Continued from The Dethroned Caesar of Murang’a III
Lilian is 34. She comes from an impoverished family, and when she dropped out of school in class eight, it seemed as though her destiny in poverty had been confirmed. Like her elder sisters, she found employment as her house help. Her two sisters had gotten sexually involved with their employers and other losers, and as a result, had popped children like rabbits without getting any support from the donors of the male seeds. That is the one thing that Lilian wanted to avoid, which probably should have been the earliest sign that she was different from the rest of her family.
She was far from pure, sexually or otherwise. If anything, she was and still is probably more wicked than her sisters. Her younger sisters were just naïve girls who fell prey to the seductions of the male gender. Lilian, even from the age of 14, when she dropped out of school, was determined to be the predator. That is why the first thing she did was to get a long-term contraceptive. It gave her a lot of sexual freedom-especially because she considered pregnancy a bigger obstacle than STDs. Sex is not just for pleasure to her, but a tool of manipulation. She has used it powerfully in the last twenty years.
The first man she entrapped also happened to be her first employer, a man called Joseph. Joseph and his wife Eunice were both secondary school teachers. They lived about five hundred meters from where he worked, but Eunice worked in a different school about twenty kilometers away. To get to work, she drove their car because her husband did not need it to get to work.
The man of the house, Joseph, was a mischievous he-goat. He seduced her and started sleeping with her on her second week in his house. He would come to the house during the day when his wife and kids were away in school, and he would make love to her before going back to school. Joseph and Eunice lived in a three-bedroom house, built on a half-acre of land that they had purchased some ten years before Lilian joined the household. At the time, Lilian came to learn later, they had both been teaching at the school, but Eunice later got transferred.
Lilian allowed Joseph to have her body for about three months before she made her first move. To be fair, she was enjoying the experience-not just the sexual thrill, but also the fact that she was having something that Eunice thought was exclusively hers. Lilian resented Eunice. The woman was brutal: she always spoke to Lilian harshly, often hurling insults at her over the smallest of misdemeanors. She beat up Lilian a few times.
Sometimes Lilian thought Eunice knew about her behind-the-scenes activities with her husband. But that could not be true. Eunice treated her husband with the same harshness she treated Lilian. If she had the slightest suspicion that Joseph was cheating, she would have hit the roof. Lilian would have been sent packing; that is without a doubt. Joseph lived in perpetual fear of his wife, and the fact that he could dare cheat on her was probably the most defiant thing he ever did. Which added flavor to their escapades.
The fact that Joseph feared his wife provided Lilian with her first advantage. Three months after they started playing adult games, she told him that she was pregnant. He panicked, and the first thing he wanted to do was to send her away. He wanted to instigate his wife to fire her. But even though she was a teenager, Lilian anticipated that. She threatened to tell Eunice what they had been doing because the worst she would do is to send her away anyway.
Joseph was a coward, and he quickly gave her money to abort the baby and more money to buy her silence. It wasn’t much, just about five thousand in total, but it was something. In fact, it was quite a lot if placed in the right context-the context being that Eunice was paying her three thousand five hundred shillings a month, for her servitude. Of course, Lilian was not pregnant; she had made sure that she wouldn’t be. Still, she showed up that Sunday-her off day-with a receipt from some backwater clinic that allegedly gave her pills to induce an abortion. She acted sick for a couple of days just to convince Joseph that the abortion was legitimate. The receipt had been generated at a cyber-café at a cost of Kshs. 100.
Lilian worked for Joseph and Eunice for five years. In all those years, she never touched the money she got from Joseph. And it was a lot. Every three months or so she would get five thousand shillings for abortion and to buy her silence. After the ‘abortion’, Joseph would use protection for a couple of days when with her and then would abandon it after getting comfortable. So the ‘pregnancy’ story would come up again and again in a cycle of three months or so.
At some point in the third year, he tried to be mischievous and refused to pay for an abortion. Perhaps he was suspecting he was getting conned because the cycle had become too perfect. He told her that if she dared speak to Eunice he would simply deny and she would be fired. Lilian firmly reminded him that the baby she was carrying was his, and even if he got Eunice to fire her, she would go and give birth and bring back the baby. Once she proved that the baby was his, he would have trouble not just with his wife, but also with the authorities because having sex with a minor is illegal.
Joseph quickly paid the obligatory five thousand shillings, which she rejected. He raised it to seven thousand shillings and that is when she accepted. Seven thousand became the new standard payment in their dealings. Joseph never tried to run away from that obligation again.
Lilian knew that her parents were struggling, especially since they now had grandchildren to bring up. But Lilian wasn’t bothered. As far as she was concerned, it was not in her place to bring up her sisters’ children. Everyone should carry their own cross. She kept her money hidden in her room for four years. For all her faults, Eunice respected Lilian’s privacy, and she never set foot in her room. The boys were also forbidden from entering her room. The only person who entered it was Joseph, and he did it with Lilian’s consent and without the knowledge of everyone else. And Joseph’s only interest was her body; he had no time to snoop around the room because he feared getting caught by his wife.
When she turned eighteen and got an ID card, Lilian opened a savings account and kept all the money there. By that time, she had been forced to buy a suitcase to keep the money. She always kept a layer of clothes on top just in case Eunice decided to spy on her. By the time she opened her account, she had close to a hundred thousand shillings saved. When she left Joseph and Eunice’s house a year later, she had added another thirty thousand.
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Lilian left Eunice and Joseph’s house because she had found a better catch. For several years, she had entertained the idea that she could dislodge Eunice from her position as the woman of the house. It was quite obvious that that marriage was not working, at least gauging from the number of nasty arguments that went on in that house…or more precisely, the number of times Eunice shouted at her husband. When the boys were shipped off to boarding school, they confided in Lilian that they were relieved because they were tired of hearing their mother shouting at their father every night.
Over time, however, it became quite obvious that Joseph would never be able to stand up to his wife, leave alone kick her out of their matrimonial home. By the time Ivan came into the picture, Lilian was contemplating a way to poison Eunice without implicating herself. She was convinced that the only way in which she would take her rightful place as Joseph’s wife would be through Eunice’s death. She would, so to speak, ‘rescue’ Joseph from his troublesome wife.
But Ivan spared her the trouble.
Ivan was a young man, but incredibly rich. He met Lilian online. While she was saving all the ‘pregnancy’ money, Lilian was using her salary to make herself beautiful. She bought beautiful dresses and made her hair beautifully. She knew she could not afford proper make-up, but that did not matter because she had a beautiful face and smooth skin. She also bought a smartphone, with which she used to take photos for her Instagram and Facebook accounts.
Ivan sent her a message on Messenger. She checked his profile, liked what she saw and decided to reply. They flirted for a couple of weeks before they met for the first time. Lilian may have dropped out of school after KCPE, but she was fluent in both written and spoken English, thanks to her stay in Joseph’s house. Everyone in Joseph’s house spoke in English, and so over five years her English was polished. Numerous novels that she read improved her ability to write. Talking to Ivan was therefore a piece of cake.
The first time she went to Ivan’s house, she was blown away. Having been brought up in a poor household, Lilian had thought that Joseph and Eunice were quite rich, with their stone house that had many of the comforts of life that Lilian’s family lacked, such as piped water inside the house, a gas cooker, a television and so forth. They even had a car, a Toyota Fielder.
But on the day they were to meet for the first time, Ivan picked her up in a Range Rover. Lilian had never been in such a vehicle before, and she was blown away. Ivan’s house turned out to be the epitome of luxury. Everything in there, including the carpets on the floor, screamed wealth. They made love on a bed that was more comfortable than she ever imagined possible. And from that moment her ambitions rose. She was no longer interested in being the wife of a secondary school teacher. She wanted more.
Lilian had told Ivan the truth about the nature of her work, so it wasn’t hard to explain why they could only meet on Sundays, which was her off day. She did not tell him about her romance with Joseph, of course. After a couple of Sundays, Ivan told her that he wanted her to move in with him. She gladly accepted. As an appreciation gift, he wired one hundred and fifty thousand shillings to her account.
That was way more than what she had saved in five years. In the five years that Lilian had worked for Eunice and slept with Joseph, she had saved one hundred and thirty-nine thousand shillings.
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Ivan is the one who introduced Lilian to the criminal world. He later told her that when he messaged her for the first time, he had been intrigued by her beauty and wanted her as a girlfriend. But after they started talking he discovered that she was brilliant and would be more than just a girlfriend. From her way of thinking, she would be his partner in more ways than one. With a little training, she would be his business partner.
Ivan’s wealth came from multiple sources, most of them shady. Ivan was involved in smuggling gold from Congo and Angola to Kuwait, Iran and the UAE; he had a gang of poachers that got him elephant tusks and rhino horns that he smuggled to China; he ran a shady agency that smuggled young girls to Saudi Arabia. And he was also involved in trafficking drugs from South America to the East African region at large. These were the main sources of his money, which he laundered through a chain of legitimate businesses: a real estate agency, a supermarket chain and a fleet of matatus.
To date, Lilian has no idea why Ivan chose her. Maybe it was her beauty as he said, but there are so many beautiful girls on social media. Besides, a man of his status had access to any kind of woman that he wanted. It was a stroke of luck. But the most important thing is that he did choose her. And in the six years that they were together, he trusted her enough to share his business secrets with her, both legal and illegal. She became not just his wife (he married her officially in a civil ceremony at the Attorney General’s office) but also his lieutenant. By the time of his death, she was his undisputed number two. Ivan was shot dead in Zurich by people Lilian suspects were business rivals. Lilian took over the criminal empire. The only regret she has is that she did not get a baby with Ivan. He always reminded her that she was young and that they had time to get babies. Little did he know that he would be dead at the tender age of 34.
Ivan was an orphan and also came from a poor family. How he got rich so quickly, even from illegal deals, remains a mystery to Lilian. He had done well for his family, establishing businesses for them and hiring some of them in his legitimate businesses. Still, after his death his siblings tried to kick her out and grab their brother’s wealth. But they underestimated her, and that was a cardinal mistake. Lilian outsmarted his siblings in the succession battle that followed and ensured that she inherited the bulk of his wealth. At the age of 26, she found herself at the helm of a multi-billion empire. In the last eight years, she had grown the criminal empire and used the money to grow her legitimate businesses. Now she owns several companies, ranging from transport and logistics to hotels and restaurants.
Bruce has been her lover since she hired him as her driver six years ago, and he has been satisfying her sexual needs. When she sent him over to Njeri, she started sleeping with his replacement Ian, although whenever she gets the chance she hops into bed with Bruce because he is a better lover. Ian is good enough, but he lacks Bruce’s skill in bed. Ever since she turned thirty, Lilian has been desiring marriage. Ian is out of the question, of course, and while Bruce is a good lover, he is her subordinate and therefore cannot be her boyfriend, much less husband. He is not the kind of man she can flaunt in her social circles.
The man she has been in love with, and who is her official boyfriend, is an engineer named Wilfred. He runs his own successful engineering company that has won several government contracts. He is not as wealthy as she is, but then again it is difficult to find a single man who is wealthier than she is.
Lilian and Wilfred have been lovers for two years, and Lilian thought he would marry her. She had even reduced the number of times she slept with Bruce so that she could spare time and energy for Wilfred. But then Wilfred hired a young engineer named Njeri and seems to have fallen in love with her.
The most infuriating part of this is that Njeri is not even interested in Wilfred, but he is so obsessed with her that he has all but abandoned her (Lilian). To salvage her relationship, Lilian sent Bruce to seduce Njeri, and she fell for it. Lilian wanted Bruce to move with speed and marry Njeri, but the girl wasn’t to be rushed.
Bruce’s relationship with Njeri hasn’t deterred Wilfred; if anything he seems to be even more obsessed. Whenever he makes love to Lilian, it is usually quite obvious that his mind is elsewhere. Once he even mentioned Njeri’s name in the throes of passion.
Lilian has had enough. Many years ago she almost killed Eunice to get the husband, and she was just a naïve teenager then. Now she is a wealthy woman with seasoned criminals at her beck and call. Getting rid of that silly girl Njeri will be a piece of cake. Nobody will even know what happened to her because her body will never be found.
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Image by Public Domain Pictures Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/sk/photos/star%c3%bd-znalosti-pr%c3%batik-%c4%beud%c3%ad-vek-69431/
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