Chapter 10 #4
Iris huffed. “That sounds more like her.”
“Mind you, she was still very upset that you had plotted against her with her daughter, April,” Galahad said. “Ultimately
though, you and I both know she really does mean a truce. Otherwise she wouldn’t bother sending me here today. But imagine
how April or Wayward would react if they heard her say something like that.”
“Fine, I see your value now, Galahad.” Iris nodded. “And I can even guess your argument for a truce between my sister and
me. You are going to argue that Roses and I should be on the same team, because we have the same desired result—that Wayward
father a boy. So why not just combine forces to push him in that direction?”
“Clearly you’ve given all of this thought,” Galahad said, “and still decided to defy your sister. You have your own purposes
for not trusting your sister, which I will not dissuade you from. I’m not here to change your mind about Roses Sun.”
Iris was growing impatient and stood up to face him, ready to show him out. “Then why are you here? You talk more like a therapist
than a fortune teller.”
Galahad leaned against the wall, next to teenage Wayward. “Oh, do not misunderstand me, Mrs. Sun-Kwok. I may approach things
analytically, but all my actions are still grounded and informed by my psychic abilities.”
Iris opened her mouth to speak, but quickly shut it again.
Galahad began slowly walking toward her, one silent step at a time. He wore a small smile as his dark bedroom eyes flashed
at her. “You want to ask me how I knew about Ulaanbaatar, don’t you, Iris? And Shenzhen before that, Kaohsiung, Mumbai, Seoul . . .?
A seemingly endless maze of dead ends.”
“How do you . . .?” she began, her mouth dry. She cleared her throat, then asked, almost meekly, “Are they really all dead ends?”
Galahad was now very close to her, too close for her comfort, but she found herself strangely immobile and mesmerized. “That
is a conversation for another day, Iris. Let’s focus on the task at hand. I have foreseen the future of Wayward’s fatherhood
journey, and I want to tell you the same thing I told Roses.”
Iris subtly leaned back against her chair for support, licking her chapped lips. “What is it then?”
The holy man suddenly clapped his palms together in front of her face, causing her to jump. As though praying with his eyes
open, he intoned: “Wayward will have a son . . . only if you and Roses work together to make it happen.”
Iris’s face went dark. “Only if?”
Galahad nodded. “This baby boy is not promised. He is not destined. It is only through the combined efforts of Roses’s relentlessness
and your maneuvering that Wayward will father the Sunfang heir.”
“This already sounds painful,” Iris grumbled.
“Well, considering the eternally hungry alternative . . .” Galahad shrugged as he turned away to walk toward her front door.
She followed him wordlessly, already drowning in her many thoughts.
“Same dream, different beds.” The young man turned to her one last time, his voice a singsong as he exited. “Unite with Roses
on your shared cause, or never meet your grandson.”
Iris quickly slammed the door behind him.
On SANTI’s leather couch, Hyacinth continued to weep into her hands. “Oh, Pascal,” she sobbed, thinking of his green eye and
his hazel eye. “I’m so sorry about what happened to you!”
Pacing back and forth behind her, SANTI breathed in her pain like it was medical-grade nitrous. “Yes, Eve!” he commanded. “Go deeper!”
When sixteen-year-old Hyacinth found out she was pregnant, she told her father before anyone else, even Pascal. She had been
scared of disappointing him, of course, but despite being universally feared, Big Boss Sun had never even raised his voice
at her—it was as though he had showered all his love and affection over this one girl so that he could deal as sternly as
needed with all others.
Big Boss Sun was stone silent as she explained everything over the phone. Hyacinth had expected him to get on the next flight
to Paris, and she was secretly hoping for that too, as scared as she was. But her father’s response was simple, direct, and
uncharacteristically curt: Tell absolutely no one, especially Pascal, and wait for further instructions. He then hung up and she did not hear from him again.
On the fourteenth week of her secret pregnancy, Hyacinth was pulled out of class and told she had a visitor. She bounded down
the hall, excited to finally see her beloved father again. But as she turned a corner into the headmistress’s office, she
was horrified to see another face, however familiar.
Wearing a flawlessly fitted black Versace power suit, her eldest sister, Roses, glared back at her. Eleven years Hyacinth’s
senior, then-twenty-seven-year-old Roses was newly mother to an adorable toddler named April, but this had not softened her.
Hyacinth had always been terrified of her eldest sibling, and that day was no exception.
Roses grabbed Hyacinth by the wrist and marched her out of Eremita School to a very discreet medical clinic in Paris, where
they sat for an ultrasound. The result was whispered by the technician into Roses’s ear, who promptly strode outside to make
a call.
Young Hyacinth studied Roses’s face, wondering why her big sister looked so upset.
Father, Roses had said, it’s me. A pause.
Yes, we are here at the clinic and we can get it taken care— Another pause, then her tone grew defensive.
Hyacinth is still a child herself so I’m not sure why it matters whether— Yet another pause.
I apologize. Yes, Father, it’s a boy. Congratulations. Roses then hung up.
Since that fateful day, Hyacinth had wondered many times in her life how things might have been different had she been pregnant
with a girl. Would she have kept it? Would Big Boss Sun ever have spoken to her again? And most importantly, would Pascal
Bernard still be alive?
After learning of his grandson, Big Boss Sun was on the next flight to Paris, at last. But when he arrived, trouble soon followed.
Hyacinth quickly began to show, and an already suspicious Pascal brought in his own parents to intervene. As though Big Boss
Sun had been waiting for an excuse, he went nuclear and forbade Hyacinth from ever seeing her boyfriend again, not caring
about how she was still very much in love.
Big Boss Sun pulled Hyacinth out of Eremita School and confined her in a chateau near Versailles, completely alone except
for staff and a personal on-site ob-gyn. Like her childhood idol Marie Antoinette, Hyacinth found herself locked away in a
glamorous prison in the French countryside as chaos erupted outside her gilded walls. She only caught snippets here and there,
but as she understood it, Pascal Bernard’s old aristocratic parents balked at the idea of a bastard grandchild born to teenagers
and demanded an abortion. Even Big Boss Sun’s assurances that his family would raise the boy without any obligations from
the Bernards were met with stubborn refusal.
In truth, Pascal’s parents did not want to be associated with a family like the Suns in perpetuity, as powerful and wealthy
as the Sunfang empire was. The Bernards had whiter aspirations for their own legacy.
Hyacinth was deep into her second trimester and Pascal was on his last summer break of high school when the news broke globally:
a freak yacht explosion off Port Lympia of Nice on the French Riviera. No living souls found, only pieces of aristocrat, both
old . . . and young.
The name of the yacht? L’héritage de Bernard.
As she was whisked back to Taiwan, Hyacinth stared out the window of her private plane in a daze, feeling her fatherless child
kick relentlessly inside her belly. She too was no longer her daddy’s little girl. Previously pampered and shielded from her
family’s inner workings, young Hyacinth Sun now intimately understood one of their core principles as dictated by Big Boss
Sun: Above all, their lineage was king.
But Hyacinth would have done everything to support that principle . . . if only her first love, Pascal, hadn’t had to die!
“If only,” Hyacinth Sun-Bernard sighed, blowing into the tissue that SANTI had handed to her. “You ask me where my fear about
Sunbern comes from, and it is because I always bear so much guilt over his father’s death! I even took Pascal’s family name
along with Sunbern when he was born. We were never married, but it is the only way I can honor Pascal . . . after what my
family did to him.”
From behind her, SANTI placed warm hands on her shoulders, his touch calming her immediately. “Do you feel better, Eve?”
Hyacinth let out a relieved sigh. “Yes, as always, SANTI. As long as I have you, I can always find Sense of Self again.”
SANTI paced around the leather couch and knelt down on one knee before her so their faces were aligned. Few biographical details
of this tall and slender man were public, but he’d once mentioned in a TED Talk that his father had been a Bollywood actor
and his mother a particle physicist from Iceland. He looked every bit what one might think that combination would yield, with
tawny skin and thick black hair. But most important, to Hyacinth at least, were his heterochromatic eyes.
One was green, the other hazel.
Upon looking into them, Hyacinth’s own eyes welled up again. She reached out to clasp at his offered hands.
“Oh, SANTI,” she cooed, “I know that the evil lawsuits against you distract from the miraculous work that you continue to tirelessly do for me and all the other Eves here. You have saved my life countless times, and I want you to know that you will always have my full support, no matter what. As long as I control the Sunfang Trust, I pledge to fund the security of MiNT forever!”
“Thank you, my dear Eve.”
“It’s what he wanted,” she added, sounding sentimental.
SANTI smiled at her genuinely. “Are you ready for the Whispering now?”
Biting her lower lip, Hyacinth nodded at him, leaning back once again onto the couch. SANTI moved down her body, down her
deep scarlet robe, stopping right at the gold ring clasp of its belt. There he hovered his lips right over her exposed vulva,
and began to Whisper.
Hyacinth could not hear what he was saying, but that was the point. SANTI was speaking his wisdom directly into her sacred
womanhood, bypassing the fallacy of her faulty ears and weak mind. But the Whispering had a side effect.
Her physical body already heightened and edged from weeks of her latest cycle of orgasmic deprivation, as SANTI exhaled quiet
words with little puffs of warm breath against her labia, her delicate pink lips began to swell, feeling the presence of a
hot mouth nearby.
Hyacinth almost moaned aloud but quickly stifled it; SANTI frowned upon the sexualization of this very chaste and solemn ritual.
But she could feel the slippery wetness rushing to her tissue, which would soon be glistening with all her base desires.
She tempered her lust by fixing her attention on the wall above SANTI’s desk on the opposite side of his office. There, her
eyes trailed up the gallery of framed photographs of her teacher posing majestically with various luminaries: SANTI with the
Dalai Lama, SANTI with Pope Benedict XVI, SANTI with Jeff Bezos. But Hyacinth’s gaze settled on the frame at the very top,
the one most useful to her at this moment.
It was a photograph of a smiling SANTI with his arm around a very old man, taken in front of Big Bear Lake a few months before that man had passed away. As her guru continued to Whisper mysterious mantras into her pudenda, Hyacinth cooled her unwanted wantonness with this image.
The senile old man, held by SANTI in a desperate embrace, was none other than Big Boss Sun.