back to that karaoke lounge and land a few more whales.
One big score, and I’d be out for good.
In an upscale karaoke lounge, you met every kind of man there was.
One of them was a washed-up guy in his forties who asked me why I did this kind of work.
“I need money,” I told him.
He said he could give me money.
So I asked, “How much a month?”
He said, “Three grand. Room and board included. But you’d better keep me happy. And you’d have to cook, do laundry, and ideally take care of my eighty-year-old mother too.”
I told him to get lost.
He said I was shallow. Then he actually had the nerve to say, “I don’t even mind that you’re dirty. I’m willing to help you get out for good, and this is how you treat the man saving your life?”
I said, “I just think you’re too small.”
His face tightened instantly. Then he sneered. “Too small? I think you’re the one who’s too loose. Fine. I’ll throw in another two hundred. Thirty-two hundred total. Come with me and I’ll make sure you live easy.”
“I think you’re too small.”
Now he was furious. “Do you even know what matters most for a woman? Her reputation! I’m a teacher. If you came with me, everyone would call you Mrs. Williams with respect!”
“I think you’re too small.”
He was practically foaming at the mouth. “Do you know any other line besides that?”
“Yes,” I said. “Three thousand is too little. Make it three million.”
“Go to hell!”
I smiled. “Your mother probably thinks you’re too small too.”
That did it.
Humiliated and enraged, he slapped me across the face.
My head rang from the hit.
But honestly, it wasn’t even surprising. In a place like that, you saw every kind of man.