Chapter 3

Ren Tian had always looked down her nose at everyone, believing herself different from women like us. She also hated Brother Cheng for his faithlessness. With a little encouragement from the right person, she found herself a pretty young lover.

The moment photographs of them kissing were taken, the young man was shot in the crotch that very night.

Ren Tian was dragged away and dumped in the lowest kind of brothel. Within three months she had contracted syphilis, and sores covered her entire body.

She couldn’t bear it. She actually began screaming that she would call the police, with no idea how far out of her depth she was. I never heard another word about her.

Brother Cheng came back and shoved me into the sofa, planting his foot on my chest.

I didn’t dare resist.

He seized me by the hair and took me more brutally than he ever had before.

When he was done, he grabbed a bottle of red wine and poured it over my head. I crawled to him on my knees and clung to his leg.

He pinched my chin and forced me to look up. “If there’s a woman around me you don’t like, just say so. Don’t play these petty games.”

I jerked my head up, tears flooding my eyes. Then the last two words he murmured sent me plummeting into an abyss: “He Xian.”

He Xian.

Brother Cheng’s ex-wife.

The white dress and carefully rehearsed innocence I had worn the night we met had been an imitation of her.

I enrolled in a baking course. Once I had mastered the craft, I saved the money Brother Cheng gave me and opened a cake shop.

When he found out, I wrapped my arms around his waist and smiled coyly. “Brother, you hardly ever come to see me. I needed to find something to occupy myself.”

Brother Cheng’s gaze drifted westward. “Opening a cake shop is a good idea. But baking cakes one at a time won’t make you much money. The margins are low, and the business depends too heavily on manual labor. The best thing you can do is build a reputation—a brand.”

So I gritted my teeth, took out the savings I had accumulated over the years, and opened my shop in the most prestigious mall in Guangzhou. I named the brand Red and Black.

Then I spent heavily to hire a famous designer solely to create the patterns decorating our cakes.

In the end, we settled on two collections: Swans and Roses.

The Swan Collection was designed to please Brother Cheng. He said I looked like a swan when I danced. During sex, he especially loved to grip my neck and force my entire body to shudder on the edge of suffocation.

The Rose Collection was inspired by a chance encounter.

One day, I came across a lost young woman. When I asked where she was going, I learned that she had traveled from far away to confess her love to the boy she adored, so I drove her to him.

I watched her stand there holding a bouquet of roses, gesturing helplessly because she didn’t know what to say. Then the boy became just as awkward. His ears reddened before my eyes, little by little, and he cautiously hooked his pinkie around hers.

I sat in the red sports car Brother Cheng had given me and lit a cigarette.

What pure love, I thought. What brilliant roses.