Chapter 1
With the holiday season approaching, I had just finished working overtime until midnight and walked out of the company when I ran straight into Tyler Brooks.
When he saw me handing over the USB drive containing the year-end financial report, he immediately flicked the half-smoked cigarette from his mouth into my face.
“Didn’t I say ten o’clock? How dare you make me wait out in the cold for two whole hours!”
Sparks from the cigarette butt scattered across my face, and I sucked in a sharp breath, instantly wide awake.
Before I could say a word, the two thugs standing beside Tyler kicked me to the ground.
I was already numb to it all, so I merely covered my head and curled my body into a ball to avoid being seriously injured.
Things like this happened every so often.
Tyler acted like the company’s little tyrant because he had been placed there by one of the company’s executives.
It was all because I hadn’t offered him a drink when he first joined the company, and that had made me his target.
He not only led our coworkers in isolating me at work, forcing me to shoulder the entire team’s workload by myself and work overtime for a full month, but also brought street thugs to beat and insult me whenever he was in a bad mood.
He claimed that his uncle was the police chief, and whenever he bullied me, he made sure to choose blind spots outside the security cameras, so there was nothing I could do to him.
A sharp pain shot through my chest, and my eyes filled with tears.
The next second, one of the thugs grabbed my hair and forced my head up.
“Hey, look at this! This useless coward is actually crying!”
“A grown man crying? What a disgrace!”
As soon as he finished speaking, they tried to flick the cigarette butt into my mouth, so I struggled desperately, and the jade pendant hidden beneath my collar slipped out.
Tyler’s eyes lit up, and he bent down to yank the pendant from my neck, holding it in his hand and examining it.
“This pendant looks pretty valuable. It’s mine now!”
“No!”
I twisted my body with all my strength and glared at him with reddened eyes. “That belonged to my family. You can’t take it!”
But he merely sneered, then threw the pendant onto the ground right in front of me and crushed it beneath his shoe.
Apparently, that still wasn’t cruel enough for him, because he ground his foot against it several more times until the round pendant had turned to powder and could never be repaired, and only then did he slowly lift his foot.
Tyler’s expression was incredibly arrogant. “That’s disgusting. You actually carry a dead man’s junk around with you. What if it brings me bad luck? Do you think I won’t kill you?”
I stared wide-eyed at the pendant he had crushed and roared, “You animal! I’m going to kill you!”
The moment the words left my mouth, a burst of strength came from somewhere inside me, and I slammed into the thug who had been holding me down before driving my fist into Tyler’s face.
My grandfather had placed that pendant around my neck with his own hands. He told me that it had accompanied him through the war and even saved his life, making it his good-luck charm.
He had given that protective charm to me, hoping it could stay by my side in his place for the rest of my life.
On countless lonely nights, whenever I missed my family, I would take out the pendant and hold it in my palm, feeling its warmth slowly spread through my hand, as if I were holding my grandfather’s hand.
But now, everything was ruined.
Tears blurred my vision as I crouched down and carefully gathered the fragments from the ground with both hands, trying to piece the pendant back together.
But it was useless.
Tyler hadn’t expected me to fight back, and my punch sent him staggering two steps backward. Once he recovered, he ordered his thugs to grab me and declared that he was going to teach me a lesson.
“If you walk out of this street in one piece today, I’ll take your last name!”