After One Night Together, the Most Ruthless CEO in Asia Decided I Was a Gold-Digger and Made Me His Secret Mistress—Then I Walked Into His Engagement Party as the Sole Heir of the Dynasty That Was About to Buy His Company Out From Under Him

PART 2

The retaliation was swift and total, and it taught me, finally, exactly who Julian Reyes was underneath the brilliance.

He froze my accounts.

I should explain what that means, and what he thought it meant. As Seo-yeon Cho, junior designer, I maintained a set of ordinary bank accounts, the surface life, a modest salary, a checking account, a savings account with a few months’ cushion. The visible accounts of a normal working woman.

Julian, it turned out, had spent our “arrangement” quietly mapping my financial life, the way he mapped acquisition targets. And when I tried to walk away, he used his connections to have those surface accounts frozen. A junior designer suddenly locked out of her own salary, her rent due, her cards declining.

He thought he had cut off my air.

“It’s very simple,” he said, when I came to his office, as he’d known I would, because where else would a desperate woman go. “You walked away. I’m reminding you that you can’t afford to. Your accounts will stay frozen until you remember your place. Your rent is due in four days. Your cards don’t work. You have no family money, my people checked very thoroughly.” He leaned back in his chair, supremely comfortable. “So you’re going to do the sensible thing. You’re going to apologize for the dramatics, and you’re going to ask me, nicely, to take care of you again. And because I’m a generous man, I will.”

He laced his fingers together.

“Kneel,” he said, “and ask me properly, and I’ll unfreeze everything tonight. Consider it a lesson in gratitude.”

I want to describe the look on his face when he said the word kneel, because I want you to understand that he enjoyed it. This was not a man pushed to cruelty by desperation. This was a man savoring it. He had a glass of something expensive in his hand and the whole city glittering behind him and a woman in front of him whom he believed he had reduced to nothing, and he was, in that moment, completely happy.

“You really think this works,” I said. “Freezing a woman’s bank account. Starving her into kneeling.”

“I think,” Julian said, swirling his drink, “that money is the only language anyone actually speaks, and everyone who pretends otherwise is lying or hasn’t been hungry yet. You’ll kneel, Seo-yeon. Not because you’re weak. Because you’re rational. You have four days of rent and a frozen account and no other options, and a rational person in that position does the math.” He smiled. “I’ve never met anyone who didn’t do the math eventually. The poor ones do it fastest. They’ve had the most practice.”

I stood in his enormous office, with the city glittering behind him, and I looked at this man who believed he had just brought a woman to her knees with money.

And I almost laughed. Not out of bitterness. Out of something closer to wonder, at the sheer scale of what he didn’t know.

His people had checked very thoroughly. They had found the surface accounts of Seo-yeon Cho, junior designer, and frozen them, and Julian believed he had cut off my air.

Beneath those accounts, untouched and untouchable, sat the personal holdings of the sole heir to the Cho Group. Accounts in a dozen countries. A net worth that could have bought Reyes Holdings a thousand times over and not noticed the dent. A black card with no limit that I had never once used in front of him, because the entire point of my year in the world was to live without it.

Julian had frozen a junior designer’s checking account and thought he’d conquered an empire.

“You want me to kneel,” I said.

“I want you to remember your place,” he said. “It’s the same thing.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

“You said money is the only language anyone speaks,” I said. “I want you to remember that you said that. Later. When you’re trying to understand how this went so wrong for you. I want you to remember that you looked me in the eye tonight and told me that money is the only thing that’s real.” I picked up my bag. “Because you’re about to find out you were right. And it’s going to cost you everything.”

He frowned, not understanding, certain it was a bluff.

“No,” I said quietly. “I don’t think I’ll kneel. Keep the accounts frozen, Julian. Keep them frozen forever. I find I don’t need them after all.”

And I walked out of his office while he was still certain he had won, because he was a man who had never once in his life imagined that the woman in front of him might be holding a card he couldn’t see.

The next four days, I did nothing.

I let my rent go unpaid, from those surface accounts. I let the cards decline. I did not move a single dollar from the real fortune, because I wanted Julian to spend those four days believing his plan was working, believing I was somewhere in the city, breaking, getting ready to come back and kneel.

What I was actually doing was making a phone call.

Because here is the thing Julian Reyes did not know, the thing that turned his cruelty from a private humiliation into the most expensive mistake of his life.

The Lau family’s capital was not going to save Reyes Holdings.

Because three weeks earlier, before I’d ever tried to walk away, before he’d frozen a single account, the Cho Group had quietly begun acquiring Reyes Holdings’ distressed debt. It was a routine move, the kind my family’s analysts made constantly, scooping up the obligations of overextended companies at a discount. I had not even directed it. I’d simply seen it cross my desk, recognized the name of the company whose CEO had put a check on my nightstand, and told my people to accelerate.

By the time Julian froze my accounts to bring me to my knees, the Cho Group already controlled the majority of the debt that Reyes Holdings was drowning in.

The Lau engagement was meant to stabilize the company. But you cannot stabilize a company whose debt is held by a dynasty that has decided to call it in. The Lau family, when they did their due diligence, when they discovered who actually held the controlling debt of the company they were about to marry into, would run.

Julian had built his entire survival on an engagement to Vivienne Lau.

And I was about to take both away from him in the same night.

The engagement party was held at the Peninsula, in the grand ballroom, with three hundred of the most important people in Asian finance in attendance. It was meant to be Julian’s coronation. The night the desperate, overextended CEO announced the alliance that would save him, smiling beside his banking heiress, the picture of stability and power.

I received an invitation, of course.

Not as Seo-yeon Cho, junior designer. That woman was not invited to events like this.

I received it as Cho Seo-yeon, sole heir to the Cho Group, because the Cho Group’s representative had been formally invited to a gathering of this importance, and I had decided, for the first time in a year, to attend something as myself.

I had my people send my regrets to the junior-designer version of my life. I called my firm and quit by email. And then I went home, to my real home, the one Julian’s investigators had never found because it was held under a structure they could not have penetrated in a decade, and I opened a closet Julian had never seen, full of the clothes I never wore, and I dressed, for the first time in a year, as exactly who I was.

I want to describe what that felt like, because it was the strangest part.

For a year I had dressed small. Soft cardigans, sensible shoes, the careful invisibility of a junior employee who does not want to be noticed. I had made myself unremarkable on purpose, the way you’d dim a light, and after a while I had almost forgotten there was anything to dim.

That night I stood in front of the mirror in a gown that had been made for me in Milan, and jewelry that had been in my family for a hundred years, and I watched the woman I actually was come back into focus in the glass. It was like remembering my own name. The posture changed. The way I held my chin changed. The light came back up.

My grandfather called as I was leaving.

“You’re going tonight,” he said. It was not a question; very little is, with my grandfather.

“I am.”

“To the Reyes engagement.” A pause. “The young man who put a check on your nightstand.”

I had told him almost nothing, but my grandfather is my grandfather, and there is very little he does not eventually know.

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said simply. “A year at the bottom is only worth something if you carry what you learned back to the top. You learned who he is. Now show him who you are. Don’t be cruel for sport, Seo-yeon. But don’t be merciful out of weakness either. There’s a difference, and a person who runs what you’re going to run someday has to know it in her bones.” A pause. “Wear your grandmother’s earrings. She’d have enjoyed this enormously.”

I wore my grandmother’s earrings.

When I arrived at the Peninsula, the doormen did not see a frozen-out mistress in declining circumstances.

They saw a Cho.

The entire staff of the hotel had been briefed that a member of the Cho family would be attending, and they nearly fell over themselves. I was escorted in with a deference that money cannot rent and only blood and history can command. Heads turned. The whisper started at the door and rolled inward, the way it does when someone the whole room has only ever heard about in rumors finally appears in the flesh.

And across the ballroom, beneath a chandelier the size of a car, Julian Reyes stood beside Vivienne Lau in a tailored tuxedo, raising a glass to toast the alliance that was going to save him.

He saw the commotion at the door before he saw me.

He turned, the way everyone turned, to see which titan had arrived.

And then he saw my face.

I watched the glass stop halfway to his lips. I watched the color drain out of him. I watched Julian Reyes, the most ruthless CEO in Asia, the man who had put a check on my nightstand and frozen my accounts and ordered me to kneel, slowly understand that the junior designer he had spent a year humiliating had just walked into his engagement party, and that the entire room was bowing to her.

“Seo-yeon?” Vivienne said, following his stare, confused. “Julian, who is that? Why is everyone—”

“That’s not possible,” Julian whispered. He had gone gray. “That’s not—she’s a designer. She’s nobody. She’s—”

The host of the evening, a senior figure from the Lau family bank, appeared at my elbow, practically vibrating with the honor of it.

“Miss Cho,” he said, loud enough for the nearest tables to hear, bowing. “We are deeply honored. We had no idea the Cho Group itself would grace us tonight. May I present—”

“I know who Julian Reyes is,” I said, and my voice carried across the suddenly quiet ballroom, clear and unhurried, no longer the soft voice of a woman he’d kept in the dark. “We’re very well acquainted.”

And I started walking toward the man who had told me to kneel.