The commotion started, as it often did around Amber Wu, with a shriek.
It echoed from the polished marble floors in front of the Gucci store, drawing the eyes of bored, wealthy shoppers.
At the center of the forming circle was Amber Wu herself, her face a mask of fury. And on the floor at her feet, looking impossibly small, was a little boy.
"I... I am sorry. I didn't see you," the little boy said, his voice a sheepish wobble.
He pushed himself up, his large, round eyes already welling with tears as he looked at the furious woman before him.
He couldn't be more than five.
Amber Wu looked down at the boy, a cruel smile touching her lips. She knew exactly who he was. This was Lucas Vance's son.
The son of the handsome, stubborn waiter who had repeatedly rejected her advances. She'd orchestrated this little accident perfectly.
Hurting the boy was just another way to get to the father.
"Sorry? Do you have any idea how much this dress costs?" she shrieked, her voice grating. She lunged forward and pinched the child's ear, hard.
"How dare you stain my dress?"
The boy cried out, a sharp yelp of pain that lanced through the ambient noise of the mall.
"Uwuu... you're the one who ran into me, and now you're bullying a child," he wailed, his strategy shifting instantly.
He dropped to the floor and began to roll around, his cries theatrical.
In reality, he wasn't hurt that badly from the pinch, but he knew how to play the part, switching from tough to vulnerable in a heartbeat.
It was a clever tactic; faced with such an overwhelming display of cuteness and pity, most people would sympathize. That was clearly his plan.
Unexpectedly, the boy was too pure to understand the darkness of the world. The crowd, which had at first looked angry to see a child being bullied, took one look at Amber Wu and fell silent.
Their mouths clenched shut. As the wife of the man who owned this very mall, Amber Wu was not someone to be crossed.
It was better to be on her good side. The onlookers' eyes flickered with calculation as they reassessed the situation.
"Madam Wu, this brat looks unruly. Don't waste your breath on him," a sycophant in the crowd said, her voice dripping with manufactured sweetness.
The boy stopped crying instantly.
He sat up and retorted, "I am not unruly!"
Despite his theatrics, he knew being called unruly was a bad thing. If people called him unruly, it meant his father hadn't taught him well.
He clenched his little fists, his face a mask of fierce defiance. No! His father was the best in the universe.
Amber Wu let out a laugh filled with disdain. "See? I wonder if his mother taught him any basic ethics. Is this how a child speaks to an elder?"
The word hit the boy like a physical blow.
Mother.
His little body stiffened. His eyes, which had been so full of fight a moment ago, turned red. This time, when the tears came, they were real.
They streamed down his face in silent, heartbreaking trails. Mother was the only word he both hated and yearned for every single day.
His father never spoke of her, but he knew. He knew she had abandoned them. He hated her for it.
But late in the evening, when he saw his friends at kindergarten showing off the lunches their mothers made, he secretly, desperately, wished he had one too.
He knew he must never ask his father about her. He'd tried once, when his father was drunk and sad.
The words still echoed in his little ears, a haunting whisper in the dark.
"She left... left with my beating heart."
He was so afraid his father would leave too, taking his heart along with him. He would gladly give his father his heart, but he didn't want to be left all alone.
"Mommy, I know him!" a little girl standing with her own mother spoke up, her voice loud and clear in the tense silence. "He's from my kindergarten. He doesn't have a mother."
The girl's mother quickly covered her child's mouth, but the damage was done.
"Oh, so it's a motherless child."
"No wonder he's so unruly and rude at such a young age."
The taunts rained down on him. The little boy started to tremble, his small frame shaking with the force of his sobs.
This was too much for a five-year-old to bear. His palms grew sweaty, and his heart pounded so hard his ears began to ring.
Amber Wu smiled, sensing victory. She opened her mouth to inflict the final, most painful blow.
"His mother might have abandoned him and his father for—"
"Who told you his mother abandoned him?"
The voice was cold, sharp, and cut through the crowd's murmuring like a shard of ice.
Every head turned towards the sound. A wave of silence rippled through the onlookers as they took in the appearance of the woman who had spoken.
She was wearing a fiery red, sleeveless wrap dress that fell to her ankles, her long black hair flowing down her back.
She stood taller than most, her high heels adding to her height, a designer bag held loosely in one hand. Behind her, two imposing bodyguards stood like stone statues.
Her eyes, the colour of cold amethyst, scanned the faces of every person in that crowd, and one by one, they lowered their heads in shame.
They had a feeling that offending this woman was far worse than offending Amber Wu.
Amber Wu herself sensed it. The authoritative aura the woman projected was not something she could compete with.
The gears turned in her head as she searched her memory for any details about this woman. As the wife of the Wu family chairman, she knew most of the upper-class women in the city.
This was not one of them. Amber Wu understood that there were people more powerful than her, and it was better not to make an enemy she couldn't afford.
She plastered a righteous expression on her face.
"Young Miss, this child is unruly. Look how he destroyed my skirt." She pointed to a tiny, almost invisible handprint on the corner of her designer skirt.
"No, I didn't! It's not from me!" the boy cried again, his voice trembling as he looked up at the beautiful stranger, desperate for her to believe him.
"See? He's learned to lie at such a young age," Amber Wu scoffed.
Her eyes, however, held a flicker of something else. Jealousy. Rage.