Chapter Eleven
The still air around Aiden pressed against his chest. Images of blood flashed before his eyes, and he swallowed down his panic and vomit. People murmured in Chinese while his ears rang. Slowly, his vision cleared. He stared down at his legs bound to a metal chair. The floor was ominously clean.
His wrists were cuffed behind his back. His head throbbed, but he forced himself to look around.
Bright lights hung overhead in a room without windows, and the floor and walls smelled of strong sanitization.
He smelled blood but did not find any before realizing it came from the slow drip trickling down his own head.
At the edge of the room, a long metal table with cabinets lined underneath stared back at him.
Mr. Chen walked into Aiden’s view. Dressed in his usual casual business attire, he gestured to a guard, and the stranger brought in a chair, positioning it across from Aiden. Mr. Chen slowly lowered himself on it.
“Give me a light.” He held out his cigarette, and the guard obediently did as told.
Mr. Chen smoked while turning away. The smoke mixed with the strong scent of bleach, and vomit threatened to erupt from his mouth. Mr. Chen abandoned the cigarette after a few more whiffs. He turned toward Aiden.
“You can tell me the truth,” he said, his voice ringing like a spoon on fine china.
“I don’t know what truth you want,” Aiden croaked. “I know what my stepmother told you. That I’m the traitor. But I’m not. I’m not conspiring with the government or with other enemy families. She’s a far likelier suspect than me. She has hidden photographs of my brother in her study room.”
“A mother would never risk her children’s futures that way.”
“Then ask her why she has those photographs.” Aiden winced when raising his voice.
Mr. Chen leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a long time. Finally, with much deliberation, Mr. Chen turned toward him again. “I know you have a grudge against my family.”
Aiden stared. “No, I don’t.”
“It is okay. Hatred and anger are natural emotions.”
“I don’t,” he insisted through gritted teeth.
“There is no point in denying it. It must’ve been hard finding out that I was responsible for your mother’s death. You must’ve felt betrayed by your brother to know that he was the one who invited me into your family’s circle of connections.”
Freezing sweat dripped from his back, sending shivers up his spine. “What…?”
“I want you to know, Aiden, that it was a mistake. There was a…misunderstanding. If you cooperate and tell me everything, including the people you’ve been talking to, I am more than willing to apologize.”
“What?” Aiden failed to hear even his own voice as the ghostly whisper disappeared into the air.
Fury burned him. “What?” He lunged at Mr. Chen, but his body remained tied to the chair.
Its legs pulled ever so slightly against the floor in an agonizing screech.
“You killed her? Did my brother know this?!”
“I do not wish to speak ill of your deceased brother. He was a charming young man. Not gruff like your father.” Mr. Chen chuckled. “However, he was not aware.”
“How could you kill someone like that over a misunderstanding?” Tears rolled from Aiden’s eyes, and his shoulders burned in pain as he pulled at the cuffs. He wheezed for air as the ghostly echoes of his mom’s last breaths vibrated against him.
Mr. Chen’s inquisitive eyes turned cold.
His delicate voice hardened. He crossed his legs and arms while watching Aiden writhe.
“You are the only person in Infinite who could potentially have access to information that would galvanize the government to come after us and still have a reasonable motive.”
“I would never kill my brother!” Aiden howled.
His body felt as if she laid on top of him again.
How did Ge feel when he died? I hope he didn’t feel anything.
Please, let him not have felt anything when he died.
Ma felt something. She died in pain. She definitely felt herself die.
Aiden dry heaved toward the ground, screaming.
“There is no one else. You accuse your stepmother, but she’s been a part of Infinite before you were born—just in a lower ranked family. She risks far more by being the traitor than someone as young as you who hasn't yet bloodied your hands.”
“It’s not me!”
“Stop lying,” Mr. Chen growled. He threw the chair across the room, and it crashed into the wall. The older man paced all around the room. “We have consolidated all the families together. Only you and the disgraced Guo family would have something to gain from this.”
The Guo family again. Him. Zhou. The kidnapper.
Their obsession with that family. Aiden wanted to press harder about the family that has haunted him since his trip to Hong Kong, but his family’s dead faces flashed before his eyes.
His father withered away in a hospital bed, his brother left no body behind, and Aiden was too familiar with his mother’s body.
Crying and gasping, he tried to fling himself onto the ground and curl up and fade into nothing, but his burning shoulders and legs stayed tied to the chair. He continued to sob.
“It appears you are in too much of a panic at getting caught. That or you really are just an excellent actor.” Mr. Chen took out another cigarette. “You will come to regret not talking to me. Yang and Zhou will not be as kind.”
The man motioned the guards and left the room, slamming the door shut behind him.
Aiden wished he'd never left campus. Brendan, Brendan. His hand desperately grasped for the other boy’s warmth. Alone in a room where people were, without doubt, murdered, he wept, wondering how to leap back in time to where he danced with joy, kissed with love, and understood what fun felt like.
· · ·
Freezing water splashed against his head and shoulders.
Aiden gasped from his frozen darkness and sputtered for air.
Water dripped from his hair and face. Two large leather shoes reflected the light above.
Angry, heavy breathing commenced. Aiden sighed, raising his head to meet Mr. Zhou’s stiff anger.
Mr. Zhou stood with his arms glued to his side, his shoulders straight and statuesque, and his lips pressed thinly together.
Ah, Aiden realized, staring up at the sturdy man.
There’s no way he would allow Mr. Chen into the upper circle if he knew that Mr. Chen killed my mother over a misunderstanding.
In fact, it was laughable to Aiden, and he chewed on the inside of his cheeks to keep himself from cackling.
Mr. Zhou, the man who expected perfection from his employees, who cared so little about his own family that Aiden couldn’t name his wife, was oblivious to Mr. Chen’s mistake.
Aiden knew Mr. Zhou would throw a fit if he ever found out.
“You made a big mistake to turn down Chen’s questioning. I will be blunt. Tell me everything you know.”
If people start demanding, you go cold. Act like you don’t care.
“I already told him everything I know.” Aiden glanced to the side nonchalantly.
“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.”