Scorned Love: An Enemies to Lovers Romance (Scorned Fate)

Xander left early for the Donateka’s Brooklyn warehouse. I felt a little guilty for dragging him to the bar, although, come to think of it, I wasn’t sure if it was his idea or mine.

Meanwhile, I met the sun with my much-neglected tai chi practice. I barely remembered preparing for bed last night and woke up like I’d guzzled every grain of sand in the Sahara. It even felt like I’d gargled with it and spat it back onto myself.

These were not the meditative thoughts of a tai chi warrior. I cleared my head, and swept my arms and foot to the side, willing the flow of chi to come over me. I am the water. I go with the flow. The disapproving eyes of Nico De Lucci disrupted my waves. I dropped my arms and straightened my stance, shoulders drooping.

“Argh.” I grabbed the bottled water where I’d mixed electrolytes to help me recover from my evening. I was pathetic, so pathetic. I didn’t even feel like updating my social media. Normally, I’d share my less than stellar mornings with my followers, but I’d been doing that less and less without Sera at my side. I missed my best friend. I was happy for her, though. The first time she married Matteo, I thought she deserved better, but I’d seen how Matteo worked hard to deserve her. I was glad she was living her happily ever after.

I also missed Daniel. Parking my butt on a barstool, I sipped water and swiped his number.

I thought it was going to ring out, but just before my heart sank in disappointment, my brother’s face filled the screen. As I expected, he was still at the office. Manhattan and Hong Kong had a twelve-hour time difference, which meant it was Saturday night there.

“Hi, Mei.” It was short for mei-mei. Little sister, though I was not little anymore. I occasionally called him go go for older brother.

“I miss my sparring partner. Why are you still at the office?” Daniel had already been a practitioner of the martial arts before I picked up Wing Chun six years ago—the lowest point of my life.

Daniel shed his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, hair tousled and far from its usual slicked-back look. “Busy.” His distracted and weary voice said it all. As always, my brother was a workaholic, and I wanted to help him, but he wanted me far away from Hong Kong and from the rest of the Wu family. They considered me too Western for their tastes, but tolerated me because I was good publicity.

“Are you ever going to slow down?” I asked. “You know you can come back to Manhattan.”

“My place is here. You know that.”

I did. And I hated it.

The Triad killed my father when I was eighteen. That was what the news reported and what Daniel told me. The responsibility to run Wheeler Corp, a conglomerate whose holdings consisted of commercial real estate, transport, and department store chains, fell on my brother at a young age. Donateka started as a high-end department store in Hong Kong but had evolved into luxury boutiques scattered across Asia, Europe, and was now breaking into the American market. We controlled fifty-five percent of the board and my brother made every effort to hang on to that control. That was how his workaholism shaped up. He was afraid that if he slowed down, Uncle Jimmy—Xander’s dad—would swoop in and convince other board members to side with him and oust Daniel as CEO.

“Is all of this really important?” I waved at the loft. And that was where my conflicted feelings came in. I was living off my brother’s blood and sweat and that feeling grated on me. My social media accounts, my degree at Stanford—they were all for show.

“It is.” Daniel’s face lost its weariness and his eyes sharpened. “We stick to the plan. You and Xander will make Donateka a global brand. Our department stores in Asia grew fifteen percent in profit from last year. Our boutiques everywhere else are taking off. You can do this, Ivy. I want you to succeed in this. You’re not a numbers person, you’re a visionary.”

“I just miss you,” I whispered. “We’re all we’ve got, Daniel.”

My brother was six years older than me. For as long as I could remember, it was him and me against the world. I barely remembered our mother, who left when I was five. She’d been a popular Hong Kong actress who gave it all up to marry my father. It didn’t work too well for her and she’d turned to drinking. My father divorced her, gained full custody of us, and forbade her to contact us again. Last I heard, she was in Switzerland with a new family.

“And it’s exactly why I’m doing this. You’re all I’ve got too, sis.”

These past few phone conversations always ended on a melancholy note, and Daniel was oftentimes the one to snap me out of it. “So, what’s your plan today?”

“Brooklyn,” I told him. “Xander is implementing the mood board of the collection, but all the ruckus of the warehouse and the constant interruptions are disrupting his creativity.”

“Rent another space.”

“Trying to save money,” I mumbled.

“De Lucci has concerns about that area when he found out you’ve been going there.”

“Which De Lucci?”

Grooves appeared between his brows like my question was unnecessary. “Matteo. He found out from Sera.”

I relaxed. “It’ll be fine. Well, I better let you get back to it.”

“Kick ass today, Mei.”

“You too.”

By the time I arrived in Brooklyn, I was feeling invigorated. Plus, I’d hydrated and eaten, so I was back in the mood to post on Pixygram. I might treat my followers to a glimpse of the runway mockup. Fittings weren’t due until next week. Technically, Donateka was ready-to-wear, but I was giving Xander leeway to do a few haute couture pieces, a variation of what we already sold in the boutique.

I parked my Mazda Miata in front of the warehouse. I wasn’t involved in business operations. My job was mostly marketing. Wheeler had a centralized publicity department, and we’d hired other marketing firms. I was the wild card mostly and went for leads by instinct. When I took over Donateka’s Pixygram account, it had only 10K followers; now, it had grown to 200K. My personal lifestyle account, Ivy in the City, was almost a million. I started that account six years ago, and it had gone through so many growing pains.

I winced. It had morphed into a lifeline.

Entering the warehouse, I ran into Katie Quinn. As Donateka’s business manager, she split her time between our boutique in the Meatpacking District and the Brooklyn warehouse. Katie wore mostly black, gray, and white clothes. Sometimes, she’d add a pop of gold or silver jewelry. She styled her silver-streaked blonde hair in an elegant bob. She bled class and money. We knew immediately Katie was the person we were looking for to represent Donateka. Today, she was wearing a flowy sleeveless top and baggy trousers, both from our summer collection.

Behind her loomed bolts of fabric from our European textile partners. A majority of them were still shrink-wrapped in protective packaging. Several sample bolts lay on top of collapsible tables alongside a yardstick and shears.

Xander had already inspected them.

“Good morning,” I greeted Katie. “I brought bacon-and-egg brioche for anyone who’s hungry.” Our jack-of-all-trades, Carlos, appeared behind her.

“Did I hear brioche?” Carlos was one of the first employees we hired for our U.S. workroom. He was Puerto Rican and loved to eat. His wife was from the Dominican Republic and was a bank manager. He, meanwhile, kept our fabricators, the company vehicles, and the warehouse in shape. He was also a father to a newborn.

“Did you fix fabricator number two?” Katie asked. Fabricators were industrial straight-stich sewing machines and the workhorse of our workroom.

“Yes, ma’am. Just needed a bit of Carlos luvin’.” He was also a shameless flirt.

Katie rolled her eyes while I laughed. I handed him the keys. “Bring in the food and coffee. We’re on carb restriction next week.”

“Models coming in?” I detected a whine in his statement.

“Yes, think of it as cleaner eating.” I winked. Carlos made a face and headed for the exit.

I was excited to spearhead a fashion show featuring women of all sizes. The fashion industry seemed to have a start-and-stop attitude with regards to inclusivity on the runway. They’d tout diversity one season only to backtrack the next when they see a lack of enthusiasm from their core consumers. They expected their customers to embrace change instantly. Change was an evolution, not a knee-jerk reaction.

I passed by the workroom and waved to the weekend staff. Only a few were around on Saturday. Mostly the sewers and pattern makers that worked with Xander for prototyping. Before Donateka opened in the U.S., our workrooms were in Italy because we opened our first boutiques in Paris and Milan. We prided ourselves on adapting to a city’s fashion. The Brooklyn workroom was barely a year old and we already employed a staff of twenty-five.

But the main fashion brain was in Singapore, and that was Xander’s home base. I watched him now as he worked furiously over the drawing board. Xander had darker skin than I did, courtesy of his Malaysian mother. He had deep-set expressive eyes on a squarish face with a strong jawline. He was a head taller than my five six. I envied his thick wavy hair and always thought it was wasted on a man.

I walked over to the spring collection mood board on the wall.

“How’s it coming along?”

He looked up distractedly. “It’s coming.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong except we need two more models for the catalogue,” he said. “I need to figure out the sequence of this collection. He grabbed a purple-colored pencil and swept it across the paper.

“Is that for Olga?”

“She inspires me,” Xander said.

Xander and I became closer after he came out to Uncle Jimmy as bisexual. His father had suspicions before, even when Xander had a Russian girlfriend, a redhead named Irina, the love of his life and, according to him, his soul mate. She’d been the inspiration for our Irina bustier. A fan-favorite piece he invented four years ago when Donateka branched out from department store to boutique and he became its chief designer.

We spared no penny to make his vision a success. He was revising a few of the silhouettes, probably after inspecting the weight of the fabric.

“You and Nico should compare notes.”

My cousin glanced at me slyly. “I don’t know, cuz. From what I could gauge yesterday, he seems to be cold towards her.”

“You know the De Lucci brothers are called the Broody Brothers, right?”

Xander stopped sketching and put the pencil down and his hand over his mouth. His body shook with silent laughter.

“It’s true.” A grin tugged at the corners of my mouth.

When he looked at me, there were tears in his eyes. “I didn’t know that.”

“Matteo isn’t as broody nowadays, thanks to Sera.”

“How are they doing?”

“They’re on their three-week honeymoon in Europe, but they’re also making a stop in Turkey to visit their olive oil farm.” Bowman Inc., a shell company set up by Daniel and Matteo, bought up shares of the olive oil enterprise owned by Sera’s godfather, who ended up bequeathing his remaining shares to Sera. Between Matteo and Sera, they had a controlling interest in the company. That path didn’t come easy.

“Didn’t the shares drama precipitate a divorce between Matteo and Sera?”

My lips curved. And some of the best groveling ever. Before I could answer Xander, I heard a commotion from reception and Katie’s raised voice. The manager was usually even-pitched, and it was jarring to hear her voice in that tone.

“Oh, Carlos must have done it now.” Xander picked up the colored pencil and resumed purpling the drawing.

But my sixth sense had me leaving Xander and making my way back to the front of the warehouse. My stomach dropped and then flipped. Two men I didn’t recognize flanked Carlos, and judging from my employee’s grim expression, they weren’t his friends.

The first man was garbed in black. Tall and thin, he had thick puffy hair in a shade of black that reminded me of cheap hair dye. His companion was a head shorter and thicker around the waist. He wore faded jeans and a colorful polo with a couple of buttons undone. Same thick hair, but this one was mostly gray. He also sported a bad tan job, highlighted even worse by the gold chains around his neck.

Both were eating the brioche I had brought for my employees.

“Do they have appointments?” I asked, my temper flaring.

Katie looked at me, her face panicked. From my months working with her, if she looked flustered, there was every reason to panic.

“Ivy, get back inside.” She was worried for me.

“Who do we have here?” The man’s Brooklyn accent was thick. One I’d heard in those Italian gangster movies.

Carlos nodded. “Go on, mami. Katie and I got this.”

I crossed my arms. “No. What the hell’s going on here? And I didn’t bring those for you.”

The man in black took a bigger bite of the brioche and chewed. I didn’t know how but he reminded me of a smiley emoji. He gulped. “Can I have coffee?” He tipped his chin to Carlos.

Carlos looked at Katie and then at me.

“No. Both of you will leave,” I said. “This is not a walk-in warehouse.”

“What if I want to get something special for my wife?” the black-clad man continued to speak and chew. His partner seemed content to let him do the talking, but his eyes were taking in the surroundings. My heartbeat raced.

“Our store on Thirteenth Street can help you.”

“I want to get her the new collection.”

“That won’t be available until after fashion week,” Katie answered. “Gentlemen, you really have to leave before we call the cops.”

“You do that, Katie,” the black-clad man said, finishing the brioche. “I can call you Katie, right?” He leaned forward. “We own the cops.” He tipped his chin at his partner. It happened so fast. Gray Hair cocked his elbow and dropped it between Carlos’s shoulder blades, sending my employee to the floor.

“Carlos!” Katie and I shrieked.

Feet stampeded from behind and chatter erupted. Xander’s voice bellowed, “What the fuck is going on here?”

Black drew his gun and pointed it at the crowd behind us.

I didn’t have time to think. I was responsible for every single person here. I stepped in front of the gun and threw up my hands. “What do you want?”

“They want more money,” Katie whispered, her voice singeing with signs of hysteria. “We pay a certain amount for them to leave us alone.”

The man’s gun didn’t waver. “We make sure gangs don’t bother you.”

I detested the mafia because of this. “Protection money? Is that what you guys still call it?” My eyes fell on Carlos. “You okay, Carlos?”

He nodded and tried to get up but Gray Hair put his big paw on his shoulder and forced him back to his knees. “Stay down.”

“We don’t keep money here,” Katie gritted.

Black glanced briefly at the newly delivered fabrics. “We’ll take those bolts. Silk, right?”

Even with my back facing him, I could feel Xander seething because if these men took those, our show was fucked. We were on a tight deadline as it was. But was it worth anyone getting hurt? No. However, I was not above risking myself.

“Go get it, then.” I kept my arms crossed. My body coiled tight with tension. I forced myself to breathe through my nose to remain alert.

The man in black lowered his gun, laughed…giggled. Giggled! It grated. It sent blood to my head, heating my cheeks, but I called upon my years of practice of flowing like water to remain calm.

He did a two-step like an idiot made more idiotic by his gangly body. He faced his partner. “You believe the balls on this chick?” He tucked his gun away.

Carlos was shaking his head at me.

Black faced me again, and I saw the exact transition to violence. His arm cut into an arc. I sidestepped. His hand displaced air where it missed me by a few centimeters. I angled my body to give him a narrower target and widened the width between my feet to give me more balance.

I ignored the collective hysteria that descended on the warehouse, all my attention laser-focused on our aggressors.

If our situation wasn’t dire, I would find the look on their faces comical.

The guy in black recovered first. “You some kind of ninja chick?” He thumbed his nose as if he was enjoying this. “Let’s see what else you got.”

He stomped a threatening step forward as if to scare me.

I simply stared at him, but my peripheral vision was aware of where Gray Hair was moving. He had dragged Carlos from the floor, still not drawing any weapon. My arms remained at my sides.

Black punched forward. I evaded. He repeated a series of jabs like a boxer on the offensive, driving me backward, driving me toward the bolts of fabrics, driving me to where I exactly wanted to go.

When we were close enough to the table, he executed a right hook. I caught that hand with my left and twisted his wrist.

He yowled. I snapped my right palm forward and nailed him on the chest.

Black staggered.

“What the fuck?” Gray Hair drew his own gun and shoved Carlos toward the group that was spectating.

I caught Xander’s eyes and gave him a quick shake of my head. My cousin knew how to fight, and I was depending on him to protect our crew.

I reached back and found what I came for. The measuring stick. I drew it out and held it toward our trespassers.

Gray Hair laughed. A laugh that let me know I had spooked him and he was struggling to maintain the advantage. “You’re bringing a stick to a gunfight?”

Black was still clutching his chest. “She’s sneaky. Don’t underestimate her.”

Got that right.

Keeping the stick in front of me, I cross-slid my right foot over my left, leading the men away from my staff. I was also moving closer to Gray Hair without him noticing it until it was too late.

My stick sliced through the air and struck his gun hand in a series of hits.

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

He cursed and dropped the weapon. I kicked it over to Xander.

Not waiting for either man to recover and still using the stick, I slapped Gray Hair on both sides of his face, then leap-kicked him in the chest. The force sent him hurtling, landing his ass on the floor.

Black roared in frustration and whipped out his gun, but he wasn’t aiming it at me. He didn’t know where to aim, which told me he had no intention of shooting anyone, but was using the weapon for intimidation.

“Drop it!” Xander yelled. He held up the gun and he knew how to use it too.

But the man in black was stubborn. “You gonna shoot me? You gonna shoot a made man?”

And that was the whole root of this problem. They thought they were invincible. Already frustrated as hell with fashion week, I didn’t mind messing with them.

I stepped forward. Before he could turn his gun on me, the tip of the yardstick poked under his armpit. His hand went slack, and he nearly dropped the gun if he hadn’t quickly grabbed it with his other hand.

“Ah…ah.” His eyes widened, fear passing through them. “What did you do?”

“What’s wrong, Al?” Gray Hair asked his partner.

“Are you feeling dizzy?” I leaned in closer, increasing the pressure a little. “Do you hear your heart beating faster?”

“I can’t move my arm.”

“Pressure point. That’s connected to your heart.”

“Stop this,” Gray Hair gritted, taking a couple of steps forward, but I held up a finger in warning.

“We’ll leave,” he begged. So he cared for the man in black.

I released the pinch point and lowered the stick.

Black was pale; Gray Hair was gray beneath his tan.

They backed away.

“There’s a rumor that Bruce Lee died from a death touch he received three days prior,” I said conversationally, twirling the stick.

Black looked ready to puke. “Did you…did you…”

“Oh no, that’s different,” I said.

When brief relief crossed his face, I added, “I think.”

“Let’s get out of here.” Gray Hair dragged Al away. The two men scampered for the exit.

When the door slammed behind them, I turned.

Everyone rushed toward me.

Carlos reached me first and engulfed me in a bear hug. “You crazy, mami. I didn’t know you know kung fu.”

“I’m a woman of many talents,” I deadpanned, trying to make light of the situation despite the adrenaline roaring through my veins. Daniel and I practiced many made-up scenarios. I never understood my brother’s intensity about sparring until I found out he was involved in a secret organization that monitored the underworld.

Next was Katie. “I can’t believe what just happened. But…what do we do if they return?”

“We’re closing shop today. Everyone goes home while we figure out security.” Daniel was going to love the extra expense.

Xander slid in front of Katie and squeezed my face. “How dare you have all the fun?”

“You had my back.” I smiled. “I never asked if you still practice?”

“We should spar.”

“Let’s.”

He lifted the gun by the butt with two fingers. “What do we do with this?”

Exhilaration was fading and the first tremors of the adrenaline withdrawal hit me. I forced out a smile, but Xander’s eyes narrowed. I hated that he knew me so well.

“I need a minute.” Pushing through the gathering of jubilant employees, I ran to the ladies’ room. I was shaking so badly. I heaved into the toilet and vomited coffee and acid. My lungs locked in a compressed state and my vision blurred.

Breathe, Ivy.

Shit. shit. shit. What do I do now?

After a few rapid heartbeats, clarity returned with oxygen. I stood and staggered to the sink.

Oh my God, that was a rush.

A tentative knock sounded on the door.

“Cuz. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I called and turned on the faucet, hoping he’d take the hint and give me space. I splashed cold water over my skin and wet a paper towel to put on my neck. Then I leaned against the sink as the enormity of what had happened sunk in.

I had no regrets standing up for my employees. I hated bullies, but I was at a loss about what to do next. Reporting this to law enforcement was tricky because I lived on the fringes of an organization that policed the underworld. I wondered if Black—or Al as we now know, was telling the truth about the cops in their pockets. I missed Sera and Daniel. They would know what to do.

I called Sera.