I felt a little silly when I spotted a window with slat blinds right behind the couch, a portal to the outside. Maybe I could break it and escape to the outside.
But no…
I didn’t find an ocean when I peeked through the blind’s slats, but a concrete floor situated at least 3o feet below me—the office must be located on the second floor of a tall warehouse.
Many men were standing around—no, not around, I realized upon closer look. They were in a three-way argument with a large group of Asian guys on one side of the triangle. They weren’t Silent Triad, though—they wore tracksuits, not the business kind. And they appeared to be fighting with a bunch of burly bikers and Latino gangsters, dressed in tanks and sagging jeans.
Or maybe the gangsters were arguing with the bikers and the Asian tracksuits?
I couldn’t tell for sure, but they all appeared pissed.
And toward the back of the warehouse, there stood another man.
No—wrong again, there hung another man from a pair of shackles attached to a giant hook. It appeared he’d been beaten pretty badly. His face was swollen and puffy, and his head lolled listlessly to the side.
My heart stopped when I realized it was Han.
I had to…I don’t know…do something. But I couldn’t go with my first instinct to bang on the glass and tell whoever had strung him up like this to let him go. Alerting them to my presence didn’t seem like the wisest move.
So I ran to the door, adrenaline pumping through my veins—only to quickly discover it was locked.
I cursed underneath my breath. But the lock was old, so I went to the desk to see if there was anything that could help me pick it, but nothing—just flimsy pens and wooden pencils, not even a pair of scissors.
More cursing. Plus, now my head was pounding with a possible concussion, and this bra was like, “Oh, you’re sore all over from your car accident? Here’s something more for you. Stab! Stab-stab-stab!”
Seriously, would it be wrong if I stopped in the middle of my escape to take this thing off—
That thought suddenly broke off when a new idea occurred to me.
HAN
“Go ahead, son,” Han was pushed forward, so close to the woman his father had just shot dead, he was almost standing in his blood. “Take a picture.”
Han hesitated, though he knew better than to do that. Delun never hesitated, his father often reminded him. He once gave Delun a gun, pointed his arm toward the enemy, and told him to shoot, and his older son just did. No questions asked.
His father had crowed about it for months to his younger illegitimate son. And Han had told himself that maybe he too could do something like that someday. Kill without hesitation. Make his father proud.
This was not even that. All he had to do was take a picture with the Polaroid camera his father had given him a few weeks ago for his birthday. It shouldn’t have been hard. Not for the secret son of one of Shanghai’s most notorious gangsters.
But this was a woman, not a man. And her large, distended belly held a baby—one that was dying a much slower death than its mom. Also, there was her still alive son—the little boy whose tongue his father had ordered cut out and left at his enemy’s gate…
He threw himself over his mother’s body and wailed in a tongueless animal way that made Han hate his father. Hate himself…
And in the end, Han couldn’t. He couldn’t take the picture.
“Weakling!” his father spat out. He set the gun down on the bed the woman had been sitting on before taking a kill shot to the head. Then he snatched the camera from his useless, seven-year-old son and took the picture himself.
Afterward, he turned back to Han to sneer, “Delun would have….”
His father trailed off when he saw what Han held in his hands. The gun he’d set down…it was now pointed straight at him.
“Son…” For the first time ever, his father’s face softened while addressing him. “Don’t—”
Whatever he’d been about to say next was drowned out by the blast of Han’s gunshot.
The recoil sent Han’s little body flying backward.
“You got great aim,” Victor’s cousin, who made everyone call him Phantom, would tell him years later, the first time they shot guns together. “Anybody ever tell you that.”
No…no one had ever told him that. But Han figured it out that day when he sat up and found his father sprawled out in front of him, dead with a perfectly placed hole in his chest.
The three-year-old who had been crying in that animal way of his over his mother’s dead body had abruptly stopped. And he was staring at Han’s father, staring at the dead body of the man who’d killed his mother.
