A cinderella crime story, p.14
A Cinderella Crime Story, page 14
Do you have anything to defend yourself with? Her gaze screamed at him.
Aiden could just answer the question. He could dial Brendan’s phone number, put him on speaker, and have his stepmother hear the boy on the other end who asked him to the dance. Instead, he snapped at the bait dangling before him. The words slipped out, and he relished in the truth blared in earshot of her two children. “Are you sure you should be questioning me, when you’re the one who took suspicious photographs of my brother before he died?”
Her face paled, and the arms tightened around her body. Aiden watched Zhu Zhu lift her head up from her iPad, and He Bao turned to his mother with disbelief in his eyes.
Aiden continued. “It’s hidden in She Diao Ying Xiong Zhuang. The one with the green cover. You should go look for it.”
“He Bao, grab him.” His stepmother’s command shrilled in the quiet night. She yanked at her son’s arm. “Are you just going to let him accuse your mother like this? Grab him!”
He Bao’s eyes flared. Aiden counted his steps and stepped to the side just as the taller boy lunged at him. He positioned his legs to keep his feet sturdy on the ground, and he watched He Bao’s eyes to analyze where his stepbrother would aim next to attack him.
Pain connected to the side of his head as his stepmother smashed her heavy bag against him. He stumbled, reeling, and He Bao wasted no time pulling him to the porch’s floor. Aiden’s chin smashed against the wood. He Bao sat down on him, while his stepmother ran over and kicked him in the stomach. He heaved for air, and he barely caught his breath before his stepmother kicked him in the same spot with acute intensity.
“Ma, I have him down. I’m stronger than him. You don’t have to attack him like that—I got this!” He Bao yelled, but she slammed her bag down on Aiden’s head once more, leaving Aiden wheezing.
“You want me to remain calm after he accused me of being the traitor? Accused me of putting us in this precarious situation where our entire lives hinge on a missing will!”
“You’re the one who decided I accused you,” Aiden spat. The purse swiped against his head again.
“You traitor!”
Zhu Zhu gasped, staring with trembling shoulders.
“Zhu Zhu!” Aiden reached for her, but He Bao grabbed his arm and pinned it. “River—I’m not the traitor!”
“You’re trying to turn us against Ma. Just like a traitor.”
“She’s the one hiding things. Zhu Zhu, go to the study room. I swear you’ll find those photographs!”
“Zhu Zhu, call Mr. Zhou this instant. Tell him to come here and to get rid of Hui Lang as quickly as possible.” His stepmother kicked him again, knocking the air out of his body.
“Ma, I got this. Stop kicking him like this—it’s unnecessary,” He Bao protested.
“What have I taught you He Bao? The second you show any sympathy toward the enemy, you are nothing but a dead body. Zhu Zhu! What are you waiting for?”
“I’m calling—I’m calling.” Zhu Zhu’s voice shook. Her hands scrambled for the contact in her phone. The phone slipped from her hand to the ground, and her mother screeched at her.
I can’t breathe…
Aiden could no longer feel his legs, and his whole body ached too much for him to throw He Bao off. As his stepmother’s flurried attacks continued to rain down on him, Aiden looked up to see Zhu Zhu’s terrified eyes. Her eyes were the last thing he saw before the darkness closed in.
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.”
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.
Brendan told him he could do whatever he wanted to do. His brother said he would give him whatever he wished for. But I can’t just depend on them like that. Aiden’s hands clenched against his back.
He couldn’t give up. Not when the photographs provided all the evidence he needed to confirm the truth felt in his heart—his stepmother betrayed Infinite to the government and killed his brother.
He needed to buy time past Yang’s interrogation. Something or someone would waltz into this prison for him to use to make his escape. Once he escaped from the chains holding him down, Aiden knew what to do.
Infinite was already breaking apart at the seams. The secrets each interrogator held close to their chests and the different cultures of each family proved that to him. The foundation that once held the group together had been lost to time. The group lacked a heart and a focused brain.
