"Ah..."
Fan Shengmei felt as if her lower half was being subjected to medieval torture. Although several days had passed since that deeply humiliating night, she still couldn't suppress a sharp gasp of pain whenever her bruised flesh brushed against her office chair.
"Sister Fan, what's wrong? Are your hemorrhoids acting up again?" a coworker joked, noticing her rigid, agonizing posture at her desk.
"Yes! Exactly!" Fan Shengmei forced a strained smile, her face flushing a brilliant, defensive red.
'It is incredibly humiliating to claim I have severe hemorrhoids,' she gritted her teeth in silent fury, 'but it is infinitely better than letting these corporate gossips know the actual truth.'
Ring, ring...
She had just finished mentally cursing a certain aristocratic bastard when her cell phone lit up. Seeing the familiar, dreaded caller ID of her family home, she sighed heavily and reluctantly pressed answer.
> "Mom, didn't I just wire you my entire paycheck?" she whispered harshly.
Fan Shengmei's after-tax monthly salary was a solid 10,000 yuan. Factoring in her corporate insurance benefits and year-end bonuses, she was a legitimate, respectable white-collar worker in Shanghai. Considering the staggering housing prices—roughly 30,000 yuan per square meter downtown and 10,000 in the outer suburbs—her income was nowhere near enough to buy property, but it was certainly enough to live comfortably.
However, over her years in the city, she hadn't managed to save a single penny. Besides her own desperate, expensive attempts to maintain a high-society facade with designer clothes, sending exactly half of her salary back to her parasitic family every month bled her accounts dry.
> "Xiaomei, a terrible disaster has happened to your brother!"
For once, her mother wasn't calling to immediately demand her standard allowance.
> "What? What kind of trouble has he dragged himself into this time? Didn't he just settle his last legal disaster?" Fan Shengmei asked, her annoyance flaring.
> "I don't know the exact details! Your brother has been kidnapped! The men said he owes them a massive gambling debt, and if he doesn't pay it all back in full within three days, they are going to traffic him to work in the illegal mines in Africa!"
'If he actually gets shipped off to a mine in Africa, we will all finally be relieved!' Fan Shengmei thought.
Initially, a spike of panic had hit her chest, but it was instantly replaced by a wave of cold exhaustion. If her useless brother—who did absolutely nothing but eat, sleep, drink, and gamble his life away—was permanently exiled to another continent, the family might actually know a day of peace.
> "Xiaomei, that is your own flesh and blood! You cannot just stand by and watch him die!"
Sensing her daughter's cold silence, her mother immediately launched into her signature, hysterical theatrics—wailing, screaming, and weaponizing threats of suicide to the absolute extreme.
Fifteen agonizing minutes later, entirely unable to bear the emotional extortion any longer, Fan Shengmei rubbed her temples and asked the fatal question.
> "How much exactly does he owe them?"
> "They... they said 200,000 yuan!"
For the rest of the grueling workday, Fan Shengmei was a walking ghost. 200,000 yuan was a staggering, astronomical sum to her. Even if she stopped eating, drinking, and paying rent entirely for a full year, she couldn't naturally hoard that much capital.
Her salary evaporated the second it hit her bank account every month. Even if she had managed to secretly squirrel away a meager emergency fund in the past, her family had drained it long ago. Expecting her to miraculously conjure 200,000 yuan in exactly seventy-two hours was a logistical impossibility.
Her colleagues at the HR firm were merely networking acquaintances. She could leverage them for a few thousand yuan at best, but no one in their right mind was going to hand her two hundred thousand. And as for the "wealthy CEOs" she had eagerly rubbed shoulders with at elite parties over the years? They were transactional predators. None of them would bail out an aging beauty's deadbeat brother.
"Sister Fan, have you been feeling sick lately?"
Back in the cramped confines of Apartment 2202, Fan Shengmei was still dizzy, staring blankly at the wall as if her soul had been ripped out of her body.
"Huh? No, no, I haven't been feeling sick at all!" she quickly forced herself to snap out of it when she registered Qiu Yingying's voice.
"By the way, Sister Fan," Yingying said, tapping her chin with a slightly puzzled expression. "Mr. Li messaged me earlier. He asked me to ask you if you were free tonight. He said he wants to take you somewhere incredibly fun! But... why did Mr. Li contact you through my WeChat instead of just messaging you directly?"
"Huh? Mr. Li?"
It was like a bucket of ice water had been dumped over her head. Fan Shengmei suddenly remembered that she actually did have a direct line to an absolute billionaire.
Truthfully, Fan Shengmei had absolutely no desire to ever cross paths with Adrian Li again. That bastard had stripped her completely naked, pinned her to her own mattress, and instead of taking her virginity like a normal predator, he had proceeded to violently spank her ass for nearly an hour!
Initially, she had assumed it was just a mild kink—some rich man's foreplay. But after he had ruthlessly turned her heavy buttocks into a swollen, livid tapestry of purple bruises, she had sworn off the psychopath entirely. She had encountered plenty of eccentric men in Shanghai, but he was a terrifying anomaly.
'Any normal man facing a naked, voluptuous woman would just pull down his pants and fuck her, right?' Fan Shengmei thought, shifting her weight painfully on the sofa. 'Why the hell did he spend half an hour just brutally slapping my ass? The swelling still hasn't gone down!'
Torn between the agonizing memory of her bruised backside and the hysterical, weeping pleas of her mother echoing in her skull, Fan Shengmei lay silently on her bed for a long time. Finally, with a trembling hand, she dialed his number.
"Hello."
Sitting in the dim, neon-lit VIP room of a high-end karaoke club, Adrian glanced at the incoming caller ID and smiled with dark, cynical amusement.
'I initially assumed she could hold out for at least a few more days, but it seems this woman's greed and desperation have completely overridden her brain,' he calculated coldly.
Admittedly, Fan Shengmei's situation was pathetic, but as the old proverb goes: There is always something deeply hateful about a truly pitiful person. If she possessed even a fraction of actual independence and refused to be endlessly extorted by the illusion of "family affection," she wouldn't be rotting in a cramped apartment with zero assets to her name.
> "Mr. Li, this is Xiaomei. I... I heard through Yingying that you had an event planned for tonight. Would it be alright if I attended?"
"Ah, Xiaomei!" Adrian slurred slightly, deliberately projecting the aura of a drunken playboy as his hand boldly reached out to grope the breast of the premium club hostess sitting next to him on the leather sofa.
The hostess stiffened instantly. She was a professional who exclusively accompanied high-end clients for drinks and singing; she strictly did not sell her body, a boundary she always established clearly before entering a private room.
However, in this industry, the city was crawling with wealthy, entitled predators. If a man and a woman were alone in a soundproof VIP room with expensive alcohol flowing, it was a naive joke to assume the client wouldn't try to cross the line.
"I'm currently at a karaoke club," Adrian continued smoothly into the phone, entirely ignoring the hostess's rigid, uncomfortable posture as he forcefully pulled her by the waist into his lap. "I paid a girl to keep me company, but honestly, she is incredibly boring. Do you want to come over and liven things up, Xiaomei?"
"Come on now," Adrian whispered directly into the hostess's ear, a mocking, dangerous smile on his lips. "Give this old man a pretty smile."
"Boss, I think you've had a bit too much to drink," the hostess forced a polite, tight smile, her eyes flashing with deep, hidden disgust.
'I thought this guy was just a handsome, generous customer,' the hostess panicked internally, 'but he's just another disgusting, entitled pervert!'
Under the table, out of Adrian's line of sight, the hostess's fingers flew rapidly across her hidden cell phone, sending a frantic SOS text. Women working in the underground nightlife always encountered violent weirdos, so her boyfriend—who acted as her unofficial muscle and pimp—was stationed right outside the club doors, ready to kick the VIP room open the second things went sideways.
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