That night Jiaming and Shasha were locked in a first-floor room of the small building. The window had been welded shut and the iron door bolted; their captors had at least been kind enough to untie their ropes and bring them food. Jiaming had expected Cao Dongfeng to work off some anger by beating him, but that never happened either.
A little thought and he understood: Cao Dongfeng was sweet on Lingjing. Just now, while he and Shasha were being locked up, Cao Dongfeng had been shouting at his men to drag Lingjing over too—he plainly meant to wait until she was caught before he started torturing Jiaming, so that Lingjing would feel it.
Fine, then. One more day... He would have a better chance of pulling something off once Lingjing was in sight. After all, if he made his move here and they produced one more hostage over there, things would get a great deal messier. And in the meantime, he could find out what on earth had happened to that Tsukiike Kaoru.
The food was not poisoned, nothing like that, so Jiaming sat down and ate a few bites. Shasha, full of energy, kept kicking the door and cursing at the top of her lungs.
By the time she had cursed herself out of breath, it was completely dark; there was no electric light in the room, and she groped her way to the table to eat. She was a picky eater—no ginger, no garlic—and every so often she would grab the wrong thing, get it in her mouth, and go pfft, pfft, pfft.
Halfway through the meal she suddenly realized: "Oh! What if there's poison in this food?"
Jiaming laughed inwardly. "Then I'd be dead already."
Shasha hesitated for a long while and asked whether his stomach hurt or anything like that. The answer was no, but for the moment she had lost the mood to go on eating.
Iron door, iron window, concrete walls—even Jiaming would have had a hard time escaping from this. One table, one bed, and a little chamber pot in the corner made up the room's entire furnishings. Shasha sat on the edge of the bed cursing under her breath, dreaming up escape plans one after another and occasionally throwing Jiaming a "Don't be scared." Jiaming answered at random and listened to the noises coming from next door.
"You can't blame me for any of this. Everything that's happening today, your father owes me..."
"Back then he used despicable means to take your mother, and your mother was supposed to be my fiancée. To go and steal his own elder brother's wife..."
"All these years I've swallowed humiliation and borne my burden, and only then did I win the support of Yūan Tenkin. The Tsukiike family is finished, Kaoru. I grabbed you to save you, so that Chisakura Senkan would pass to a better heir. I was the eldest son of the Tsukiike family—I had the best right to inherit Chisakura Senkan..."
"Push me too far and I'll do anything!"
It was the Japanese old man talking, his voice high and shrill like a eunuch's, whining on and on. Every few sentences there would be a smack—clearly that bamboo sword coming down on the little Japanese girl again. The old man's arm was heavy, but his technique was eerily precise: the kind of blow that hurts down to your heart and lungs without cracking bone or tearing muscle. Jiaming thought, Is this old guy some kind of SM master?
Nursing his wicked thoughts, he sat with Shasha until the middle of the night. Shasha had lost the mood for cursing, too; she yawned a few times. "Shasha, you sleep," Jiaming said.
"Then what about you?"
"There's only one bed. I'll lie on the table for a while, clothes and all."
"How can that be okay!" Shasha jumped up, hesitated a moment. "It's almost winter, it's so cold, you'll catch a cold. Just... just sleep in this bed too. We're keeping our clothes on anyway."
Jiaming smiled. He did not actually care about such things at all; it was only that Huaisha cared, so he had put on a show of declining. Now he hesitated a moment and finally agreed. The two of them took off their shoes and climbed onto the bed, Jiaming on the outside, Shasha on the inside. The quilt was thin as paper—so thin he could barely feel it lying on him.
The two of them were familiar enough by now; back at the Liu family villa, when they had played themselves tired, there had been more than a few times when Jiaming, Shasha and Lingjing had all fallen asleep together on the carpet.
But this was the first time they had ever "shared a bed" in the properly defined sense of the phrase. For the first ten minutes or so Shasha lay there stiff as a board, not daring to move, like a zombie.
Then he heard her mutter, "Not even a pillow..." after which she began shifting about on the bed, thoroughly unused to it.
Jiaming slept light. In a state like this, even with his eyes closed, he could tell practically everything that changed around him. He listened to Shasha change position every few minutes, then every few minutes again, and found it funny. After about an hour she finally fell truly asleep, her body curled into a ball against the cold, and before long she rolled and rolled until she had the whole thin blanket wound up around herself.
After about three hours, once the time was past midnight, Shasha began shifting uncomfortably again. Then she half sat up, waved a hand back and forth in front of Jiaming's face, and seemed about to climb over him and get off the bed.
Halfway across, she jumped back instead, pulled the blanket over him very carefully, and even tucked the edge in at his shoulder—for all the world like a clumsy young wife, married only a little while, who still had no idea how to look after anyone.
That done, she waved her hand back and forth in front of his face a few more times before finally climbing down.
What is she up to...
Jiaming was puzzled. Shasha had always been careless and open, a girl who could not hide a thought to save her life, yet now she was being so cautious. He opened his eyes a slit and saw her silhouette go to the corner and pull down her pants, and at last he understood. He shut his eyes; a faint trickle came from the corner, and a moment later Shasha climbed back onto the bed, pulled back the cover on the inside, and lay down stiff as a zombie.
With no pillow and the midnight cold, Shasha began curling up uncomfortably again. After a couple of rolls she quietly took hold of one of Jiaming's hands and gently laid his arm out flat on the bed.
"Lingjing, sorry, okay? Just this once..."
He heard her say it very softly; then she used Jiaming's arm as a pillow and settled down comfortably. A moment later the girl rolled twice more, turned on her side, hugged his body, and sank into a deep sleep. Jiaming put an arm around her shoulders, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. This girl—even her girl-girl romance was loyal and true-hearted to the last: for nothing more than hugging him as she slept, she had to apologize sincerely to her girlfriend. In that instant Jiaming was a little moved. That's love for you.
So the night passed. When they got up the next morning, Shasha's face was red as a tomato; then, to ease the awkwardness, she started cursing at the top of her lungs again. Before long someone threw two steamed buns through the gap in the window for breakfast. Through the crack in the iron door Jiaming could see the little Japanese girl in the small square, still in that great red kimono, sitting there quietly taking her beating.
The whole timber yard was quiet that morning. Cao Jinghao and his son Cao Dongfeng both seemed to have gone out, leaving only the Japanese old man's eunuch voice and Shasha's occasional excited cursing echoing around the small square—one in Chinese, one in Japanese—and hearing them mixed together, Jiaming found it pretty comical.
In the afternoon the Caos finally came back in a rage. The moment they arrived, Cao Dongfeng had the iron door opened and had the two kids' hands tied and dragged out.
They probably were not ready to deal with Shasha yet; they only tied the girl to a chair. Jiaming they hauled over to a pillar a good two meters tall and bound him tight with his hands behind it. Not far off was the beaten Tsukiike Kaoru, and the two of them lined up side by side put Jiaming in mind of those revolutionary martyrs who died heroically after being put to torture.
"Fuck it, I can't be bothered waiting for Lingjing to show up." Cao Dongfeng had gotten himself a bamboo sword just like the old Japanese ghost's, and came over cursing as he walked. From the side Shasha shouted at the top of her voice, "Cao Dongfeng, what are you doing! You dare touch him and I'll never let you off!"
"Hmph, you little bitch, you don't get to talk here. Shut her up!" As Cao Dongfeng spoke, two of his men brought over rags and gagged Shasha's mouth. "Fuck it. Classmate Gu Jiaming, I'll be straight with you—I've been holding in a whole bellyful of fire today, and now I'm going to loosen up your muscles and bones!"
With that, the bamboo sword swept down across Jiaming's chest!