1 Prologue - Eros and Love

Alicia didn't believe in the idea of love.

She saw somewhere in one of the books she had read as a University kid to make herself look smart that romantic love is dubbed as 'Eros' and that the 'love catalyst' for it was the 'physical body'.

'What a bunch of pretentious crap.' She had thought.

In her mind, none of the labeling was needed. 'Eros' just meant you wanted to sleep with the person you're infatuated with, and 'love catalyst' that is the 'physical body' meant that you found someone hot enough to spend a night with. At least, in her mind, the whole Greek letterings and construction of psychological theories about the idea of romantic love is unneeded, nor about any type of love for that matter. You find someone hot, you want to sleep with them, and 'true love' just meant that you were willing to put in the effort to engage in that endeavor. If the nights started to get stale, so did love, and that's just the extent that the so-called 'eros' or 'love catalyst' or whatever went. Nothing more, nothing less.

Putting that aside, although Alicia didn't believe in 'eros', she knew exactly how to exploit those who did. She had - at least to the society's standards - the perfect 'love catalyst'; her face and her body.

A snow white skin with a sharp, angled nose. Slightly big, deep brown eyes that did a whole lot into crafting her somewhat 'cutesy' image along with her small mouth, and her makeup was engineered to achieve a more 'natural' look, with minimum shades and sacrificing the definitions on the eyebrows and instead putting more effort into further whitening of the skin, as well as shading the lips slightly more pink to make them shine.

"I haven't done my makeup today." She'd say to her nearbys after all her engineering was done.

"I just didn't have enough time. I could only afford to put on some lip balm."

Her hair was smooth but pitch black, just about reached her shoulders. She preferred that exact length because it was easy to manipulate, as it could be tied up to give a more brightened, tidy feel or it could be left alone for a 'sexier' look; all depending on whom she was meeting.

Thin neck, visible chest bones, breast size hitting around 37D. 165 centimeters in height and 57 kilograms in weight. She was short enough to be shorter than the average male, but tall enough to be able to be imposing when she wished to show off her proportions which, as a matter of fact, looked further good with her long legs.

She thought, based on her experience alone, the secret to her beauty was that she looked just Asian enough to appeal to the western boys and just western enough to appeal to the Asian boys. Her pride was quite high. She indeed would be the centre of attention whenever she walks into a room with black off-shoulder shirts with slight cleavage to highlight her upper half and tight, slim-fit jeans to highlight her lower half, with her hair tied up in a bun to show off her neck. She knew, better than anybody, she was the best looking girl in the room, and that her blessed genes were her weapon.

She was a deadly woman, with two puppets by her string; A rose that looked beautiful but smelt of void.

That's what Alicia was, until I met her.