Blood of Deception [ON HOLD]

Chapter Thirty Four

Zhonghong woke to a hum of pain in her head. Her eyes slowly pried apart. The overall dimness caused her vision a few moments to adjust. It wasn't that dark; there was light coming from somewhere above, illuminating the space in a sickish yellow glow, and around her revealed...bars?

She groaned, a soft sound coming from a parched throat, as the fogginess of her dull mind began to clear away. Where am I? She tried to turn her head to look, but then the echoes of herself screaming struck her with a force of a blow.

She immediately shot up.

"Yo, usagi," a gruff voice spoke. "Okitaka."

Zhonghong whipped to its owner, startled. A middle-aged man rose from a stool positioned near a worn-looking table. It was then that she realized it, that it wasn't the room that the bars surrounded but she was caged in the small cell, which looked more suitable for hunters to use to trap their wildlife preys.

"Who are you?" she rasped, sickened by the thought of being watched the entire time she was unconscious - however long that had been.

The man stopped just outside the cell, in an arm reach from her. A black-grey uniform-like attire clothed him, and the lamp from the ceiling displayed a bearded face she remembered as the one who had made her earlier fainted.

Zhonghong backed away despite the narrowness. She couldn't move. On her lap, her hands were bound by thick coils ropes so tightly that the tips of her fingers chilled. Same went for her legs.

"Why did you take me here? What is this place?" she demanded at the man, dread palpable in her voice.

"You know precisely why," he said, simply standing there and watched her struggle.

"What do you mean?"

The man scrutinized her, as if one was deciding whether to dispose of a trapped pest. "We're here on the behalf of His Imperial Excellency to purge a traitorous rat. So how about you drop the act and we can get this over with?"

"I don't know what you're talking ab-"

"Little girl," he snapped. "You should know what a real interrogation is in our empire and when I say this is far from the start, believe me." Zhonghong swallowed, anything more she was about to utter died in her throat. A human couldn't possibly be capable of nourishing such a murderous glint in their eyes.

"About five weeks prior, I've reports about a suspicious man sighted at your house," the man continued in his heavy accent. "He goes by the name of Zenryou Rei."

"Zenryou Rei," she whispered to herself, the name rolling over her tongue like ash. She wrecked her mind for the slightest remembrance of any possible encounter as an uneasy inkling settled in her stomach. She shook her head, and the gesture soon turned desperate. "I don't know him."

The man's lips stretched to a nasty snarl. A split second later, a drawn blade was below her chin through one of the gaps between the cell bars. She instantly went still.

"No more games." The man's knuckles on the hilt were white as if suppressing a tremendous call to slit her throat for wasting his time. Zhonghong's face didn't fall far from the same shade. "If you don't speak, the blood of that old man in the house is next. And we've got eyes on the younger one too."

"Leave my family alone!" she shrieked, suddenly fully alert. The grip of the ropes around her limbs started to burn, in adrenaline, in denial. In frozen fear.

"Where is the traitor?"

"I am telling you the truth," she croaked, willing her tears to not shed. "I don't know."