Chapter 2

Vera sprawled herself on the couch, staring at a large portrait of her hanging on the wall, using her eyes to trace the details of her face. Her eyes found the eye bags that her make up tried hard to conceal; she then used her fingers to touch the eye bags on her own face. Her eyes explored the portrait again and found the little lines of wrinkles that had crept to the side of her folded eye lids as a result of stretch of her wide smile. She felt her face to know if those were wrinkles from her smile or from ageing. The 35 year old lass sighed.

Her face again caught the part of her face where she found a strand of hair jutting out from under her chin. Consequently, she ran her fingers on her chin to find where the premature hair stuck out. She found it and improvised her red painted nails as tweezers.

A call came in as she struggled to uproot the shrub of hair. She made a frustrated grunt as she saw the interrupting call and grudgingly stretched her hands to pick her phone from the table. It was her mother, Catherine who was calling. As soon as she picked it, she forgot what had been trying to do before the call.

“Hello darling, how was the divorce agreement? Did it go well?” Catherine asked.

“It was good. Signed faster than I expected,” Vera replied as she examined her fingers.

“Well, that’s great. I’m really glad that leech did,” Catherine said. Vera rolled her eyes as she heard this.

Catherine hadn’t been aware of the contractual marriage between Ivan and Vera, so she had been part of the audience Vera and Ivan were entertaining with a fake marriage. Vera’s mother had always had reservations towards Ivan since the day she met him and therefore never got to bond with him.

She hated that Vera had refused the wealthy man she (Catherine) had tried to matchmake her with. She hated that instead of picking another wealthy man, she stooped so low to pick a man who had never held ten thousand dollars in his hands, not to talk of three million dollars - so she had thought. Throughout the years of that marriage, Vera and her mother argued over the matter several times to the extent that Catherine threatened that she would disown her if she didn’t get rid of him. She didn’t mean it but only did it to only frighten her. However, her daughter didn’t budge.

Catherine had always thought Ivan was a gold digger; an act that he had intentionally made Catherine to believe. The old woman so wished that her daughter would supposedly open her eyes and see that he wanted do like what a gold digger and a leech have in common - to exploit. She even desperately desired that their marriage would fail…

Her wish eventually came through. Vera and Ivan had publicly put up the act that Ivan had cheated on her and abused her physically. With swollen cheeks and a black eye at her left eye, the story sold out successfully to her mother and the public. It was two weeks after these that Vera presented the divorce papers to Ivan and mutually ended the contract, under the guise that they were actual couples getting divorced.

“By the way, I called to tell you that Steve Anderson’s birthday is tomorrow. Get dressed in your best dress and—“ Catherine had barely finished her words when her daughter cut her short.

“Mum!” Vera shouted at her.

“What?”

“I know what you’re doing,” Vera said angrily.

Vera knew her mother wanted to utilise he divorce to quickly attach her to Steve Anderson before any lady reached her. Steve Anderson happened to be the man she had wanted her to marry, the one she had rejected to marry Ivan. Steve was the son of a billionaire father and heir to his father’s fortune when he would kick the bucket.

Luckily, he was a divorcee and Catherine foreshadowed the wealth she and her daughter would be in if she married him. Catherine wouldn’t want to call she and her daughter a leech; rather she would call it survival. Besides, the family wanted her to do it.

Vera made it known to her mother that she didn’t want to be in any rush to get into a relationship, citing that she had barely recovered from the divorce from Ivan. Catherine blatantly told her daughter that she wasn’t trying to get her into another relationship, with a tone that betrayed her seriousness. Vera knew her mother was lying.

When Catherine began to feel guilty for lying to her own daughter, she then confessed that she was trying to get her to be with Steve and that it was at the request of the family. The family felt that it would be good if they married, as it would be financially beneficial to the family company.

“So, I’m gonna be sacrificing my happiness for the good of the company?” she said, sarcastically.

“Don’t look at it that way. If you look at it that way, all you would only see is the bad side of all these,” Catherine replied. She told her daughter that it was preferable to be in wealth and not in love than being poor and in love; she said the love would eventually vanish because of lack.

Vera simply replied all of her mother’s words with grunts and groans.

“So,” her mother began, “are you coming?” and finished.

Vera knew if she didn’t say yes to her mother’s offer, she would regret it. If the day of the party eventually passed without her attending, her mother would begin to dish to her annoying lectures and would eventually double up on trying to convince her to have a thing with Steve.

Vera despised Steve to the extent that she thought that Steve must have hated her too. Her hatred was because he was competition and because he was a snob.

She didn’t know being at the top of the family company would mean that she would have to get into a relationship with someone she hated.

She then thought of a mischievous thought of going to the party and getting into some agreement with Steve to deceive her mother that they were in relationship.

“I will be there,” Vera said to her and heard her mother let out a little chuckle of satisfaction. Vera hung up and threw her phone on the couch.

Hermes came to pick Ivan and dropped him off at a bar, at Ivan’s request. As he pushed the door open, he was welcomed by the boisterous and loud music, dazzling lights and a raving crowd that were mostly men. They were raving as they saw an unclad lady slowly slid down the pole on the center stage in a seductive way.

Ivan didn’t know when his head began to move front and back to the rhythm of the music. He did that till he walked up to the counter to sit.

He called to the bartender to pour him some liquor. He raised the small cup in his big hand and drank the liquor in one gulp, he then made a grunt of satisfaction as it burnt his throat. He told the bartender to pour him another cup.

He drank it the way he drank the first one. He turned to see the lady on the stage making snaky moves towards a man who kept making loud excited noises as she slowly rubbed her hands about his body. She then gently pulled him by his tie from his seat, which he succumbed sheepishly while laughing excitedly.

They both walked to the stage, pulled a chair to the centre and sat him down on it with one push of the tip of her index finger. As soon as she sat on him, the crowd went wild, while the man’s face was stupefied as she danced slow and sensually on him.

Ivan smiled at this for a moment and told the bartender to bring wine to him in the VIP lounge; he then walked over to the empty VIP which had been reserved for him, squeezed some dollars in the hands of the bouncer that stood by the place like a statue because he had been standing for hours. The bouncer appreciated him as Ivan fell into the comfort of the chair.

In not less one minute that he sat down there, a group of hot and sexy ladies in all shapes and sizes walked up to him. The bouncer stopped them with his large hand, but Ivan told him to let them in. They shrouded him like they had known him before.

The bartender came and dropped the wine which he had brought in a tray on the table. Ivan then ordered him to bring more.

The crowd of men went into another frenzy when a particular tattooed lady in bright red lingerie, boots and a cowboy hat walked in leisurely like a model on the stage.

At every sound that her shoe made against the floor, the men made loud noises until she sat in chair and spread her legs in the air, causing the men to go into another frenzy again.

The noises the men made seemed to be more than they had made for the other ladies that had come on that stage. It showed she was the star of the bar and apparently, she was the boss the bar.

Her performance ended with her bowing down and the crowd noisily cheering. They made wolf whistles as they watched her walk away from the stage, seeing her legs lunged forward, causing currents on her tattooed buttocks at each step.

A man stopped her before she could make another step. The obese man raised himself from his chair and told her to come down from the stage but the lady didn’t move an inch. He said to her that he had watched her performance and she was amazing. He then turned to the crowd to say he had thought to himself during the performance that he needed a girl like her in his life.

“This is my girl and there’s nothing anybody is gonna do about it except you want your dead body delivered to your family,” he said and laughed alone to his own joke. He told her once again to come down. She didn’t change her mind, instead she stared at him daringly.

“Do you who know I am?” He said to her. The crowd began to make indistinct noises as the atmosphere began to become tense.

The man was a person that was dreaded and feared by everyone in the district. The music had stopped at this point and the noises from the other patrons subsided as he turned around to look at everyone. Some of the other strippers whispered softly to her to do as the man had said but she didn’t listen.

The fat man laughed and climbed to the stage along with the cup of cold beer in his hand. He walked towards her and grabbed her, tried to force her to come with him.

In a blink of an eye, she pulled the man by one hand and gave him a deadly superhuman punch that threw him three feet across the floor till he bored a hole in the wall, causing a loud noise from them.

Fear immediately spread fast on the face of everyone else like an deadly epidemic and they began to tremble when they saw the man didn’t rise to his feet. They all knew he had died as they saw blood flow from underneath his body. They all stood, absolutely terrified but frozen solid like it was a symptom of the fear they shared.

Then about four strong men who were the fat man’s boys came from different corners of the bar to fight her but none of them could lay a finger on her. She squashed all of them like they were nothing.

Amidst all these, Ivan had a smile on his face all through what happened. The next thing he did was raise his cup in the air, and let his voice pierce through the dead silence.

“Come and have a drink with me, Artemis.”

Everyone’s eyes moved to where the voice had come from and stared in fear at Ivan for making such a daring move. They watched as she strutted towards him with a menacing stare.

Their fear suddenly turned into a shocking surprise when they saw her kneel and bow before Ivan.

“You’re welcome back, my lord,” she said to him.

“Thank you, Artemis,” Ivan replied with a smile and sipped his drink.