“He must have said something to you.”
“He… he said nothing. We just liked being together.”
He shook his head at me. “Well let’s see if we can jog your memory.”
Pa gave a signal and the man near Xander switched on a button. As it came on, sparks of electricity rippled through him. He screamed and screamed. The screams and the sight took me and tears poured from my eyes.
Then as if that wasn’t bad enough, the guy lashed him across his back with the whip making him scream even more. They were going to kill him.
They were.
“Stop it! Stop it,” I bawled. “Papa stop it.”
Pa raised his hand and the man stopped his lashing and switched off the electricity.
A crude, hard, evil smile filled Pa’s face as he looked at me. “Anything come to your mind yet,Jia?”
I shook my head. “No. Nothing. I told you I don’t know anything.”
He snarled and raised his hand again to give the man the go ahead to switch the electricity on.
Xander’s screams tore through me once more.
I couldn’t look. I just couldn’t look.
“I’ll make it stop if you tell me.” Pa nodded. “I’ll make it stop and take him down from there. You said you loved him. How could you let this happen to someone you love?”
What a thing to say to me.
What a question to ask.
As if that was really it, like I was the problem here. It wasn’t me at all.
It was Pa again…
This wasn’t about me. It was him.
All of it was him.
The tears running down my cheeks blurred my vision. I could barely see him, but really did I want to see him? Him with his lies.
He had no intention whatsoever of letting Xander go or making anything stop. He didn’t.
And, how I hated lies.
The irony in that was I was the biggest liar here. The biggest liar. The actress who could have gotten an Oscar for her award-winning performance.
Me. That was my role here.
Xander continued to scream and my soul quivered.
This was the moment of reckoning. It was as he’d said, he would do what he had to do.
I would too.
I looked to him and knew he knew what I was doing. I knew he appreciated it.
“I don’t know anything,” I shouted, screaming at the top of my lungs. My voice rose above him, high into the black ceiling that covered us. “I don’t know anything.”
