My Best Friend Was Dead,But Something Wore Her Face

1: 1

Elise Cooley and I grew up together in the same orphanage.

Later she married the least-favored illegitimate son of the Farley family, and she was the one who tore down the Farley kin for him and put him in the chairman's seat at Farley Group.

As for me, with nothing but a single Primordial Gold Thread, I clawed a fortune out of a heap of the dead, founded Kyros Capital, and became Farley Group's largest outside shareholder.

Everyone said the two of us, one holding the power and one holding the money, were the two women in the New York elite circle you could least afford to cross.

Today was my best friend's third wedding anniversary, and also the celebration gala for the group going public.

I was the only family she had, so of course I came to congratulate her.

Elise came toward me in her gown, glowing, and slipped her arm through mine.

"Vanessa, I finally made it."

I smiled and patted the back of her hand, and my fingertips slid naturally to the pulse points at her wrist.

The next second, I went rigid.

Her pulse pecked like a sparrow, faint and cutting off at the edges. It was the classic dead-and-severed pulse.

Worse still, this body's pulse did not belong to my best friend at all, the one who had suffered a congenital arrhythmia since childhood.

If Elise had died long ago, then what exactly was the woman with her arm through mine right now?

......

The Farley Group IPO celebration gala had booked out the entire Summit Grand Hotel.

Outside the banquet hall, dozens of media crews had their lenses set up.

Both sides of the red carpet were lined with New York's socialites.

When I arrived, the noisy crowd went quiet for a beat.

"That's Vanessa Ashford."

"Ms. Ashford of Kyros Capital came herself."

"Three years ago, when Farley's cash flow collapsed, she's the one who put in two billion to save them. Without her, where would Farley be today?"

"I heard she's not just Farley's second-largest shareholder, she also holds a veto vote on the board. Even Raymond Farley greets her politely as Chairwoman Ashford."

The chatter reached my ears, and I paid it no mind.

I crossed the crowd and spotted Elise at the center of the banquet hall at once.

She wore a dark green gown, her black hair pinned up, a gardenia-shaped diamond hairpin set beside her ear.

That was the wedding gift I had given her.

Three years ago, when she was about to marry Raymond Farley, I had objected.

Back then Raymond was only the Farley family's illegitimate son, the one they kept out of the light, with no real power, surrounded by kin watching him like circling hawks.

To help him rise, Elise had lost a pregnancy, taken a blade, and nearly been shoved down a staircase by the Farley family.

It broke my heart, and more than once I urged her to divorce him.

But she always laughed and pulled me into a hug.

"Vanessa, I know you don't like him."

"But I've never held on to anything in my whole life. I want to hold on to a home."

Every time she said that, I couldn't push her anymore.

When we were twelve, we lived through a fire.

She carried me out of the burning dormitory on her back, and a fallen beam broke one of her ribs.

At fifteen, when my adoptive family returned me to the orphanage, she climbed the wall and ran more than ten miles to find me.

The year we were twenty, her heart condition flared, and I knelt in the hospital corridor all night.

We shared no blood, yet we understood each other better than any kin in the world.

She wanted a home, so I put two billion under her to catch her if she fell.

"Vanessa!"

Elise saw me, and her eyes lit up at once.

"You finally came. I thought you'd use a meeting as an excuse to stand me up again."

She grumbled, but her arm had already slipped through mine, easy and familiar.

I looked down at her.

Her eyes, her voice, the gardenia scent on her, even the way she tipped her chin up slightly when she spoke, all of it was exactly the same as before.

"It's your third wedding anniversary. How could I not come?"

I smoothed back the loose hair by her ear.

"No gift for me this time?"

She held out her hand to me, her eyes curving up just slightly.

I took the document from my assistant and held it out in front of her.

"Five percent of Farley's shares, transferred into your name."

The smile on her face faded a little.

"Vanessa, I already have Farley shares."

"Those came from Raymond. He can take them back anytime. This portion is mine to give, and it belongs to you alone."

I looked straight into her eyes.

"Elise, no matter who you marry, you need your own way out."

She was quiet for a moment, then suddenly reached up and hugged me.

"You really haven't changed at all."

She rested her chin on my shoulder, her voice very soft.

"I always feel like the whole world wants to hurt me, and you're the only one who can protect me."

"Isn't that so?"

"Of course it isn't."

She laughed and drew back, but her eyes had gone a little red.

"Now it's my turn to protect you."

With that she caught my hand and pulled me toward the center of the banquet hall.

Raymond saw us coming and raised a glass.

He pulled Elise into his arms and announced to all the reporters:

"Besides celebrating Farley going public today, I have one more thing to announce."

"I will give fifty percent of the Farley shares in my name, free of charge, to my wife, Elise Cooley."

The banquet hall erupted in applause.

Held in his arms, Elise was glowing, yet her eyes stayed on me the whole time.

"Vanessa."

She stepped out of Raymond's hold and came to my side again.

"I finally made it."

She smiled and slipped her arm through mine.

I smiled too.

But as I patted the back of her hand, my fingertips slid naturally to the pulse points at her wrist.

The next second, all the blood in me froze.

Beneath my fingers, the pulse pecked like a sparrow, faint and cutting off at the edges.

This was the dead-and-severed pulse of the Primordial Pulse art.

Only a corpse whose flesh had already died, whose soul had been forcibly bound in place by some outside force, would give a pulse like this.

Worse still, this pulse was steady and strong, without the faintest sign of the congenital arrhythmia.

It didn't belong to Elise.

I flung her hand off.

The false Elise couldn't keep her footing and staggered back two steps.

Raymond caught her, quick on his feet.

"Vanessa, what's wrong with you?"

The false Elise looked up at me, her face full of shock.

I stared at her and asked, one word at a time:

"Who are you?"

2: 2

The ballroom went silent in an instant.

The color drained from the false Elise's face.

"Vanessa, what are you saying?"

She took a step toward me.

I raised my hand between us.

"Don't touch me."

Three short words, and her eyes reddened at once.

"Is it because I've been so busy with Farley Group's listing lately, because I haven't spent time with you? Are you upset?"

She softened her voice, the way she always used to.

"It's my fault. Once the gala is over, I'll go back to the old orphanage site with you. All right? You've always wanted to go back and see it."

That was the exact tone Elise used whenever she was coaxing me.

For a moment, I almost hoped my Primordial Pulse art had failed me.

But the Primordial Gold Thread coiled around my right wrist was tightening, inch by inch.

It had sensed the breath of death.

The thing in front of me was not alive.

Raymond stepped in front of her.

"Ms. Ashford, there's a lot of press here tonight. Whatever you have to say, we can discuss it in private."

I gave him no room.

"Elise has had a congenital arrhythmia since she was a child. She has to be checked every three months. Bring out her medical records for the past year."

Raymond's brow furrowed.

"Her health has recovered."

"Congenital heart disease doesn't heal for no reason."

I looked at the false Elise.

"Where's your heart medication?"

She hesitated a moment, then took a clear pill bottle from her clutch.

"It's here."

I took the bottle, shook out a white tablet, and crushed it under my nail.

No musk, no borneol. Only the smell of cheap orange flavoring.

"This is a vitamin."

My eyes settled on Raymond's face.

"Chairman Farley, you swapped her life-saving medication for vitamins. Do you want her dead, or did you know all along that she never needed the medication at all?"

The crowd began to stir.

Raymond did not panic.

He took the tablet and explained calmly:

"This is a new drug developed by a Swiss lab for Elise's specific condition. The approval and import paperwork are all with our private medical team. If you have doubts, Ms. Ashford, you're welcome to have someone verify it."

"Of course I will."

I turned to my assistant.

"Get the legal department and the medical investment division at Kyros Capital on the line. In ten minutes, I want everything on this drug, and Elise Cooley's medical visit records for the past three years."

"Yes, Ms. Ashford."

The assistant pulled out a phone immediately.

The smile on Raymond's face finally faded.

"Vanessa, this is our family matter."

"Anything to do with Elise is my matter."

I looked at the press in the room.

"Tonight's gala is suspended. All directors of Farley Group stay. Everyone else, out."

My voice wasn't loud, but no one dared argue.

Kyros Capital held twenty-seven percent of Farley Group.

I was Farley Group's largest outside shareholder, and the only person who had dared to bet on the company back when it was on the edge of bankruptcy.

Raymond's eyes went fully dark.

"Ms. Ashford, have you forgotten this is Farley Group's gala?"

"And you've forgotten that without my money, Farley Group wouldn't have lived to see today."

I stepped forward.

"Hand Elise over to me. I'm taking her to the hospital."

"I won't go!"

The false Elise spoke up suddenly.

She came around Raymond, tears spilling over.

"Vanessa, why do you have to ruin my happiness, and today of all days?"

I froze.

Her voice trembled, as if she'd held it back for a long time.

"You've been like this since we were children. I wanted to make friends with other people, and you weren't happy. I wanted to leave the orphanage, and you weren't happy. I wanted to marry Raymond, and you weren't happy either."

"You always said it was for my own good. But did you ever ask whether I wanted to be controlled by you?"

Every camera in the ballroom was aimed at me.

These words, Elise had actually once said to me.

Three years ago, over Raymond, we'd had our worst fight.

She had smashed the cup I gave her, and asked me with red eyes:

"Vanessa, are you afraid I'll get hurt, or are you afraid that once I have someone else, you won't be needed anymore?"

I didn't contact her for a whole month.

Later she waited a full night outside my company.

When the sky lightened, neither of us apologized. We just held each other and cried for a long time.

Raymond suddenly overturned the champagne tower beside him.

Glasses shattered across the floor.

The ballroom lights went out at the same moment.

In the dark, a group of bodyguards rushed out from a side door, cutting me off from my assistant.

Someone pressed a drug-soaked towel over my nose and mouth.

I lost consciousness in an instant.

3: 3

I woke up in a sealed VIP lounge.

A TV was playing the latest footage from the ballroom.

On the screen, the false Elise leaned against Raymond, her face drained of color.

The anchor said I had been on long-term psychiatric medication and had suffered a sudden delusional episode at the gala, that I'd been rushed to the hospital.

Then came the word from inside Kyros Capital.

My vice president had joined with three board members to announce my suspension, claiming my mental state had been unstable for the past six months, that I'd brought up ghosts and spirits in major decisions more than once.

The smears began to flood the internet.

"Vanessa Ashford has long envied her best friend and repeatedly tried to sabotage the Farleys' marriage."

"A source reveals: Vanessa Ashford harbored a pathological need to control Elise Cooley."

I watched the screen, and instead of panicking, I went calm.

For Raymond to seize the narrative this fast, to flip Kyros Capital's leadership, he had to have planned it long ago.

Whatever happened to Elise, it didn't start today.

I closed my eyes and called back the trace I'd caught when I touched the false Elise.

I drew out the gold thread, bit my fingertip, and smeared the blood along it.

"Thread-Suspended Primordial Diagnosis, fix the pulse and seek the way."

"Blood as the guide, soul as the witness. Go."

The Primordial Gold Thread lifted into the air, circled the room for a moment, then snapped taut, pointing toward the western suburbs of New York.

The Farley hillside villa.

Elise was there.

I set out for the villa at once.

The whole way, the Primordial Gold Thread grew colder.

By the time I reached it, white frost had crusted across the thread's surface.

I followed its pull to the back garden.

The thread hung suspended over the koi pond, its tip aimed straight down into the water.

I broke open the pump control box and threw the drain gate.

The water dropped fast.

In under twenty minutes, warning lights flared outside the villa.

Raymond came storming into the back garden with the false Elise, the police, and a wall of bodyguards.

He saw the koi pond draining and his face went dark.

"Vanessa, you broke into a private home and you're deliberately destroying private property. You really think money puts you above the law?"

"There's a body at the bottom of that pond."

I didn't look at him. I kept my eyes on the falling water.

"You killed Elise Cooley."

An officer stepped in front of me.

"Ms. Ashford, Mrs. Farley is standing right here, perfectly fine. Stop the destruction immediately and cooperate with the investigation."

"You can restrain me, but the pump stays on."

I held out both hands.

"If there's nothing at the bottom, I'll take full legal responsibility."

The detective captain looked at me, then at the pond that was nearly empty, and in the end he didn't call it off.

Soon a chained rosewood chest surfaced from the sludge.

Every face changed at once.

The chest was hauled onto the bank.

They cut the chains and the lid rose slowly.

No bones inside.

Only a wedding gown soaked in black blood.

My heart dropped.

The false Elise suddenly threw herself at the chest, clutched the gown, and broke down sobbing.

"Vanessa, why did you have to dig my wound open again?"

Through her tears she told the police this was the gown she'd worn when she lost the baby.

She couldn't bear to burn it, and she couldn't bear to see it every day, so she'd sealed it in the chest and sunk it in the pond, a grave for her child.

The way the officers looked at me shifted.

I stared at the blood on the gown.

This wasn't ordinary miscarriage blood.

It carried the grievance of a dead infant, enough to mislead the Primordial Gold Thread.

They knew I'd come.

They even knew I'd go to the koi pond first.

As Raymond turned away, I bit through the tip of my tongue and spat a mouthful of Life-Essence Blood onto the Primordial Gold Thread.

"Primordial Truth-Seeking, break the false and return to one!"

The thread flared a dark red, then wrenched around, aiming straight at the villa's basement.

Raymond's step hitched.

That single instant of stiffness was all the answer I needed.

I ran for the basement, cold air rushing up to meet me.

A statue of the war god stood enshrined in the basement.

The cement floor beneath the shrine reeked of killing force.

I grabbed the fire axe from the corner and brought it down against the ground.

The police and bodyguards came right behind me.

"Stop her!"

For the first time, Raymond lost his composure.

I swung a dozen times, again and again.

The cement layer caved in with a crash, and beneath it lay a woman's white bones wrapped in yellow cloth.

Seven Soul-Anchoring Nails were driven into the top of the skull.

Everyone sucked in a cold breath.

But Raymond recovered fast.

"I didn't know! This villa was bought secondhand, I had no idea there was a body underground!"

The police sealed off the scene at once.

I stared at the left side of the skeleton's ribcage.

There was no old injury there.

This wasn't Elise.

Two hours later, the DNA came back. The dead woman was Kate Finch, a peripheral woman who had gone missing a year and a half ago.

The bloody gown was the first layer of deception.

The substitute body was the second.

Raymond had worked it out long before. He would make me point to the wrong thing over and over, until my madness was beyond dispute.

4: 4

Because a body had turned up in the basement, they hauled me back to the precinct for questioning.

Kyros Capital's legal team arrived and bailed me out on grounds of insufficient evidence.

But the moment I stepped out of the precinct, notice from the board reached me.

Three directors had jointly moved for a mandatory psychiatric evaluation.

Some of the accounts under my name were frozen too, on suspicion of insider trading.

Raymond didn't just want to silence me. He wanted to swallow Kyros Capital whole.

That night I didn't go home. I slipped into the Farley villa alone.

I went in through a side door with cameras on purpose, and let a bodyguard find me in a third-floor guest room on purpose.

Raymond didn't call the police, just as I'd expected.

He locked me in the room Elise used to live in.

The false Elise came in carrying a bowl of calming broth.

"Vanessa, why are you back again?"

She set the bowl on the nightstand.

"Raymond already promised me. As long as you agree to treatment, he won't hurt you."

"He's stripped me down to nothing, and you're still speaking up for him?"

I let the exhaustion and pain show on my face.

"Elise, when did we become like this?"

The false Elise sat down beside me.

"From the moment you refused to accept that I'd grown up."

"Is that so?"

I looked at her.

"Then do you still remember what the old director left us as a dowry, right before she died?"

She paused a few seconds, then drew a jade peace-clasp pendant from her collar.

"Of course I remember. A pair of peace-clasp pendants."

"You're wrong."

"The old director was so poor she couldn't even afford painkillers. Where would she get jade?"

I tore the pendant off her neck and smashed it hard against the floor.

"What she gave us were two plastic hairpins from a dollar store."

The expression froze on the false Elise's face.

"Elise kept hers in a tin box. For more than ten years she couldn't bear to wear it."

I pressed closer.

"You read her memories, but you'll never understand why a two-dollar thing could be worth more than jade."

"Because you never went hungry with her, never picked through trash with her, never carried her ten kilometers down a mountain road when her heart gave out."

"And you were never in that fire, listening to her tell me over and over, Vanessa, you can't fall asleep."

The tenderness in the false Elise's eyes drained away, bit by bit.

"You think you understand her?"

Her voice turned old and hoarse all at once.

"It wasn't your name she called out before she died."

My heart felt like a knife had gone into it.

"What did you say?"

"She kept calling for Raymond."

The false Elise leaned in close to my face.

"She begged Raymond to let her go, begged him for the sake of what they'd been to each other, to give her a quick end."

"As for you, she said only one thing."

"Don't let Vanessa know."

My tears spilled before I could stop them.

That really was something Elise would say.

The false Elise began to laugh.

"But look at you now. The one she gave her life to protect, and we dragged her in anyway."

I lifted a hand and wiped the tears away.

"Thank you for telling me."

"What?"

"Thank you for letting me know she was protecting me right up to the last second."

The Primordial Gold Thread shot out from my sleeve and wound around her wrist.

She let out a shrill, agonized scream.

Black blood seeped from the edges of her skin, and dense lines of stitching surfaced across her face.

I pulled the thread taut.

"You don't deserve to wear her face."

The door crashed open.

Raymond stood outside with his bodyguards.

"I knew all along you got caught on purpose."

He raised a pistol and aimed it at my chest.

"Vanessa, you really are harder to handle than Elise."

"At least she couldn't bring herself to be truly cruel to me. You've never had a heart at all."

"My heart, I gave all of it to her."

I looked at him.

"What's left is only enough to kill you."