Page 37 of The Queen's Denial

“I will fucking kill you—”

“They said her name was Chi Yan, yes. And she’s fine, okay? You just can’t see her yet because… she’s a little bit, ya know… protocol…” He breathes out a long sigh and seems to decide to just get it over with. “She’s very unconscious right now.”

Chapter 18

Chi

A heavy darkness blankets me from head to toe. I blink and try to focus, but the darkness persists, and I can’t see an inch in front of my face.

There’s a horrible stench of decay wherever I am, mingling with what I can only guess is lemon-scented disinfectant. As I regain my senses further, I realize I’m blindfolded. I try to reach up to yank it off my face when I realize my wrists are bound with something, holding me down to what feels like a cold metal table. I open my mouth in shock and realize that it’s not gagged or taped shut. So, I do the only thing that could possibly be expected in this situation. I scream as loud as possible.

“Shut the fuck up!” someone says from the corner of the room. “No one can hear you anyway. We have questions, and if you don’t want to answer them, you’ll be gagged and left here to rot. You might be a high fucking commodity out in the real world, but down here with us degenerates… well, you’re nothing but a pretty little liability.”

I’m not really one to shut up when someone tells me to, but I figure I should probably do so now. Once I do, I get an earful of harsh whispers — quite possibly the chilliest voices I’ve ever heard. I hope to never hear them again, especially not blindfolded and bound.

“He’s gonna fucking kill us if she tells him, so shut up and let me do the talking.” Maybe they don’t realize I can hear them, or maybe they just don’t care if I do.

Another voice, still terrifying but fractionally less so, meets my ears. “Chi Yan?”

I assume he wants me to confirm or deny that this is my name, so I nod.

“Pardon my French, woman, but why in the ever-loving fuck have you come here?”

I let out a long breath and try to keep my voice as steady and imposing as possible. “I want to see Andy Scutari. I need to see how he’s doing, and I knew the bastard wasn’t going to tell me anything until I paced myself around the grand ballroom a few hundred more times.”

Okay, apparently whatever they drugged me with is still wearing off. That is far more truth than I was hoping to spew. I clear my throat and try again. “I need to see him so that I can make sure he’s okay. Then I’ll be out of your hair.”

“Ever hear of a fucking phone call?” the creep in the corner mumbles under his breath.

For whatever reason, a surge of confidence hits. “Gee, I never thought of that! I only tried it a thousand fucking times!”

“Shut up!” the other guy whisper-yells in the creep’s direction, before stalking over to me. “So, you tried him, but he didn’t pick up? And he didn’t call you back? Ever think he might not want to talk to you, little girl?”

I shake my head no. “I mean, well, he just doesn’t want to tell me where he is sometimes. But he calls me all the time when things are good.” I realize a moment later that I sound like a hopelessly in love girl hanging on by a thread to a guy who couldn’t give less of a shit about her.

I try to focus on how to better explain that I’m not some insane stalker girl who followed him here out of misplaced infatuation. “I mean… oh, fuck this. I’m the Yakuza princess, okay? Soon to be queen. I want to make sure a valuable asset of our organization isn’t fucking dead! Let me see Andy Scutari, or I swear to God, you will be very sorry.”

There’s a long hesitation, in which I’m sure creep-o in the corner is going to decide to kill me, but luckily for me, I feel my binds being loosened. “If you take that blindfold off, there’s nothing I can do to save you. And honestly, if you take a look around, you might lose all faith in humanity anyway and ask us to end it now anyway.”

My breath catches in my throat, but I lift myself up off the metal table on shaky legs and hold my head as high as I can with a blindfold on.

I’m dragged unceremoniously through what I guess from the feel and the mustiness must be a cellar of some sort. A cold, dank, disgusting-smelling basement that they must use for something extremely nefarious.

At one point, the smell becomes too pungent to ignore, and I gasp. “What is that?” I say, gagging.

“There are a couple of active infections right now.”

I consider this piece of information, given to me, I’m sure, just to scare me. “What is this, a lab or something?”

“No. I’m talking about infections on people. It’s decaying flesh.” The creepy weirdo is far too close when he says this, and his warm, damp breath hits my neck like a burst of air on a humid day. I cringe away in disgust.

Creepy guy chuckles and continues speaking. “It’s not a lab, per se, but there are scientists here. We put our skills to use for good… and not so good.”

I gulp. “Okay. Sorry I asked.”

Finally, we get to an area that is not as filled with death, and although I’m not sure that stench of decay will ever leave me, I’m certain that the air quality has improved. There’s another smell here, like a hospital, and I sigh out with one part relief and one part some new anxiety. The last time I was in a hospital was for my own injury, and the time before that was with Andy to see my father, half dead.

And then suddenly, I’m pulled into a room by one of the men who walked me up here.

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