Leon looked at the lewd smile spreading across Frank’s face and felt like laughing.
So the old man had a thing for young girls like Ashley.
Kept asking about her.
The guy was damn near sixty years old.
“I’m not interested in second-hand goods.”
Leon’s reply was casual, flat.
It punctured Frank’s thinly veiled little fantasy like a pin through a balloon.
Frank’s smile froze on his face.
He smacked his lips.
“Don’t speak too soon, kid.”
“You’ll learn.
When a man’s hungry long enough, even stale food starts smelling good.”
Leon couldn’t be bothered with him anymore.
He walked straight to his office, locked the door from the inside, and dialed Shane’s number.
The call connected on the second ring.
“Leon?”
Shane’s voice was sharper than it had been, more alert, though the fatigue underneath hadn’t gone anywhere.
“I need a small favor.” Leon got straight to the point.
“Go ahead.”
“I need an expedited blood panel.
The full workup, every viral screen you can run.”
“I need the results today.”
A few seconds of silence.
“…Another one for that shelter plan of yours?”
“You could think of it that way.”
“Alright.” Shane didn’t push further.
“I’m heading over now.
Leave the samples in a black bag, trash can at the precinct entrance.
I’ll get you the results as fast as I can.”
“Thanks.”
Leon hung up.
He sealed the two blood vials, still faintly warm from Ashley’s body, inside an evidence bag and dropped them in the trash can.
By evening, his phone buzzed.
An encrypted email from Shane.
The attachment was a PDF lab report.
Leon opened it and read from top to bottom, taking his time.
HIV: Negative.
Hepatitis B: Negative.
Hepatitis C: Negative.
Syphilis: Negative.
Every single line.
Uniformly negative.
“Well done.”
Leon replied.
Shane wrote back almost instantly: “Who is she?
Worth all this trouble?”
Leon smiled and typed: “Just a new addition to the plan.
Had to make sure she’s clean.”
Silence on the other end.
Since when did joining a shelter plan require testing for syphilis?
Really…
strange.
But Shane didn’t ask.
In his experience, Leon was a complete weirdo.
Weirdos did weird things.
That was basically the whole story, wasn’t it?
Leon had Ashley brought back to the empty interrogation room.
Her expression was a complicated mix.
Nervousness.
Anticipation.
And underneath both, a thin thread of defiance she hadn’t quite buried.
“Results are in.”
Leon slid a printed copy of the lab report across the table.
She couldn’t read a word of the dense medical English, but she recognized the one that mattered at the bottom of the page.
Negative.
“Nothing to worry about,” Leon added.
The tension went out of Ashley’s shoulders all at once.
She exhaled slowly, and then, once the relief had settled, the corner of her mouth curled into something mocking.
She leaned back in the chair, crossed her legs, and looked at him with an expression that said she found this whole thing amusing.
“Told you.”
“I genuinely don’t understand you Chinese guys.
This obsession with that one little thing.
Like it’s some kind of sacred object.”
“What century are we in?
And you’re still hung up on this virginity complex.”
She expected that to land.
Expected irritation, maybe embarrassment.
Leon’s reaction took her by surprise.
He wasn’t irritated.
He let out a low, quiet laugh, like she’d said something genuinely funny.
“Virginity complex?”
He stood, walked around the table, and looked down at her.
“Ashley.
You don’t understand anything.”
“I don’t?” She held his gaze.
“You want a clean woman.
That’s it.
That’s the whole thing.
So when you’re with her, you don’t have to picture someone else having her in the exact same way.”
“Possession is part of it,” Leon said, raising one finger and cutting her off.
“But it’s not the whole picture.”
“Then what is it?
Proof of love?
A symbol of purity?”
“No.”
Leon leaned down, close to her ear, voice dropping low.
“It’s a trump card.
A card a woman can throw in a man’s face at any moment during the long, grinding gamble of marriage.”
He straightened up and kept going, like he was working through a calculation.
“Picture it.
Ten years from now.
Twenty years from now.
You’re screaming at each other over bills, over nothing, and your husband is jabbing his finger in your face telling you you’re useless, that you do nothing but spend his money.”
“At that moment, you can look him dead in the eye and say: ‘I was a virgin when I married you.'”
“Tell me.
No matter how furious he is, doesn’t he have to swallow it?”
“Because that’s a debt, Ashley.”
“A debt he can never fully repay.
Not in a lifetime.”
“With that debt in your pocket, you can enjoy everything he has without guilt.
Spend his money freely.
Get him to forgive things he’d never forgive otherwise.”
“And you,” Leon straightened up fully and looked her over, the way someone appraises a piece of merchandise they’re considering.
“Your looks.
Classic American sweetheart.
Blonde, blue-eyed, high cheekbones.
Exactly what the Western beauty standard calls for.”
“Too bad beauty like that is like a sports car.
Impressive when it’s new.
Depreciates fastest of everything.”
“In less than ten years, when the wrinkles start at the corners of your eyes and your skin begins to loosen, what exactly will you use to compete with the younger, prettier women who come after you?”
“In the end you’ll be living on old goodwill.
History.
Sentiment.”
Leon’s words peeled back the surface of things, one layer at a time, until the raw truth underneath was exposed.
The body she was proud of.
The face she’d always relied on.
In his eyes, they were depreciating assets.
Liabilities in progress.
And the one thing she’d never thought to value was the only thing he’d call an intangible asset worth holding.
It left her head empty.
“As for Western women in general.”
“Fast food.
Good once in a while, sure.
When the mood’s right, a couple glasses of wine, and suddenly anyone will do.”
“Convenient.
Fast.
Zero nutritional value.”
“Eat too much of it and you just feel sick.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
She wanted to tear into him.
She had a dozen responses lined up.
None of them came out.
Because he wasn’t wrong.
She’d watched it happen too many times.
Girls just like her, giving everything away, and ending up with nothing.
Discarded.
Forgotten.
“I don’t want to hear any more of this!”
She grabbed the lab report off the table and crushed it in her fist, crumpling it until it was a tight ball, like she could squeeze the humiliation out of it that way.
“Enough.
Is our deal still on or not?” She stared at him.
“Of course.”
Leon sat back down, his posture relaxed, like the last few minutes had simply not happened.
“Now.
Let’s talk about what you need to do.”
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a brown paper bag, and dropped it on the table.
It landed with a dense, solid thud.
“If you want to work with me, you need to prove you’re not an idiot first.”
“If you can’t handle a simple task without screwing it up, this arrangement doesn’t need to go any further.”
Ashley opened the bag slowly, suspicion pulling at her face.
Inside were two factory-fresh cartons of Marlboros.
In prison, that was hard currency.
The hardest.
Slide someone a couple of cigarettes and they were your most loyal friend on the block.
Brenda had held her position at the top of C Block almost entirely by monopolizing the supply.
“These are…”
“Your seed money,” Leon said.
“Use them to bring the fence-sitters over.
Grease whatever wheels need greasing.”
“Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll conduct a surprise inspection of the laundry room.
Right on schedule.”
He held her gaze.
“I’ve handed you the knife.
I’ve given you the ammunition.”
“Whether you end up running C Block is entirely up to you.”
Ashley’s hands tightened around the bag.
“I’ll handle it.”
She knew what this moment meant.
The second she walked out of here with those two cartons, there was no going back to anything that came before.
…
After Ashley left, Leon returned to his staff dormitory.
He turned on the old television in the corner and switched to the local news.
A female anchor read a community interest story in a pleasant, measured voice.
A charity bake sale at an elementary school.
On screen, children held up cookies and frosted cakes and grinned at the camera with uncomplicated joy.
Everything looked peaceful.
Quiet.
Normal.
Leon settled back on the bed and lit a cigarette.
He knew exactly what this calm was worth.
He flipped through the channels.
CNN, FOX, BBC.
International news.
Financial markets.
Sports.
Nothing unusual on any of them.
No reports of a mysterious illness spreading anywhere.
No riots.
No emergency declarations.
The stock market wasn’t even twitching.
Plenty of time left.
That should have been reassuring.
In a way, it was.
But it also sharpened his attention.
Outbreaks didn’t announce themselves.
They started in some overlooked corner of the world and moved faster than any news cycle could track.
By the time the cameras showed up, it was already too late to do anything that mattered.
➤ Next: Brenda Takes a Fall