Phantom: Her Ruthless Villain (Ruthless Triad 5)

“Uh…” Phantom scraped a hand over the back of his head. “Well, you know, she’s a fortune teller. And she kind of told me and our entire family that you were the woman I would marry.”

My eyes widened. “She did what? When?”

“About ten years ago, I guess,” he answered. “Right after I met you for the first time. I had lunch with her afterward, and she told me and then everybody else in the family that I had just met the woman I would marry—a tall, black doctor. And that grandma would die soon after holding our firstborn, a little girl—so yeah, that was a bomb drop. And you saw my family. They were ecstatic about that shit. Less ecstatic about having to wait ten years for the prophecy to even sort of begin to come true. Like, everybody except Mike got married before me. But main point…they were kind of expecting you.”

I’m an OB/Gyn for women with disabilities, so I’ve pretty much got my neutral “I’m not judging you” face on lock. But it was kind of hard not to look at Hak-kan like he was delusional.

Mainly because everything he’d just said to me was completely insane.

“I don’t….” Another scraped hand over the back of his head. “I don’t want to scare you. I was kind of hoping to slow feed you all this psycho shit, not overwhelm you with it. So can we drop this?”

When he put it like that, the trepidatious person I used to be wanted to agree. But the new Olivia he helped carve out of a block of insecurity answered, “No, we can’t drop this. I think it’s time for you to tell me everything. Everything you did after your grandma gave you this supposed fortune of yours.”

Hak-kan let out a huge expulsion of air. As eager as he’d been to spend every minute of the day with me, he now looked like he’d rather be anywhere but here.

But after a few moments of hesitation, he began talking, “So my grandma told me that I’d just met the woman I was going to marry. Only thing is, this woman already had a boyfriend—one I found out was into some nefarious shit. So yeah, I used him to wash some money, gave him enough dirty side hustle to make it worth his while to exclusively launder for my triad and a few of our partners. And it worked. I controlled who he dealt with, so none of it ever blew back on you.”

I shook my head, not quite able to add all of this up. “But Garrett and I broke up. We were apart for years, and I never heard from you….”

I realized the answer to my question before he had the chance to reply. “That’s when you were dating the other woman. The one you almost asked to marry you.”

Hak-kan confirmed my guess with a nod. “Yeah, fortunes are weird—especially if you don’t know what it feels like to make them come true. I met a girl—one who fit into my world, and I was like, why the hell not try to make this work? No offense to my grandma, but you felt like a long shot at best. But then we broke up, and by the time I was free, Garrett had swooped back in, and I was fucked.”

Alarm warred with regret inside of me.

I hated that I’d wasted so many years with Garrett. But how could I, as a woman of science, reconcile all the truly delusional things Hak-kan was telling me?

“Do you seriously believe this? That we’re meant to be? That this was all part of some prophecy? And you manipulated Garrett—and what else? Kept tabs on me all these years, just because your grandmother made up some fortune about us?”

I wanted him to say no. I wanted him to laugh all of this off and tell me that only his family believed his grandmother and not him.

But instead, he said, “When I convinced my partners to buy VIP Bai3, I told them it was a good investment, and it was. But I’d also read an interview with Drew Glendaver about how he hoped to pass the company down to one of his daughters. But from what I could tell he wasn’t grooming Clement Calson to take over as CEO. I did some forecasting and here we are.”

I didn’t no whether to be impressed or scared. No, Dad wasn’t grooming Clement to take his CEO position. He’d confessed to me once that his son-in-law was a V.P. of Distribution born. Meant to be a cog in charge of other cogs—not the entire company. But I couldn’t believe Hak-kan had figured that out, just by reading one article.

“And you might have wondered about the rose tattoo on my back…” he continued.

My heart dropped into my stomach. “No…no, you didn’t.”