When He Liked Others, I’ll Tame Him

Chapter 2

I spun on my heel and headed back to my room, flicked my lighter to light a cigarette, and huffed out a frustrated breath. My mood was absolute garbage.

The text from my parents had popped up on my phone two full hours ago, and I still hadn’t bothered to reply.

Mom: Marge, your sister's going to stay with you for the next few days. Be nice to each other, okay? Don't lose your temper again.

Lose my temper? Why on earth would I?

I wasn’t about to give Kaila any opening to smear my name.

That girl and I have never gotten along. I still couldn’t figure out what got into her to suddenly demand she crash at my place for a while.

Kaila is my parents’ adopted daughter.

When I was three years old, I got kidn*pped and sold off to a remote mountain village. I stayed there for eleven whole years.

When I was fourteen, I was out bent over hoeing the fields when my parents showed up out of nowhere. They told me I was their biological daughter.

My stomach twisted with nerves as I walked back into the house that had lost me all those years ago. The first person I saw was her, glowing, polished, and spoiled rotten by money.

She was so pretty, dressed up like a real-life princess, dripping with designer goods from head to toe. Next to her, I was just a scruffy, dirt-streaked outsider.

That’s when I found out: just one year after I went missing, they adopted a girl the same age as me.

At first, I really did think this girl, who wasn’t related to me by blood, would try to get along with me.

That was until my parents left, and she leaned right into my ear and hissed these words, "Let me tell you something. I’ve been in this family way longer than you have. I’m the real daughter of this house." She gave me a dirty look. "Mom and Dad have only ever loved me. Don’t think you can just waltz back in and call this yours. I’ll never let you get what you want. Don’t you dare try to steal what’s mine."

Funny, huh? She’d lived in my house long enough that she actually thought it belonged to her.

But if this had been a few years back, I might’ve still craved my parents’ love. Now? I’m just grateful I escaped that godforsaken mountain hole, and I milk my parents’ money for every cent it’s worth.

After all, Kaila will never know the truth: the night before my parents came to pick me up, I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to get out of that damn forced marriage to a mute man that was only two weeks away.

My parents must’ve seen how awkward and out of place I was. They didn’t say a word, just quietly handed me a black card with no spending limit.

I’d been poor my whole life, so even with all that money at my fingertips, I still couldn’t bring myself to splurge much. I only bought a few nice sets of clothes to look decent, and I secretly opened my own personal bank account to transfer money into it every single month.

When I turned eighteen, my parents could tell how uncomfortable I felt living under the same roof as everyone else, so they gifted me an entire private villa. It was their way of making up for the eleven years they’d lost with me.

She never got anything like that.

Green-eyed envy ate at her, but she never let my parents see a single trace of it.

That two-faced act of hers made me sick to my stomach. I’m nothing like her. If I like money, I just like money, straight up.

Money’s the best thing in the world, if you ask me.

That’s why I never spared any expense on Ronan, even though he never gets close to me, and he cost me a fortune to begin with.

The food I feed him is always the priciest stuff, imported by air from overseas. I change out the seawater he lives in every single day, and I regularly top it off with a 30,000-dollar nutrient solution, one ampule per treatment. I even hired the best maintenance team to look after the scales on his tail.

That’s exactly why, when Jade saw him for the first time, the first thing she said was, "That three million you spent? It’s totally worth it. Take good care of him, and you’ll find out how fun he is soon enough."

I ended up buying him just because she got one first. I followed the trend.

After all, I’d grown into a full-grown woman by then. My hormones were raging, pushing me straight into what feels like another whole damned abyss.

Compared to building a real intimate relationship with some guy whose personality I don’t even know, this kind of transactional arrangement fit me way better, no question about it.

Safe. Attentive. Forever obedient.

That’s the slogan in the mermaid shop.

Though, up to this point, it hasn’t actually held true.