Phantom: Her Ruthless Villain (Ruthless Triad 5)

And my heart thrilled when my phone lit up with Hak-kan’s number.

“Hey, I just had lunch with my Dad. That’s such great news about him agreeing to sell the company to VIP Bai3. But hey, I was thinking—”

“You need to stay there for a little while longer,” Hak-kan said, cutting me off. “Past Christmas. Maybe to New Year.”

“What?” I asked. “I can’t stay here that long. I have patients.”

“Okay, I’ll figure out the arrangements and call you back. Not from this number. So keep a lookout.”

My blood ran cold at his terse instructions.

“Hak-kan, what’s going on? I don’t understand. Will you just tell me—”

He hung up before I could get out the rest of my questions.

I didn’t hear from Hak-kan for two days. Two days of pacing back and forth with worry, wondering what was going on.

And when an Unknown Number finally popped up on my phone, I raced to answer the call.

“Hak-kan?” I asked, assuming it could only be him.

“You can come back,” his voice was gruff with undertones of weariness. “I’m sending you a ticket, and two of my guys will pick you up at the airport and escort you to work for a couple of weeks. Don’t say what. Don’t ask me any questions. Just do this, O.”

I have to say, I’ve never met anyone who wielded authority the way Hak-kan did, but I had to go against his command and ask him one question. “Are you…are you okay?”

Silence. It stretched on so long that I checked to see if we were still connected.

We were. So I said, “Hak-kan, can you talk to me? Just talk to me? Prove we’re not that couple like you said.”

“I can’t do this with you,” he answered, his voice abrupt. “I know I said I would, and I’ll buy your dad’s company or whatever. But the rest…just get onto the plane.”

My heart stopped, and my knees threatened to buckle.

“Are you…?” The question hurt so bad, but I had to ask it out loud. “Are you breaking up with me?”

Another silence. But this time, it only stretched over a moment. Not long at all.

“There’s nothing to break up,” he answered. “We were only pretending from the start.”

18

So that was how we ended. With a late-night phone call and an emailed plane ticket for the next day.

I…I didn’t know what to do. So I did as he told me.

The flight back to New York was like one of those bad dreams….you know it’s a nightmare while you’re having it, but you still can’t figure out how to wake yourself up.

The last embers of hope that I’d misunderstood him again, that he hadn’t seriously dumped me over the phone after getting what he wanted—well, that hope died when I saw Wayne waiting for me at the baggage claim.

I knew then that this situation was real life, not a dream. If we were still a thing, he never would have sent someone else to come get me.

Wayne and I walked out to the curb together, where another Silent Triad member was waiting for us behind the wheel of one of their fleet Audi’s.

No more Upper Westside penthouse for me. They delivered me back to the Central Park East brownstone I hadn’t stepped foot in since November. And inside, I found all the suitcases his men had used to haul my things over to Hak-kan’s place. They sat in a neat row by the front stairs with matching Ugandan flag stickers attached to each of them—lest I imagined, even for a moment, that they belonged to someone other than me.

“This neighborhood’s too nice for us to hang out on the stoop all night, so we’re going to take inside shifts downstairs,” the guard who’d introduced himself as Tom informed me after both him and Wayne followed me inside. “But if you need anything, text me,”

“All I need are answers,” I told him. Fear and sadness whirred inside my chest. “How long will you be here? Following me around? Is Hak-kan planning to call or visit and explain any of this to me?”

“Hak-kan?” Tom asked, furrowing his forehead.

“That’s Phantom’s Chinese name,” Wayne explained. “Nobody uses it but her, though.”

“Oh!” Tom answered. “Uh, well, Phantom’s in Hawaii right now, so we don’t know when he’ll be back. And as for how long we’ll be staying—only a week or two. This is just a standard phase-out now that you and Phantom aren’t together anymore.”

…aren’t together anymore.

The last three words hit me like scalpels nicking arteries. Their triad had a phase-out security protocol for all the women they dumped?

It made me feel delusional. Like everything I had experienced with Hak-kan had merely been in my head—no, not Hak-kan, Phantom.

I needed to start referring to him as Phantom because apparently, I wasn’t as special to him as I’d thought.

“I’m sorry. We’re not trying to upset you or anything,” Tom told me. “We’re just following orders.”