Victor: Her Ruthless Crush

by Theodora Taylor

Han and Victor looked over to see Luca Ferraro, the son of one of New York’s most infamous crime families. He was drinking champagne with a large guy who looked to be of Middle-Eastern descent.

  “What’s an Italian mobster doing at a Chinese-owned club?” Han asked out loud what all three of them were thinking. He brought out his iPhone, his fingers flying over the keys.

  “Wanna make an example of him?” Phantom asked. “Give Kuang another head for his platter.”

  “Hold on,” Han said, looking up from his phone. “According to my contact in their crew, he gave up his place in their family.”

  Han cut his eyes towards Victor, “For a girl.”

  Yes, Victor’s bout of temporary insanity had been forgiven, but forgotten? Not quite yet.

  “I still don’t like that he dared to come in here. He should know better than to walk up into another gang’s territory without an invite,” Phantom said.

  “Maybe he doesn’t know this place belongs to the 24K,” Han answered.

  Phantom fisted a beefy hand on top of the shiny black table, “Maybe I should give him an etiquette lesson then.”

  Victor stopped the argument right there.

  “Be smart,” he signed to his cousin. “This girl might be temporary. And we might want to do business with him someday. Future banking.”

  Phantom rolled his eyes. He understood future-banking, and he went along with it. But that didn’t mean he liked it.

  “Okay, guess I’ll smash instead,” he decided out loud.

  Then he ended up starting the fight he was so obviously spoiling for when he pulled a girl that was sitting on another guy’s lap into his and told her, “Guess what. You just got upgraded.”

  Victor and Han laughed at his antics but closely watched Ferraro and his friend. They chatted pleasantly at first, but then their conversation got animated. Eventually, Ferraro stood up abruptly from the table, knocking his chair backward. His friend called after him, but Ferraro ignored him.

  However, the former Ferraro scion stopped short when he saw two other men coming toward him, identical twin brothers. They looked even more Italian and even more mafia than Ferraro, with shaved heads and huge gold crosses hanging down from their thick necks. Ferraro’s anger instantly faded, and he gave them both those half hugs that American men loved so much.

  Victor tensed. Maybe Phantom had been right. But then the three buddies turned around and headed for the exit.

  “Wonder what that’s all about,” Han said. He looked up from the phone he’d been texting on all night to watch Ferraro leave the club with his friends.

  Victor did too. But out loud, he signed, “Who cares? He’s nobody to us until he returns to his family.”

  “Exactly,” Han agreed.

  But then his chosen brother got quiet for a few moments before saying. “She’s graduating.”

  Victor looked over at Han, Luca Ferraro instantly forgotten. He didn't have to ask who she was. There was only one she. Still.

  And the only one more irritated about that than him was Han. Victor suspected his brother was only looking down at his phone again to avoid any follow-up questions.

  Victor shook his shoulder to get his attention. “When?”

  “Why does it matter?” Han asked, his face going stony. “That conversation was as close to a proposal as you're going to get before we prove ourselves to the 24K dragon.”

  True, Victor had all but promised himself to the 24K dragon’s spoiled daughter. But this wasn’t about love. This was about revenge. He signed again. “When?”

  Han lowered his phone and let out a stream of Cantonese. Cuss words and recriminations.

  Victor waited patiently.

  “You should forget about this girl already.” Han switched back to signing now that he’d put down his phone. “Proving ourselves to Kuang. That should be the only thing on your mind.”

  Victor considered his points then asked, “Are you saying you don't trust me to oversee the East Coast? You think I can’t handle our business and wrap up some loose strings from the past?”

  This wasn't a question; it was a direct challenge. If Han answered no, then by honor, they'd have to fight for control of The Silent Triad. If he answered yes, then he would be forced to give Victor the information he wanted.

  Victor knew he was a bastard for putting Han in this position. But he could be a bastard sometimes. Especially when it came to her.

  In the end, Han let out another stream of explosive curses. Then he signed, “Next week.”

  24

  DAWN

  “I can't believe we're finally graduating!”

  My best friend, Lena Kumar, waved to her father in the audience as we lined up at the edge of the stage to receive our diplomas.

  I waved at my family too. Well, most of my family. My mother and brother were sitting next to Lena's father in the temporary bleachers they’d placed out on Skinner Green, the campus’s center lawn. But my father had to work.

  A few months after Byron went off to Monmouth University in New Jersey, Dad moved my mom down to Texas. He’d been mostly out of town on a vague "assignment" ever since.

  But he’d called me the night before the ceremony to congratulate me on graduating from Mount Holyoke with a degree in Biological Sciences—the first step in building my mom’s dream of me to become a doctor.

  "You made your mother and me real proud," he’d told me. “I just wish I could be there to see you walk across that stage.”

  Un-huh. With a cynicism I didn't have four years ago, I had wondered where he really was right now. Which criminals was he tricking this time?

  But that had been how I felt on the inside. On the outside, I had just thanked him for calling and murmured something about maybe visiting him and mom in Texas soon.

  I kept up the act. Because that was what our family did. We pretended, especially with each other. That still hadn't changed.

  But other than that, my life was totally different.

  I’d traded the cosmopolitan city of Tokyo for the bucolic college town of South Hadley, Massachusetts. All the free time I used to dedicate to drawing had been re-delegated to round-the-clock studying to keep up with all my science and math classes.

  I'd also made a best friend.

  Her name was Lena. She was Indian and black instead of Korean and black. Her mother was dead, not deaf like mine. And her eyes were much rounder than mine. But that was pretty much where our differences ended.

  She was also on the total parental guilt track to becoming a doctor, which was why she was standing right behind me in line to receive our Bachelor in Biological Science degrees. She’d grown up with a tiger parent. And like me, she belonged to what our insanely body-positive dorm president called the "cute and chubby club."

  We’d both had to work our asses off to get good grades at Mount Holyoke. And I doubt I would've gotten into medical school if Lena hadn’t always been willing to spend Friday nights with me, doing sexy things like studying crazy hard and running endless flashcards and assuring each other that this would somehow all be worth it in the end.

  Maybe it was. Our family members waved back at us from the bleachers. And both our tiger parents looked prouder than proud.

  Mom was right, I told myself as the dean handing out diplomas started saying all the “H” names, and we got closer to the stage steps. Going to Mount Holyoke and then eventually on to medical school was a much more practical life path than putting all of my eggs in a teenage Chinese gangster's basket.

  My father had made sure to keep my name out of the reports after the Red Diamond-Nakamura-gumi sting was finished. To his colleagues, he'd made me look like a dutiful daughter who went above and beyond to help him bring a bunch of criminals to justice. Meanwhile, Raymond Zhang had been put behind bars where he couldn’t hurt anyone else. And Red Diamond had crumbled without their leader. Good. That meant everything that happened in Japan was in the past.

  And as for my future, that looked brighter than ever.
I'd be starting med school at Manhattan University next fall. And I'd even lined up a fantastic internship for the summer with the Women’s Disability Clinic, one of their most distinguished non-profits.

  Everything had worked out in the end. I should be happy.

  “Why don't you look happy?” Lena asked me as we moved even closer to the stage.

  I didn't dare answer, her or myself.

  Instead, I ran through all my reminders yet again…

  Victor's father was a criminal. Extortion, money laundering, trafficking—the drugs, weapons, and human kind. He deserved nothing less than to rot away in prison for the rest of his life. He wasn't a good guy.

  And neither was Victor if he followed in his father's footsteps. Which according to my father, was exactly what Victor planned to do, “no matter what lies that boy told you to get in your pants.”

  What we had…the promises we made each other…it wasn’t real.

  I had matured and could see first love for what it really was now. College was a dumpster fire when it came to carrying over high school relationships. So many of my friends at Mount Holyoke had dumped and been dumped over the phone—sometimes over emails and texts. It wasn’t a good idea to expect your first love to last through your first year of college, much less marry him beforehand.

  Everything Victor and I had planned could have only ended in disaster.

  There was no reason I should still be thinking about him.

  But that was exactly what I’d been doing for the last four years. I had even looked up when Tuft’s graduation would be at the beginning of May. And I’d sighed when I saw it was scheduled for a week before mine. It wasn't like he was there. I had no idea where he was in the world right now, but it wasn't there.

  He was somewhere far away.

  And that future I'd imagined for us had been nothing more than a silly girl’s fantasy. I hated, absolutely hated, that I couldn’t stop daydreaming about the parallel timeline where we pulled it off.

  I had tried my best to enjoy my college experience. Still, every break was tinged with sadness, especially when I went home with Lena to Boston—the place where I would have visited Victor whenever I could in my alternate timeline. And when I was studying in the library with Lena on Friday nights, I often wondered what it would have been like to take the Peter Pan bus over to Tufts and spend the whole weekend doing the same thing with Victor.

  There was this wild despondency always lurking just below the surface. I rarely let my hair down, but when I did, it got nasty. I’d earned a bad reputation at college for drinking too much at parties and then weeping all night over things I couldn't talk about to anyone about even when I was drunk.

  But that was nothing to tell Lena. The fact was I should be happy. There was absolutely no reason not to be. I was graduating with honors. I had my whole life in front of me.

  I pasted on a smile for Lena, pretending to be all the things I should be. “Sorry, I was just thinking about everything I have to do before moving to New York.”

  “Yeah, I bet. I can't believe you got such a great internship—” Lena cut off, probably realizing how that might sound.

  Manhattan University had turned her down and pretty much every other med program she had applied to with me. But I knew she was happy for me and wouldn’t ever want to come off as catty or jealous.

  If I had been animating her, I would’ve drawn some embarrassed smoke coming out of her head and a chibi version of her bending over backward as she said, “I mean, I do believe it. You’re brilliant, and you deserve the world. It's just such a great match for you. It's like your life couldn’t have worked out any better. That’s so cool.”

  “Is it a great match for me?” I asked, my smile slipping just a little bit.

  I never told Lena about my art dreams—we’d both been too busy just trying to get decent grades. But another detail from my parallel timeline spun into my mind then. The college acceptance email I never answered from RhIDS. What would it have been like to go there? To major in animation and maybe start making the stories that still unfurled in my head sometimes, no matter how much math I threw at them?

  I loved Lena. There were no words in the world to express how nice it was to meet someone with a similar background and worldview after eighteen years of feeling like a freak. But…

  Sometimes it felt like I was only pretending to be the person she thought of as her best friend, the person who’d gotten that internship.

  “Having everything work out exactly as it should, feels super weird,” I confessed to her. “Like I'm playing a role somebody else assigned to me.”

  Lena nodded knowingly. “Sounds like you're struggling with imposter syndrome. I was reading an article in Psychology Now about how a lot of grads feel like that, no matter how much they’ve achieved.”

  I grinned at her answer. Lena’s forbidden love wasn’t nearly as secret as mine. Ever since I met her, she’d been obsessed with modern psychology.

  “So have you broken it to your dad that you’ll be interning at that kids’ therapy program instead of trying to get a job that will look good on your next round of med school applications?” I asked.

  Lena rolled her eyes. “No, he’s still getting over my perfect Indian boyfriend dumping me. No need to pile on.”

  Now it was my turn to dig. “Are you still getting over your Indian boyfriend—who, by the way, was not so perfect if he didn't see your value, girl.”

  Lena had been a little off ever since our trip to Daytona for spring break. We’d gone there just a few days after Rohan, her zero personality Indian boyfriend, dumped her, claiming he just couldn't date someone without his mother’s approval. I had thought that it would be a good way for my best friend to finally blow off some steam. And the first night, she’d actually put on a bikini and talked to some hockey players who’d flown down for spring break too. But she’d ended throwing deuces the next day and cutting out early.

  She hadn’t seemed that broken up about Rohan when we flew down to Florida, so I had to wonder if something else had happened over spring break.

  Granted, it could just be guilt making me think she was acting weird. I got so wasted the first night of our spring break that I woke up the next morning with a hangover to end all hangovers. Lena was nowhere to be found when I crawled out of bed. And when the two other friends we’d flew down with and I came back from our hair of the dog mimosa brunch, which had turned into late afternoon shots, we found her packing up her stuff.

  She claimed that she didn't feel comfortable spending a full week in Daytona when she was behind in all her classes. And, listen, I would’ve totally understood if she had decided she had better things to do than hold back my hair for a whole week of partying.

  Still, I couldn't help but wonder if her leaving so abruptly was about something else. Maybe someone else. I thought about that crazy hot guy she’d run into at the beach bar below our hotel the first night she was there. The one I vaguely remembered her saying had been “some hockey douche from high school.”

  Did she have a Victor, too?

  “I'm fine,” she insisted, pasting on a smile even brighter and faker than mine.

  “Are you, though?” I asked.

  “Are you?” she shot back.

  “Dawn Kingston!” the dean called out before either of us could answer.

  There came a polite smattering of applause, and I waved to my mom and Byron again as I jogged up the steps. Mom was clapping way more happily than anyone else. She only stopped to dab her eyes with a tissue.

  This was worth it, I decided as I walked toward my diploma. I was living mom’s dream. The one she had never gotten to have, growing up poor in Korea. This was worth it, totally, totally worth—

  Another sight iced over my blood.

  A man was standing between the rows of stadium seating. He was tall and Asian and dressed in a well-tailored white suit.

  His hair was much shorter than when I saw him last. But other than that, he looked exactl
y like Victor. But it couldn't be Victor. Could it?

  He wasn’t clapping like everyone else. He just stood there, stony and silent. Our eyes connected as I walked across the stage.

  “Ms. Kingston! Ms. Kingston!”

  The sound of a voice calling my name brought me back to the stage.

  I looked over my shoulder to find the dean handing out diplomas in my rearview. She was waving the leather-bound black sleeve with the diploma I had forgotten to take from her at me.

  “Sorry about that!” I apologized, jogging back to get it.

  “Oh, it happens all the time, dear,” she answered with a laugh. “These graduations are just so overstimulating.”

  But Lena, who was next in line, didn’t let me off the hook nearly as easily.

  “What was that all about?” she asked when she joined me on the side of the stage after collecting her own diploma. “Who were you staring at out in the audience?”

  I looked back to the section between the bleachers. “I thought I saw someone I…”

  The "knew" trailed off when I found the place where I thought I spotted Victor empty.

  He was gone.

  Or, more likely, he was never there at all.

  I'd probably imagined him. On my freaking graduation day.

  Seriously, what was wrong with me?

  25

  I asked myself that same question several times over the next twenty-four hours. And not just because of that crazy Victor sighting.

  Lena had everything packed and ready to go a week before graduation. But I hadn't taken so much as a poster down from my wall. And I was due to get on a bus to New York at 2 pm.

  “Remember how I said that sometimes the emotions we’re trying to suppress manifest in strange ways?” Lena asked when she saw the state of my dorm room.

  She helped me the best she could the morning after graduation. But her father had already checked out of his hotel, and he was waiting to drive her back to Boston.

  She gave me a wave from the doorway before she left around noon. “Good luck and call me to let me know you got to New York safely.”