Chapter 254: She did to spite me

Marion signed the register, placed the pen back in its holder, and rolled her shoulders to loosen her strained muscles.

She had cleaned six houses today, large villas with double staircases and marble kitchens and bathrooms bigger than her living room. And each one was forty minutes from the last. Her legs ached more from climbing in and out of the van between them than from the scrubbing itself.

She reached for her bag when the receptionist stopped her. "Nelson wants to see you."

Marion’s hand stilled on the strap for a second. She drew a breath, held it, and walked to his office. She knocked twice before pushing the door open to find Nelson sitting behind his desk.

The moment she stepped inside, he gave her a smile. His gold teeth caught the fluorescent light. That smile had never meant anything good. -It was poisonous. Every inch of it.

"You called me." Marion kept her voice flat. Her face gave nothing.

"Yes. I did." Nelson folded his hands on the desk, his thumbs pressing together in a gesture of composed concern. "I wanted to know how you are doing."

Marion blinked, caught off guard. She observed him closely. Was he alright? She questioned silently. Her chin pulled back by a fraction. She examined him the way a person examines food that smells wrong, turning it over, checking for mould, trusting nothing about its appearance.

Had he swallowed the wrong pills this morning? Since when did Nelson ask his employees how they were doing?

Her alertness spiked, but she kept it off her face.

"I am doing fine," she replied carefully.

"Sit." The word dropped from his mouth without a please attached to it.

Marion sat. Not because she wanted to, but because her legs welcomed the rest.

She folded her hands in her lap and waited for Nelson to bark.

"How is Cixi doing?" Nelson leaned forward, his elbows settling on the desk, his gold teeth flashing behind the question. "Is she happy? Did she find some rich guy by sleeping around?"

He caught Marion again, shocking her. Why was he asking about her after seven months?

"Cixi does not work in the company anymore." Her voice barely stayed level. "And I do not think it is appropriate to talk about her when she has nothing to do with the company anymore."

She was at her wits ’ end. Her life had been running the same track for years, predictable and exhausting and survivable.

Then Binge had arrived and planted a seed of doubt in her mind.

She started noticing details she had never noticed before, observing more than necessary.

And now this bastard, this salary-eating, hotel-room-summoning, deepfake-ignoring bastard who had turned Cixi’s life into a waking nightmare, sat across from her asking if Cixi was happy.

Nelson leaned back in his chair and let out a long, fake sigh. "I do feel bad for Cixi. She did not get her paycheck. She deserved that money."

Marion’s eyes burned. The heat pressed against the back of her sockets immediately. Despite every effort to hold her expression neutral, Nelson was chipping away at her composure with each calculated word.

"Were you and your wife not the ones who made sure she never received the money?" Marion asked in a controlled voice.

Nelson tilted his head. His tongue ran along the edge of his gold teeth, as if buying time to rearrange his lie. "You should know, Marion, how married life is." He spread his hands, palms upward. "Being married yourself, you know it is not easy to live in a loveless marriage."

’What is your problem, you scumbag?’ The words screamed through Marion’s skull so loud she was surprised he could not hear them.

"What does a marriage have to do with Cixi?" she questioned, her jaw tight.

"My wife is old now." Nelson shook his head with the weariness of a man burdened by his own domestic misfortune."And she is insecure about herself."

Marion’s head spun, not from illness but from the sheer, brazen audacity of a man calling his wife old when he carried the same number of years on his own sagging face.

"When she saw Cixi sending me the video, she could not help herself." Nelson’s voice dropped like a wounded animal."She made sure it reached the company head. And Cixi was expelled."

If Marion did not know Nelson, she would have believed him, seeing his lowered voice. The downcast eyes. The slight shake of the head.

"Your wife did more than that," Marion countered. "She posted the deepfake video online to humiliate My friend."

Nelson’s teeth clenched. "It was not a deepfake." He gritted the words out. Each one pushed through the narrow gap between his teeth with stubborn force.

He knew it was a deepfake. Somewhere beneath the delusion, in the rational corner of his brain that he had barricaded and abandoned, he knew the body in that video did not belong to Cixi. But he believed she had put her face on it, for Him.

Because she wanted him.

Because she had always wanted him, and when he failed to support her and let his wife destroy her reputation without lifting a finger, she had chosen a rich man to spite him. To punish him. To make him jealous.

The heights of delusion this man had scaled would have required oxygen tanks.

Marion’s nails dug into her palms in fury. The crescent shapes pressed deep into her flesh, making the pain anchor her, keeping the rage contained behind her ribs where it thrashed and burned and begged to be let out.

If she released it, she would break his bones. She would reach across that desk and shatter every gold tooth in his head and not stop until the chair toppled backwards and took him with it. "What do you want?" she asked directly. Her voice came out strained and tight.

If this company did not pay well, she would have walked out years ago. But the paycheck arrived on time, covered the rent, fed three children, and paid tuition fees.

Marion regretted not completing her education every single day. Every morning when she pulled on her uniform and drove to the first house on her list, the regret sat in the passenger seat beside her.

Fewer qualifications meant fewer options. Fewer options meant working at the same company Nelson worked for.

"I want to meet Cixi." Nelson’s fingers drummed against the desk. "But there is no way for me to reach her."

Cixi had changed her number. Changed where she lived. Nelson could have found her. His elder brother had already discovered she resided at the Crown Palace. But a man could not simply walk up to Crown’s front door and demand an audience with a woman who had refused to see him in anger.

Even Nelson’s delusion had its limits.

"Last time I checked," Marion kept her face straight, "you asked her to meet in a hotel room."