Jade Venus Extra Quality · Must Read

As the crowd dispersed, I was mopping near the pillar closest to her table. I shouldn’t have spoken. But my mouth opened before my fear could stop it.

“Wei Dong found this in the tomb,” the old woman said. “He knew what it meant. He wore it for luck. But when he died, he gave it to his wife and told her to wear it every Friday at Table Seven. Not to scare his enemies. To wait.” jade venus

They called her Jade Venus. Not to her face, of course. To her face, she was simply Mrs. Wei, the widow of the Dragon of the South China Sea, a man who’d once owned half of Cotai before a stroke felled him at fifty-two. But behind her back, in the smoky whispers of the junket operators and the sigh of the mahjong tiles, she was Jade Venus—a statue carved from nephrite, cold and priceless and utterly untouchable. As the crowd dispersed, I was mopping near