Victor: Her Ruthless Crush by Theodora Taylor (beach read book TXT) 📕

to countries where men don't care about how young you are. In fact, the younger, the better!”

“What?” My dad sounded like a total racist. Also, “Victor's not like that!”

“Yes, he is!” my dad roared, his eyes bulging with anger. “All those Chinese are like that! You have no idea who you're dealing with!”

Dad…my dad who was always on my side, looked at me like he’d never been so disappointed. “I can't believe you would put yourself in this much danger.”

“Dad, please. He's a nice guy. I'm not sure about what his father does, but Victor himself couldn't be any nicer. I love him, and he loves me. If you want, we can have him over for dinner or something. And you'll see—”

Without warning, Dad lunged forward and snatched the backpack out of my hands. He immediately started throwing stuff out of it. Books, drawing supplies, pencils—everything went flying to the floor. “You think I'm ever going to let you see that little boy again? You are grounded!”

“Dad, what are you doing?” I demanded as he threw all my school things to the ground. “Stop!”

But he didn't stop, not until he found my NTT Docomo in the inside pocket where I’d hidden it. He looked at it, looked at me. Then he threw it to the ground and stomped it underneath his shoe like Victor did Byron’s camera back on my birthday hike.

My heart screamed. “Dad, don’t! Please don’t!”

“You’re grounded until it's time for you to go to Mount Holyoke,” he informed me through clenched teeth. “For the rest of the school year, you come straight home from Tokyo Progressive. You don't talk to that boy. You don't even look at him.”

I was eighteen now, not to mention totally deflowered by my own choice. But I burst into tears like a little kid. The best day of my life had disintegrated into the worst.

Dad threw my backpack down over the broken pieces of the Docomo phone Victor gave me and stormed out of the room.

Mom followed after him, but not before admonishing me.

“Bad, bad girl. I cannot believe I raised such an ungrateful daughter,” she said. Like I was a dog who’d pooped all over her beautiful carpet dream.

Byron just grimaced as he left out the door.

“Sorry,” he murmured with a guilty look, low enough that mom wouldn’t hear him.

And then they were all gone. Leaving me there with the broken pieces of my phone.

I sobbed. I sobbed so hard and so long over that phone.

My father had somehow destroyed the beautiful piece of art I'd made with Victor over the last few months. And I felt that all the way in my soul.

But eventually, I stopped crying like a little girl. I sniffed and wiped away my tears.

There was one thing, one beacon of hope that might make this night a little better.

I sat down at my computer to look at the email my father had opened. The one from the Rhode Island Design School—or RhIDS as all the cool kids who went there called it.

I braced myself. Then I took a deep breath to see if I got in.

16

VICTOR

“沒有新訊息”

When Victor checked his phone for what must have been the hundredth time that night, he found the same Chinese characters flashing back at him: No new messages. It made him want to chuck the damn thing at one of the underground garage’s concrete poles.

But most of all, it made him worry.

He'd sent Dawn several texts in the hours since she left his bedroom in a rush, but she hadn't returned any of them. And now it was after 10 PM, her bedtime as mandated by her mother. Maybe she had gone straight to bed after getting home so late. That would make sense. But Victor couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

She always wrote him before she went to bed. Always. Even if it was only to say that she looked forward to seeing him the next morning at her train station.

Would he see her the next morning? Was she okay? Had she gotten in trouble with her parents as she’d feared?

Maybe after all of this business was done, he would send Donny over to where she lived. Or maybe he would go himself.

According to his guard, her father hadn't allowed her to come to the door when Donny had dropped off the phone for her. There was little chance he would allow her to do so this late at night. But perhaps Victor could force the issue.

Jake Nakamura had been an asshole and a bully to her brother, but technically, he’d been right. Dawn’s father was merely a cog in his yakuza boss’s machine. Victor could certainly force his way into the apartment without any repercussions and make sure Dawn was okay…

But how would she respond to that?

He knew she was close with her brother and that she loved her parents. She sometimes complained about them, but she often talked about them with admiration. Especially her mother, who had overcome her hearing loss while raising two children in a country foreign to her.

Also, Victor had gone out of his way to keep his world from touching hers. If he employed the full extent of his power, she would know all the things he hadn't told her. That he wasn't a nice boyfriend. Or even a decent one. He was a criminal born and bred. The son of a monster being groomed to become an even bigger monster.

“Are we keeping you from something, son?”

Victor looked up to find his father, regarding him with a cold, disapproving stare. Han stood on his right side, a de facto assistant, while he earned his snake tattoo under Raymond. And several local Red Diamond members stood behind them in the dark shadows.

Victor understood his father’s irritation. He should be standing where Han was right now. He would be if he hadn’t asked Raymond to accept his chosen son as a replacement for his real one. There was also the fact that