Chapter Three
Bugs flew around Aiden’s ears, buzzing. “Aiden,” they called with weird human voices that jumbled familiar tones of condescension, concern, and sorrow into one.
He swatted them away, but they flew back with reinforcements, forming a cloud around his head and obscuring his view.
“Aiden,” his name echoed in the darkness.
Their wings slapped against his face, their legs punched his limbs and stomach.
Aiden gritted his teeth, placing his hands against his knees, but the buzzing grew so loud that the noise slammed his body to the ground.
The ground beneath him cracked open to a never-ending void.
Aiden jolted from his bed and flopped back down with a gasp. Still expecting to see monstrous beating wings, he blinked the haze from his mind and stared up at his apartment ceiling.
What? He continued lying in bed. Why did I even wake up?
The phone lit up insistently, buzzing against the dresser. Eyes squinting, he grabbed his phone and looked at the seven missed calls from his stepmother. At 4 am? He opened her text, skimming the headline of the article she sent:
Ye Hui, Patriarch of the Hui Family, Found Dead in a Car Accident
Aiden blinked.
He reread each word. He checked the name. He checked the date. He checked the link to see a credible website.
He banged his hand against the lamp in his hurry to turn on the light. “No, no, this isn’t right.” The words fell from his mouth. He tried to click the link, but his fingers refused to obey him. They flung around like noodle balloons in front of car dealerships.
The phone dropped from his hand, and he scrambled to catch it, bumping his head against the side of his dresser and falling off his bed. There was no pain despite the resounding crash. He continued to tap the link, but his fingers aimed left, right, up, and down of the link.
“Come on!” He slammed his hand down.
The link blinked open with an attack of bright, warm colors from the photo of a burning car. Despite the pixels burning his eyes, he zoomed in further on the flash of light. There were two distinctive shapes trapped inside the car. He didn’t recognize the faces.
He realized the men might not have faces at the time of the photograph.
His stepmother’s caller ID popped up, and despite his ice-cold fingers, Aiden answered the call in one try. “What happened? When did you find out? Is there anything you know that isn’t on the news?”
“Hui Lang—when you last saw Hui Ye, who did he meet with? What families are they affiliated with?” Not a hint of panic was present in her voice.
“I don’t know. He met with some people, but I don’t know them at all.” Aiden whirled around the room, walking in indiscriminate circles. “I don’t know who he interacts with aside from Wang Xing—”
“—who died with him.”
The stepmother’s coldness called forth freezing wind that whipped at his face.
He dug his nails into the palm of his hand, and the floor blurred with increased panting and increased speed.
“I don’t know anything. Do you know anything?
Have any other families said anything? This wasn’t an accident, right? He was murdered?”
“Hui Lang, in our family, accidents don’t happen," she chided, “and don’t start asking me if he died peacefully. That’s not important. You need to come home. We have a funeral procession to figure out, and most importantly, we need to have ownership of the estate Hui Ye left behind.”
“Will we find out who killed him?” Aiden’s voice hitched. He stopped moving. The floor mysteriously continued to spin. “Is there anyone we can suspect?”
“Aiden—we are part of Infinite. Do you know how many enemies the Hui family has from that fact alone? It doesn’t matter who killed him. We must figure out our future first. Learn to prioritize. Hui Ye was good at it. Come home tomorrow.”
The line clicked.
Aiden thought he preferred silence. He thought that, until he lost all feeling in his legs, and his knees thudded against the floor. Silence wrapped around him like a suffocating straitjacket. His arms fell limp against his sides.
I just saw him.
A determined smile was plastered on Hui Ye’s face, but when Aiden stared into his brother’s eyes, they struggled to lift at the corners.
Somewhere, deep down, his brother knew he needed to step away from Aiden’s life if Aiden pursued a life without Infinite.
A fact that neither of them wanted to accept.
Hands shaking, Aiden brought the phone back to him.
The phone blinked back to life, showing the photo of the burning car.
With the world tilting beneath his knees, Aiden threw himself onto the ground and hugged his stomach, but it lurched harder.
Unwelcome scenes flashed before his eyes.
Of a living room. Of a heaviness cupping over him.
Of the scent of blood crawling up his nostrils.
Distraction. Aiden grappled with his phone. Pictures. Happy pictures. Not burning car pictures. He scanned his phone’s gallery.
Shoddily taken pictures of food, of funny statues, and of random cats he saw roaming the streets of Hong Kong glowed back at him.
Not a single photo of Hui Ye with him. Not a single photo of Hui Ye existed.
His family unanimously decided, with his agreement, that digital photos were too dangerous with social media. And the paper photographs that people once developed and printed from stores? His brother destroyed them all when he was younger. Because of her.
The lamp flickered. The walls elongated and loomed above him to stare down with judgmental eyes. His chest squeezed, and Aiden curled up on the ground and covered his head.
What do you do when you’re overwhelmed?
“Focus on one thing. Just one thing,” he whispered.
He focused on the burning car, the questions of how his brother felt in the moment he died, and the truth that the brother who promised him everything was dead.
He focused on death, how it permeated the world they lived in, and how it was impossible to run or hide from it.
He focused on the futility of life, and somewhere, somehow, his brother’s lessons echoed true once more.
He focused on the apathy that crawled through every nerve of his body, and he remained on the ground for the entire night, unable to shed a single tear for losing his entire family to the mafia world.
· · ·
Aiden opened the front door, frozen still by the blast of air conditioning. His stepmother stood at the doorway with crossed arms. Allowing his feet to thaw in the outside air, he dragged his backpack behind him and closed the door to the freezing castle.
“I can take care of everything,” his stepmother said the second he stepped in. “You don’t need to do anything.”
“Yeah, Ma can do it,” He Bao agreed. His stepbrother also crossed his arms but remained sitting on the couch. “But don’t cry. That’d be embarrassing.”
Zhu Zhu sat beside her brother, playing with her iPad and never looked up.
“The dates will be important. Already we have been cursed with bad luck with his death. Now is more imperative than ever that we choose a good luck month. Of course, the funeral would not be taking place here, but in Hong Kong. I do not want to bother with moving his remains back here which I’m sure you’ll agree with, but we mustn’t appear too Chinese, so western style it’ll be.
” Aiden still stood at the doorway in his shoes.
His stepmother walked with her slippers squeaking against the tiled ground, around and around.
His fingers burned from holding the backpack up from the ground. He dropped it to the ground.
“Why are you still standing here? We have work to do. Take off your shoes before you come in—don’t let grief get in the way of basic manners for goodness sakes.” She pulled him onto the wooden floor before he kicked his last shoe off.
She spent days counting the guests, mumbled the importance of which guest affected the family businesses, and invited strangers who called with screaming voices of desperation to be included in the funeral.
I should say something.
He washed the dishes, and she increased the guest list.
Ge would probably prefer a Chinese traditional funeral.
He vacuumed the house, she spent more on the decorations, and his stepsiblings lived with their usual attitudes.
What about the girl who left the lime green dress? I hope she’s at the funeral. Maybe I can finally know who Celia is.
Sorrow washed over him. It carried him far away from his stepmother and his stepsiblings, leaving him stranded in his own thoughts of hopelessness. His stepmother made all the decisions.
The funeral was to take place in Hong Kong under western traditions with a guest list of strangers.
· · ·
Aiden supposed the funeral was large, overdramatic, and filled with guests important to Infinite, but people passed around him in blurs.
Entering the grand hall reserved only for the richest guests, opened his eyes to a world that shrunk around him.
The pews minimized, the floor beneath his feet skewed together, and the walls boxed him in.
He smelled nothing, though flowers littered the floor, on stands, and hung from the ceiling.
Words jumbled together in Chinese of various dialects alongside English.
Only the casket loomed larger.