Prologue
With a loud sigh, the manager of the agency entered his office and dumped his bag carelessly on the ground, nudging the door close with his foot before trudging to his desk. A tray of envelopes and letters, spilling with long-winded contracts and documents, made Myou Jyuan wish, at that very moment, for a cup of scalding hot black coffee. With three cubes of sugar.
He flipped through the mail, scanning through the ones that looked important, and throwing the ones that didn't back into the tray for tomorrow. "Advertisements, billboards, magazines," he mumbled, thumbing through the stack when his eye suddenly fell on a plain brown envelope. On it was scrawled, in his chief photographer's slightly loopy handwriting, 'Chinoarov Competition Results'. He looked at the large brown envelope, back to the stack of papers, and then made a snap decision, shoving the remainder of unsorted mail into the drawer and reaching for the former instead.
He walked around the large desk and planted himself in the soft, high-backed chair with an exhalation, still holding the envelope in one hand. With a silent prayer, he opened the flap, and shook the photographs out onto the tabletop.
The first photo that caught his attention was of one of the agency's own models, Nuriko. The backdrop was a cloudy shade of sky-blue, and the object of advertisement was a brand of drink. Houjun had captured the model's tall, willow-like profile superbly on his lens, but the picture had only obtained a third placing in the Photographic Section.
He made a reminder to himself to put the photograph of Nuriko into the violet-haired man's portfolio, and then continued looking through the pictures, when he saw the brightly-labeled photograph from deep within the stack with the words 'First Prize for Cover Girl Section' scribbled on it. He pulled it out, and blinked.
The model had been captured against a soft, pastel turquoise background, and was turned half-away from the camera with the face looking full into the center. And it was the face that captured Myou Jyuan.
Smooth, with high cheekbones and straight, charmingly asymmetrical features, half-lidded eyes that were outlined with smoky mascara, immediately expressed both sensuality and definition. Lips painted a light pale pink were slightly parted in a small smile, and there was a stubborn, almost masculine tilt to the lines of the jaw and face itself. A smooth curtain of rich, deep-rose colored hair framed and fell lightly to the sides of the face. Clothed in a simple black dress, with only a silver choker around a slender neck, the model practically radiated with inner light.
Below the photograph, in a small, neat print that marked the official tag of the competition entry was the name Tasu Leika.