The next morning, Mo Chen put her plan into action. She called her mother.
"Mom," she said, her voice carefully laced with stress. "I'm having a crisis."
"What's wrong, Chen?" Ye Xia's voice was instantly alert.
"It's the wedding. The pressure… it's making me do strange things. I've been… shopping. A lot. And not just shopping. I bought a car yesterday and… I crashed it."
It was a lie, but a plausible one. The wrecked Bugatti was her evidence.
There was a pause on the other end. "Are you hurt?"
"No, no, I'm fine. The car is totaled. And then I went and bought a bunch of electronics and… I don't know, I just started breaking them. It's like I have all this nervous energy and I don't know what to do with it!" She let a sob catch in her throat, a masterful performance born of genuine, if misdirected, emotion.
She was describing a textbook stress-induced breakdown. For a young heiress about to marry, it was entirely believable.
"Chen, listen to me," Ye Xia said, her voice calm and steady. "This is normal. Your instincts are trying to tell you something. This is a huge life change. Do you… do you want to postpone?"
"No!" Mo Chen said, a little too quickly. "No, I want to marry Julian. I just… I think I need an outlet. A project. Something to channel this… this energy."
"What kind of project?"
"I want to start an art collection. A really aggressive, high-impact one. I'm talking auctions, private sales, buying pieces and… I don't know, maybe even deconstructing them. It's a form of expression." It was the perfect cover. The art world was a known haven for money laundering and bizarre, profligate spending. Destroying art could be framed as a radical artistic statement.
Ye Xia was silent for a long moment. Mo Chen could almost feel her mother's powerful intuition reaching through the phone, probing for the truth she was hiding.
"Alright," Ye Xia said finally. "If this is what you need. Use your trust fund. But Chen… be careful. Fire can be a tool, but it can also consume you."
The warning, so apt, sent a shiver down Mo Chen's spine. "I know, Mom. Thank you."
She hung up, her cover secured. Now, she could burn in plain sight.