Ficorpio
Chapter 1
A wealthy heiress with a ruined leg was the quickest ladder a migrant could climb.
The only problem was that my wife had a temper.
She loved shrimp, and I was the only one allowed to peel them for her.
The shells had to remain whole. The meat couldn’t be torn. If I made even the slightest mistake, she’d smile and dump the entire plate into the trash.
But if I could use her to climb to the top, what was the harm in peeling a few extra shrimp?
I never imagined that one day, she would tell me…
“Do you know that if you want a female shrimp to lay more eggs, you have to cut off one of its eyes?”
“People are the same.”
My name is Ethan Bennett. I’m from Chaoshan.
My parents, Daniel and Nora Bennett, ran a shrimp farm. They weren’t educated, and neither was I. I had never been the academic type.
After failing to get into college, I stayed home to help at the farm. Then a heat wave killed every shrimp we had, leaving my family buried under a mountain of debt.
The creditors came pounding on our door. Our relatives hid whenever they saw us coming.
We sold the house and the car, and my father left to find work.
But misfortune never comes alone. After spending day after day directly under an industrial fan, Daniel suddenly lost the use of one side of his body.
Luckily, I still had my cousin Caleb. He decided to lend my family a hand.
“Come to Harbor City with me, Ethan. That place is paved with gold. As long as you’re willing to work hard and keep your head down.”
My mother packed a bag for me that very night.
And just like that, I came to Harbor City.
Before then, I had never ridden the subway. I had never seen a building more than ten stories high. In Harbor City, I caught my first glimpses of the lives led by the upper class, peering through the cracks in their world.
I thought I would be living like them soon enough. But I had no degree and no real skills, so all I could do was follow Caleb around and scrape together a living.
Nightclubs, private clubs, the entrances of boxing gyms… When Caleb told me to bow, I bowed. When he told me to stand guard, I stood guard.
After years of keeping my head down, my knees learned to bend on their own. Young masters and society girls, male escorts and women from the clubs—it didn’t matter. As long as they tipped well, everyone was “sir” or “ma’am” in my mouth.
But there was always a fire burning inside me.
Why were some people born into mansions in the Mid-Levels while, no matter how hard I worked, I was only fit to live in a Subdivided Flat?
I needed an opportunity.
In my third year in Harbor City, Caleb got me a security job at Sunrise Nightclub. The place wasn’t very big, but plenty of people came through its doors.
That was where I met Mandy Sinclair.
Mandy was beautiful and generous with her money. She drove a Porsche and arrived with a large entourage every time.
But no one had ever heard her talk about where she came from.
Chapter 2
Some said she had just returned from overseas and that her family was in business. Others said she was the daughter of some prominent family, simply coming out to have fun because she had nothing better to do.
I didn’t care which story was true. I only knew she was rich.
That was enough.
One evening, she twisted her ankle as she was leaving. I reached out and caught her.
She looked up at me and smiled.
“How tall are you?”
“Six foot.”
“That tall? What a waste, keeping you at the door.”
She handed me a card.
“Give me a call.”
I held the card between my fingers, my palm damp with sweat.
I knew my chance had arrived.
That very night, I called her and went to her presidential suite. She was sitting by the window in a bathrobe, eating cherries. When she saw me come in, she patted the seat beside her.
“Sit.”
When she told me to sit, I sat.
When she told me what to do, I did it.
Afterward, I stood before the floor-to-ceiling windows, with the night view of Victoria Harbour spread out beneath my feet. The lights glittered across the city like gold.
I loved the feeling.
Caleb had been right. From up high, you really could see farther.
Mandy came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my waist.
“Do you like it?”
“I do.”
“That’s all that matters.”
She took me to expensive Japanese restaurants in Central, gave me watches and designer bags, and even brought me to a golf course, where she taught me how to hold a golf club.
She wrapped her arms around me from behind and laughed.
“See? It’s easy.”
“Golf is so much fun.”
As time passed, we grew closer and closer. I moved into her apartment, drove her car, and used her card.
The drawer beside the bed always held a thick stack of cash for me to take whenever I wanted. Large sums traveled from Harbor City to Chaoshan. I paid off my family’s debts and paid for my father’s treatment.
At the time, I truly believed I had stumbled across a gold brick and finally escaped the underworld.
But I never dreamed that one morning, a middle-aged man would storm in with three enormous bodyguards, drag me out of bed, and pin me face-down on the floor.
Mandy stood beside them in a robe, crying, her shoulders shaking.
Only later did I learn that the middle-aged man was the real head of the household.
Mandy was his financially sponsored mistress.
They took me to the police station.
The Rolex and designer bags all had serial numbers. It didn’t take long to trace them back to their owner. The man said I had stolen everything and that he would press charges. He swore I’d spend the rest of my life behind bars.
All I could do was kneel on the floor and beg him like a dog. Mandy also swore she would never contact me again.
Chapter 3
Only then did the man agree not to press charges.
But in front of everyone, he gave me a brutal lesson with a golf club.
It was the same club Mandy had taught me with. It cracked two of my ribs.
When he saw me beaten half to death, the middle-aged man crouched down and prodded my cheek with the clubhead.
“Listen, kid. You can’t just put your hands on any woman you want.”
I spent a long time in the hospital. Caleb covered all my medical expenses.
On the day I was discharged, he came to pick me up. He studied me for a long moment, then handed me a cigarette.
“Learn anything?”
I took it and lit up.
“I did.”
Never trust a woman.
Especially not a rich one.
I spent the next few years working in the Nightlife Trade, meeting all kinds of people and hearing all kinds of stories.
Someone told the story of a Samsung heiress who married her bodyguard and gave him fourteen point one billion won.
Someone else talked about a wealthy heiress from the Mid-Levels whose family controlled her life so tightly that a young punk managed to trick her out of both her body and her heart.
I listened to every story and filed it away.
There were many roads to becoming one of the people at the top.
I still wanted to take the fastest one.
Only this time, I knew which women I could afford to touch…
and which ones I couldn’t.
If I was going to rely on a woman, she had to be the kind who came from a good family, with a clean heart and a trust fund behind her. I couldn’t afford another woman who could barely keep herself on her feet.
Like Mandy.
But women like that weren’t easy to find.
A woman who came to a nightclub was usually either there to cheat on someone or had come with a man. Wealthy young women who came simply to broaden their horizons were few and far between.
So the days passed, and I still hadn’t found the right target.
It wasn’t as though no one had hinted at an arrangement over the past few years. Once, a tipsy society wife slipped a hotel key card into my pocket. Another wealthy woman had asked me outright, “How much a month to come home with me?”
Every time, I laughed and pushed the offer back.
My cousin Caleb had been arrested some time ago and was still awaiting trial. He’d worked as a gang runner, and when his boss went down, Caleb had been dragged down with him.
These days, I worked under Andy Brooks.
He was the top male escort in the East Kowloon nightlife trade: broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and skin so flawless it looked as though water might bead on it. Everyone knew he specialized in entertaining wealthy women and men.
He was the nightclub’s living advertisement.
But Harbor City’s economy had been in decline for years. Nightclubs had closed one after another. The place I worked now was still among the best in the city, but most of our customers were visitors from the mainland. They tipped little and demanded plenty.
Making money was getting harder by the day.