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Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd - A.R Duarte

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245 pages

English

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Joana d''Aragon and her best friend Maria embark on a journey of a lifetime. Two European girls in their 20s move to Macau to pursue an unbelievable career path, they are courtesans and flow around the most important elites in china, from bankers to casino owners to the worst mafia in Asia. One of Joana''s clients is Patrick Zhang, a casino magnate that rules half of the Southeast Asia region. Joana and Patrick end up embarking on a dangerous path, choosing to be together, putting both their lives in danger, for what would become an almost live threatening, dangerous love.

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Thriller

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Publié par	Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
Date de parution	31 janvier 2020
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781528972864
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0175€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Face of Danger
Ride or Die
A.R. Duarte
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-01-31
The Face of Danger About the author Copyright Information © Chapter 1 Only in Darkness You Can See the Stars Macau, November 28 2017. Chapter 2 The Making of a Star Chapter 3 The Negative Denominator Chapter 4 The Awakening of a Monster Chapter 5 The Silence of the Innocents Chapter 6 The Rise of the Moon Chapter 7 Miss Dangerous Woman Chapter 8 The Beginning of the End Chapter 9 The Eclipse of Danger Chapter 10 The Making of a Dragon
About the author

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A.R. Duarte is a twenty-eight-year-old writer born and raised in Lisbon, Portugal. She began her writing adventure in Singapore, at the age of twenty-five and has now published her first manuscript named, The Face of Danger I – Ride or Die.
A.R.’s sense of writing is inspired by subjects such as impossible romantic, dark stories, replete with a sense of loss and rebirth. The author also likes to portray the women’s figure as the centre of action, emphasizing their sense of femininity combined with a strong sense of willpower and conquering, above all.
In her books, A.R. also develops the deconstruction of society’s paradigms. Going in more depth into the perception of right and the wrong, the good and the evil in her intricate characters, creating reasoning behind their actions.
Copyright Information ©
A.R. Duarte (2020)
The right of A.R. Duarte to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528950886 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528972864 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Chapter 1

Only in Darkness You Can See the Stars

Macau, November 28 2017.
The rush at the end of the day was down by 8:30 pm, all the casinos’ and motels’ lights of small Macau were on, ready for another night of danger and forgetfulness. The city completely changed from day to night, passing from a scary, degraded, forgotten city to a city of sins, where anything can happen.
On number seven of Fisherman Street was built a colonial-type conglomerate of apartments, left from when the Portuguese still inhabited the city decades ago.
This building fitted perfectly in the grossly Chinese dirty resemble streets.
Here, all the inhabitants had something in common; they were often called misfits, or leftovers of the society. This community was filled with families and singles. You could see clearly in their eyes that their hopes, expectations, and dreams had left their souls a long time ago. Their eyes were full of disbelief and sadness, an immersion of the emptiness of thoughts. They had nothing left to look forward to in life, and that was the factor that would kill them slowly, rotting their souls…
You see, to me, there are two types of people in the world—the ones that live and the ones that survive, and in Macau, specifically, either you make it or you don’t, and when you don’t, you become a burden to the society—the lower cast. The type of person that societies and governments seem to discriminate, or seem to avoid, or simply seem too busy to remember that they, in fact, to even acknowledge their presence.
From drug addicts to prostitutes, coming from the four corners of the globe, searching for a new life, a better life, or just a simple light at the end of the tunnel. Whole families living under the same roof, numerous families, packed into tiny dorms, illegal immigrants coming from China mostly, from those containers that take months to arrive at the shore, to old people, just rotting on benches like rats, forgotten by their loved ones, another lifetime ago.
There was not one day in that building that something new would not happen, from gunshots, police enforcement, people getting injured and killed, to drug overdoses. Nothing was unheard or unseen around Fisherman Street, and things escalated for worse on a daily basis. Horrible noises of people screaming and just talking loudly in foreign dialects, so many of them, countless. It was truly the building of horrors where no one would come in, and few would ever come out.
The building was degraded, falling apart, roofs leaking, holes in the floor and walls, dirt, pure, disgusting, filthy, dead animals laying around with their decomposed bodies, old people that had deceased weeks ago on their beds, alone, purely alone, and no one would realise it or care for what mattered. Social care would come once a week to deliver food and proper medicine but it was far from enough and would never get to all the people in need in time.
I know what you are thinking… as a poor community people would have created kind of a tight bond, behaving like a strong foundation, but that was clearly not the case on the Sea Paradise Conglomerate of the Fisherman Street. It was everyone for themselves, and there was not a single soul that could count on anybody.
Not only people would encapsulate themselves in the safety of their homes, but they would ensure to lock their doors and to leave the house only when it would be strictly necessary. There was no common space that they would use for BBQs or let alone have their children play outside with other children. They would see Sea Paradise not as a place of living, but a place of hiding from the rest of the society, feeling ashamed of living in that piece of evil, a place forgotten by God.
If someone was leaving their house, to avoid seeing their neighbours or engage in any type of conversation, the others would abruptly close their door and locks and wait for the coast to be clear. And it has always been like that and it was always going to be like that…
In spite of that, there were still family feuds, gangs of different ethnicities and rivalries that would, most of the times, result in destruction and violence that would last for weeks, months, and sometimes even years between families. The police would never come! They would not dare to put their own lives in danger for gangster feuds, and just for the record, they were way too busy cleaning money from the only places that matter, casinos and massage parlours. No one would care about rusty souls feuding for territory or an excess of a noise complaint.
Many of these policemen would double as security guards for the mafia lords and the businessmen that would come from Hong Kong and China to clean their money and have a good time, whatever that good time or leisure activities would involve… But let’s not jump to conclusions just yet, Macau is only Macau due to these types of men and organised gangs that transformed a commonplace into one of the main sources of money laundering in all the Central Asian region. And can you imagine that this little city of sin, a dumpster by day, is a moneymaking machine by night? According to the New York Times , Macau makes more than 22% in revenues than Vegas. And you are thinking, wait a minute that is not relevant at all. Now hear this, Macau is 30.5 km² and Las Vegas is 352 km²’ not double, not triple, 10 times the size of the former. Getting back to our story…
On the third floor of the Sea Paradise, among all those terrifying people that I described earlier would reside some decent ones. What do I mean about decent? People that would have regular jobs or people that would work but as much as they would earn, rivers of money, they could not declare it, so they would choose to live in a dumpster to leave the suspicions behind them, making these people blend into society without getting themselves noticed. And what type of people am I talking about? You guessed it… working girls… escorts… hookers… masseuses… and what is the other name that they have for it? Courtesans… Yes, that one is my favourite! Sounds fancy, don’t you think?
Although there were many such girls living in the Sea Paradise conglomerate, our story will revolve around two young girls in their mid-20s. Their names were Joana and Maria. Have you noticed the European names? Caucasians! Let’s call them that, in truth, it is the way Asians call white people, Caucasians! This probably won’t tell you much, but they shared a strong bond, a connection for life. Although they did not share the same blood or heritage, they were certain that they would be in each other’s lives until death did them apart.
What was so special about them was the fact that they were daughters of former expats from Macau. You know Macau, the old Portuguese colony? Macau was colonised by the Portuguese for exactly 442 years, from 1887 onwards. The girls’ parents were Portuguese citizens that were born and raised in Macau in the ’60s. Their ancestors came and fought for this land, the exotic land that gave them the pride they once had to be called the most adventurous people on the face of the world, the adventurous and the fearless Portuguese. Their ancestors had a special love for little Macau because it was a piece of heaven, the small piece of Europe in Asia. They were also of course respected, treated like kings, and rolled the imports and exports from the Orient to the Occident. The men would command the fields of rice and tea as the Macanese soil was fertile, and the Portuguese women would teach the Macanese children the saint language, the Portuguese dialect, still spoken today by many families in Macau. The Macanese were receptive of the language, as it was easier for them for some reason to forget th