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

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