11 years of love – Mafia boss marries her: “This is protection, not romance”
The humid air of the city clung to Lan’s skin like a second, unwanted layer, mocking her reflection in the cracked vanity mirror that sat atop her cluttered desk. She spent hours every night tracing the faint lines around her eyes and the dullness of her complexion, wondering where the vibrant girl she once was had disappeared. Beauty was not just a desire in this town; it was a currency, a shield, and a weapon, and Lan felt she was slowly becoming bankrupt in all three categories.
“Why do you look so tired lately, Lan?” her colleague asked while they shared a meager lunch of cold rice and stir-fried greens in the dim office pantry.
Lan forced a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, feeling the weight of the makeup she had used to hide the dark circles that seemed to grow deeper. “It’s just the stress of the new project,” she lied, though the truth was that she had been spending her nights scrolling through forums about eternal youth. Her obsession had started small, a few creams here and there, but it had spiraled into a desperate search for something more permanent and far more effective.
The rumors of the “Skin Beauty” treatment had reached her through a whisper in a dark corner of a beauty clinic she used to frequent. They spoke of a woman named Madam Huong who lived on the outskirts of the city, in a house that smelled of incense and something metallic. Madam Huong didn’t use chemicals or lasers; she used “essence,” a word that sounded poetic until one considered what exactly needed to be distilled to create it.
Lan found herself standing before a weathered wooden gate that groaned as she pushed it open, revealing a courtyard filled with jars of various sizes. The air here was cooler, almost unnaturally so, and the silence was broken only by the rhythmic sound of someone grinding something in a heavy stone mortar. She clutched her purse tightly, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird, but her vanity was a stronger force than her mounting primal fear.
“I have been waiting for you, child,” a voice rasped from the shadows of the porch, belonging to a woman whose skin was impossibly smooth.
Madam Huong stepped into the light, and Lan gasped; the woman looked like a porcelain doll, her face devoid of any natural lines or human imperfections. Her eyes, however, remained old and yellowed, creating a jarring contrast with the youthful sheen of her cheeks and the tight pull of her perfect jawline. She gestured for Lan to enter the house, where the smell of burning sage struggled to mask a cloying, sweet scent that reminded Lan of overripe lilies.
“I want to be beautiful again,” Lan whispered, her voice trembling as she sat on a low wooden stool, surrounded by the shadows of the flickering candles.
The old woman tilted her head, a slow and deliberate movement that seemed to stretch the skin of her neck to its absolute limit without breaking. “Beauty is not a gift; it is a transfer,” Madam Huong replied, her fingers tracing the air around Lan’s face as if she were already carving a statue. “To gain something so precious, something else must be discarded, and you must be willing to live with the silence that follows the change you seek.”
Lan didn’t care about the philosophical warnings; she only cared about the reflection she saw in the mirror every morning, the one that made her weep. “I am willing to do anything,” she said, her resolve hardening like cooling wax as she looked into those yellowed eyes that seemed to see her soul. Madam Huong smiled, a thin line that didn’t involve the rest of her face, and reached for a small, ornate jar that was sealed with red silk.
The first treatment involved a thick, cold paste that felt like wet earth being pressed into her pores, followed by a series of sharp, stinging needles. Lan gritted her teeth, refusing to cry out even as she felt her skin tightening and burning under the influence of the mysterious substances being applied. She felt as though her face was being peeled away and replaced by something colder, something that didn’t belong to the biology she was born with years ago.
“Keep your face covered for three days,” the woman instructed as she wrapped Lan’s head in white bandages, leaving only small slits for her eyes and nose.
Lan returned home in a daze, the world looking distorted through the narrow gaps in the fabric, her skin pulsing with a rhythmic, heavy throb of life. She stayed in her darkened apartment, avoiding the phone and the door, listening to the sound of her own breathing and the scratching of rats in walls. Every hour, the tightening grew more intense, as if invisible hands were pulling her features toward a central point, reshaping her identity in the cold, lonely dark.
On the third night, the itching began—a deep, visceral sensation that felt like insects crawling beneath the surface of her muscles, seeking a way to escape. She wanted to tear the bandages off, to scream and claw at her own flesh, but she remembered the porcelain face of Madam Huong and held her hands. She fell into a feverish sleep where she dreamt of gardens made of human hair and rivers of milk that turned into blood when she tried to drink.
When the sun rose on the fourth day, Lan stood before her bathroom mirror, her fingers trembling as she reached for the knot of the white bandages. The fabric fell away in coils, revealing a face that she barely recognized—a face so radiant, so smooth, and so hauntingly perfect that it took her breath. She touched her cheek and felt no warmth, only a smooth, marble-like surface that didn’t give way under her touch, a mask of eternal and cold youth.
“It worked,” she breathed, her voice sounding different, more melodic and hollow, as if it were echoing through a long and empty marble hallway in her chest.
She went back to work, and the reaction was immediate; everyone stared, their eyes filled with a mixture of intense envy and a strange, deep-seated discomfort. They complimented her, but they didn’t linger near her, as if they could sense the unnatural chill that now radiated from her pores whenever she walked past. Lan didn’t mind the distance; she felt superior, a goddess among mortals, her skin a masterpiece that demanded worship even if it didn’t allow for any love.
However, the “Skin Beauty” treatment had a secret that Madam Huong had only hinted at—the need for maintenance that became more gruesome with every passing week. A month after the procedure, Lan noticed a small grey spot near her hairline, a patch of decay that wouldn’t go away no matter how much cream she used. The spot was cold to the touch and smelled faintly of the jars in the old woman’s courtyard, a reminder that the transfer was never truly completed.
She rushed back to the house on the outskirts, her perfection cracking like a dry riverbed, her heart racing with the fear of losing her new identity. Madam Huong was waiting, her own porcelain face still as perfect as before, though her yellowed eyes seemed even more sunken and hollowed than they were. “The essence is fading,” the old woman said without being asked, her voice a dry rustle of dead leaves against the stone floor of the dark house.
“What do I need to do to fix it?” Lan cried, her voice cracking as she touched the grey patch that was slowly spreading toward her temple.
The old woman pointed to a small knife on the table, its blade thin and curved like a crescent moon, gleaming with a dark and sinister intent. “The essence comes from life,” she whispered, leaning closer so that Lan could see the fine, transparent threads that held the woman’s own skin in place. “You must find a donor, someone young and healthy, and you must take what you need while the spirit is still clinging to the dying body’s warmth.”
Lan recoiled in horror, but then she looked at her reflection in a silver tray and saw the grey decay creeping down toward her eye like a shadow. The thought of returning to her old self, or worse, becoming a rotting husk, was more terrifying than the prospect of the crime she was being asked. Her vanity had become a parasite, a living entity that demanded blood and flesh to sustain its own unnatural and frozen existence in the world of men.
She thought of the young girl who lived in the apartment next to hers, a student with glowing skin and a laughter that rang through the thin walls. That night, Lan invited her over for tea, her perfect face a mask of friendliness that hid the predatory hunger growing in the dark depths of her soul. The girl didn’t suspect a thing, admiring Lan’s beauty even as the tea, laced with Madam Huong’s “essence,” began to make her head heavy and her limbs weak.
When the girl finally slumped over the table, Lan felt a moment of hesitation, the last vestige of her humanity flickering like a candle in a cold wind. Then, she saw the grey spot in the mirror, now the size of a coin, and the hesitation vanished, replaced by a cold and clinical need for survival. She picked up the curved knife and felt the sharpness of the edge against her thumb, a silent promise of the beauty that was about to be restored.
The ritual was messy and silent, a series of precise cuts that Lan performed with a steady hand she didn’t know she possessed until this very moment. She applied the fresh essence to her face, feeling the warmth of the life she had stolen seeping into her pores, pushing back the grey decay of death. As the color returned to her cheeks, the girl on the floor grew pale and cold, her own beauty drained away like water from a broken and discarded vessel.
Lan lived this way for years, a cycle of murder and rejuvenation that kept her face perfect while her soul became a blackened and twisted thing in the dark. She moved often, never staying in one place long enough for people to notice that she never aged, and that the people around her often disappeared. She became a legend in the underworld of the obsessed, the “Skin Beauty” who had found the secret to immortality, a goddess built on a foundation of bone.
But even the most perfect masks must eventually crumble, and Lan found that the essence required grew more potent and more frequent with every passing decade of her. The donors needed to be younger, their lives more vibrant, until she was hunting children in the parks, her heart a hollow chamber of absolute and cold despair. One night, as she prepared the knife for a new victim, she looked in the mirror and saw not herself, but the face of Madam Huong staring back.
The yellowed eyes were her own now, and the porcelain skin was no longer a mask but a prison that she could never escape, even in the cold grave. She realized then that Madam Huong was not a practitioner, but a predecessor, another victim of the “Skin Beauty” who had passed the curse on to her. The transfer was never about beauty; it was about the continuation of a hunger that had existed long before they were born and would exist long after.
She dropped the knife, the metal clattering on the floor like a death knell, and she looked at the child she had kidnapped, who was crying silently. For the first time in centuries, Lan felt a pang of genuine pity, a spark of the girl she used to be before the vanity had consumed her whole. She realized that the only way to end the cycle was to let the decay take her, to embrace the rotting truth that lay beneath the perfect mask.
She walked out into the moonlight, the grey spots appearing all over her body now, the porcelain skin cracking and falling away in large, dusty white flakes. People on the street screamed as they saw her—a beautiful woman turning into a skeletal remain in the span of a few blocks, her eyes turning yellow. She didn’t stop until she reached the old house on the outskirts, but the gate was gone, and the courtyard was nothing but a pile of ash.
Madam Huong was gone, but the smell of incense and metallic blood remained, a ghost of the greed that had fueled their lives for so many years. Lan sat on the ground, her skin now a patchwork of grey and bone, feeling the wind for the first time in centuries as it touched her soul. She closed her eyes and waited for the silence, the one that the old woman had warned her about, the silence that follows the end of beauty.
As the sun began to rise, there was nothing left of the “Skin Beauty” but a pile of fine white dust that the wind carried away into the city. The legend persisted, a whisper in the dark corners of beauty clinics, a warning to those who would trade their humanity for a face that never dies. But for Lan, there was only the peace of being forgotten, the ultimate beauty of finally returning to the earth from which all life and death spring.
In the end, the cost of the mask was more than any life was worth, a lesson learned too late in the shadows of an obsessed world. The jars in the courtyard remained empty, waiting for the next person who would walk through the gate and ask to be beautiful at any price. And somewhere in the humid air of the city, a new whisper began, a new story of a woman who could give you the skin of a goddess.
The cycle continues, for vanity is a hunger that never truly dies as long as there are mirrors and eyes to see what they want to see. Beauty is a fleeting shadow, but the desire for it is an eternal flame that burns through the souls of the weak and the desperate for love. Lan’s story was just one chapter in a book that has no end, a tale of skin and bone and the darkness that lives in the heart.
“Are you ready for your treatment?” a new voice whispered from the shadows of a new house, to a new girl who was tired of her face.
The girl smiled, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird, but her vanity was a stronger force than her mounting and primal fear. She stepped into the house, and the smell of burning sage struggled to mask the cloying, sweet scent that reminded her of overripe and dying lilies. The transfer was about to begin again, a beautiful mask for a soul that was already beginning to fade into the cold and lonely dark of eternity.
