“You told him nothing.”
“I know nothing.” Aiden remembered struggling to go through with his brother’s instructions when kidnapped in Hong Kong. Body permeated with fear, it took all his self-control to keep his voice steady and to hide the shivering of his body. However, the lowest level of defeat left Aiden reeling with a nothingness he never knew existed inside him, and he looked up at Mr. Zhou calmly. “Are you sure they’re not just keeping stuff from you?”
Mr. Zhou’s large fist slammed into his face. Aiden’s entire head swiveled to the side, and a cry instinctively slipped out from inside him. Blood trickled out of his mouth when his lips caught against his teeth.
“You are so very weak. Very brittle.” Mr. Zhou grabbed his hair, forcing Aiden to look up. “I can break your wrist with little effort. I can pull out your teeth with my bare hands if that’s the attitude you want to bring toward me.”
“Chen killed my mother over a misunderstanding. His own words, too.” He smirked when surprise entered Mr. Zhou’s usually unmoving eyes. Blood dribbled out of the cuts on his mouth. “He kept such an important thing about himself from you. How do you know he’s not keeping more?”
Mr. Zhou kicked him in the stomach, knocking the chair itself backward. Aiden threw up over the floor and gagged for breaths. His vision blurred, but his ears remained sharply alert to Mr. Zhou’s foreboding voice. “I don’t have time to be interrogating the likes of you. Mr. Yang, however, will have no greater pleasure than to break you.”
The sound of the drugged rambling man echoed in his ears. Mr. Yang’s Cheshire cat grin revealed two neat rows of pearly white teeth.Gunshots…Sounded like out of sync drums. A raid sounded like a twisted symphony played by musicians hoping to die. They droned out all noises of the world—like Mr. Zhou’s huffy anger.
Aiden didn’t even notice the man leave him in the cold, empty room. Didn’t hear his last likely-threatening words. Didn’t see his face. Aiden only saw a room of the past, from a time before he fully understood.
Before the fateful day when bullets rained into his house. Before, when his house was always full of his parents’ whispers. Strangers strolled in, and so much money passed around.
“Business,” his father always said to him. “It’s part of the business.”
“Business is complicated, but also very fun,” his mother would respond back in kind. “One day, you will be part of this business, and you will know.”
Aiden didn’t mind the strangers in his home. They always looked upon his brother with respect and a fleck of fear. They gave him gifts, and they gave his parents money, and he knew even then that money made their lives easy. Any video game, clothes, toys, anything he ever wanted—they had the means to buy it.
His father stepped out for business one night, and his mother played cards with him and his brother. His brother, winning, finally left the game to run to the restroom. As his mother teased at the fact that she was going to win now that Hui Ye had no choice but to drop out, the sound of drums hammered into his ears.
Aiden remembered an indescribable pain bursting from his leg, and his mother’s body pressed hard against his. He cried out at the pounding noise and the heaviness of her against him, and he tried to crawl out, but his mother grasped his hand and only pulled him more firmly under her body. Her fingers turned white from gripping his wrist, and she refused him one inch of movement.
Then, just as quickly as the sounds came, they stopped. The sounds of a car screeched away, and his brother’s watery calls echoed in his ears. He tried to call back, but his voice didn’t come out, and he tried to climb out, but his mother’s grip remained locked.
He tried to push her off, but she wouldn’t budge. He asked her politely then screamed at her to move, but she wouldn’t.
His brain registered the searing pain in his leg, and he began to cry and beg his brother to help him because his mother wouldn’t. Only then did he realize how strange his mother felt. Her chest didn’t beat with sounds he fell asleep on. Her eyes didn’t blink. The hand that grasped his tightly didn’t move even as he pinched it.
Time stretched on forever before his father returned with a cry of agony. His mother was finally lifted off of him, and Aiden remembered his confusion as his father howled and hugged his mother to his chest. His brother, who had stayed safely hidden away in the bathroom, scrambled to the living room with a gasp and a cry. He took Aiden into his arms, sobbing.
His father grew distant, and his brother looked after him. The killers believed his mother had tricked this other family—the Chen family—whose relationship was always contentious with the Hui. They thought she had lied, and they decided to return the favor by luring his father away to attack the home.
“You need to learn to protect yourself,” his brother decided. “Do the sounds scare you? Does this scare you?”
He handed a gun to Aiden.
Aiden wasn’t scared of the weapon. The sounds made him flinch because of their ferocity, but eventually, he grew used to it. The weapon felt weird against his skin, but eventually, he grew used to it. He learned to aim, he learned to react, and he learned that the gun was unavoidable.
But he became scared of his mother.
He was scared of the way her face turned grey. He was scared remembering her hands refusing to let his go. He was scared of the weight against his body, the eyes that didn’t blink, and the gasps that whispered in his ears when she was pelted with bullets. The mere mention of his mother made his body collapse in fear, and his brother watched with sad eyes, patted his back, and reminded him to breathe. He didn’t want to hear her name. He didn’t want to see her photographs.
He didn’t even want to remember her.
His brother purged her presence in their home. He pulled out all the photographs with their mom smiling and burned them in the fireplace. His father came home screaming at Hui Ye, but the second they mentioned his mother’s name, Aiden found himself wailing for help and gasping for air. He saw in his father’s eyes a realization. After that night, his father discarded all the furniture she bought, wiping her influence from everything in their lives.
His father smoked harder, drank more, and began bringing home various women. One night, he bought home a woman both Aiden and his brother believed to be temporary, and in a matter of days, married her. Alongside her came her children, and his father grew more distant. Like his brother, his father never mentioned Aiden's mother again. Even as he lay dying in bed, his father did not speak her name. He faded into a husk of a man.
Is this how the entire Hui family dies?Aiden wondered. His mother murdered by the Chen family. His father murdered by grief. His brother murdered by the traitor.
Aiden’s stomach lurched at the very thought.
No.He closed his eyes.Absolutely not.He focused on the pain pulsing through his body. He dug into the betrayal he felt toward his stepmother. He milked every sense of fury inside his bones.I’m not going to die.
