Chapter 1

"It breaks my heart, seeing Julian like this."

The sweet, cooing voice of my mistress, Nora Fox, drifted into my ear. I fought down a surge of private triumph and stayed slumped in the bed, playing dead.

The next second, my wife Teresa Pruitt's gentle voice answered, and it dropped me straight into a pit of ice:

"Mm. Though... his medicine's working fast, isn't it? I thought we'd have to wait another couple of weeks."

I was lying on the two-hundred-thousand-dollar Hästens mattress in the master bedroom, and in that instant it felt as if every drop of blood in me had been drained out and frozen into shards.

The heavy velvet curtains were drawn tight. The main light was off, and only a dim wall lamp by the bed gave off a faint yellow glow.

The air was thick with expensive agarwood and a light trace of disinfectant. Teresa had lit the incense herself, she said, to soothe the nerves of her "stroke patient."

Half a minute ago, I'd still been wrapped up in a secret, twisted satisfaction.

At that business dinner a week back, I'd had a few too many glasses of top-shelf whiskey. My blood pressure spiked, my vision went black, and I collapsed in the private room.

When I came to, I was already lying in a high-end VIP hospital suite, and the doctor told me I'd suffered a sudden stroke.

Luckily, they'd gotten to me in time. There were early signs of partial paralysis, but with proper rehab there was every hope I'd make a full recovery.

But I hadn't told anyone I could already move.

The day they pulled the oxygen tube, I'd tried my fingers, and my toes could curl a little too.

Yet the moment Teresa pushed open the door of the ward, eyes rimmed red, a brilliant idea came to me. I'd pretend I was completely paralyzed. Couldn't speak, couldn't move.

Who am I? Julian Henson.

The man who'd built two publicly listed companies from nothing.

Half a lifetime of moving heaven and earth in business, and in matters of women I'd always had the upper hand too.

At home, Teresa was the full-time wife I'd kept for eight years, gentle and virtuous, running my daily life with everything in its place.

Outside, Nora was the new intern at my company, twenty-two, fresh as a peach you could squeeze the juice out of, watching me every day in the office with that worshipful look in her eyes.

I loved it too much, the sense of accomplishment in playing both women, keeping the wife at home and the girl on the side, both banners flying and neither falling.

So I'd decided to use this stroke to put them to the test.

I wanted to see: once the great tree that was me had fallen, would Teresa, the housewife who couldn't survive without me, start to despise me?

Would Nora pack up and walk out on the spot?

To sell it completely, I'd spent days enduring the raw pain of stiff limbs, forcing myself to stay limp even when Teresa wiped my body down.

Ten minutes ago, Nora had come clicking into my bedroom on her heels, under the pretext of "the company sending a representative to visit the chairman."

Eyes shut, I could all but picture the catfight about to unfold.

Nora would show off, openly and slyly, how well she knew my daily habits, and Teresa would pull rank as the wife to put her back in her place.

I lay there fully expecting two women fighting over me to shed bitter, heartbroken tears in front of my "ruined body."

But there was no arguing. No probing. Not even a whiff of gunpowder in the air.

Nora's heels struck the Persian rug with a muffled tap, tap.

She came to the bedside and tucked the blanket around me, and then... the words that made my skin crawl landed lightly against my eardrum.

"His medicine's working this fast? I thought we'd have to wait another two weeks before he was fully turned into a vegetable."

My brain went blank in an instant.

My eyelid twitched, out of my control. I bit down hard on the tip of my tongue, using the sharp pain to force myself not to open my eyes now, of all times.

"Well, isn't that thanks to that 'special-blend coffee' you make him every day at the office?"

Teresa's voice came again, carrying a lazy, teasing note I'd never heard from her before.

She even laughed softly, and right after, I heard the crisp scrape of a lighter's wheel.

Teresa was smoking?!

That realization shook me more than the two of them knowing each other.

Eight years of marriage, and Teresa would cough for ages just from the smell of smoke. How could she possibly smoke?

"That old thing's sharp. I measure the dose in the coffee down to the milligram. A little too much and he'd taste the bitterness."

Nora's cooing voice, in my ears now, was exactly like a viper flicking its tongue.

"But Teresa, that batch of imported blood-pressure pills you switched him to, that's the real killer, isn't it? The way he was drooling yesterday, that sure didn't look faked to me."

"He had it coming."

Teresa blew out a ring of smoke, and the smell of tobacco instantly overpowered the agarwood, boring straight up my nose.

A wave of suffocation hit me, and my chest heaved once, hard.

"Ooh, sis, look, now he's even panting."

Nora suddenly bent down, and that Chanel Chance perfume of hers, a scent I knew all too well, washed over me.

A cold finger poked lightly at my cheek, then slid slowly, in some shiver-inducing rhythm, down the line of my jaw to my Adam's apple.

"Julian, oh, Julian..." Her warm breath brushed the shell of my ear, but the words she breathed out cut through everything I thought I knew like a knife. "You're usually so strong, aren't you? So how come now... you can't even lift a single finger?"