Page 46 of Billionaire’s Ruin

Dannie Wu.

Little Wu.

Xiao Wu.

My stomach churned. No, that couldn’t be right. That couldn’t be him.

I shook my head, too fast. The space spun, and the punishment came quick—a cluster of needle pricks behind my eyes, drilling into my skull.

“Shit…” I gritted my teeth and tried to breathe through it.

I forced my mind to replay everything. What happened after the van stopped? Who were those men? Was Auntie Five really behind this like my mother said? It didn’t make sense. Why would she take her own nephew?

No… it wasn’t her. Couldn’t be.

Those men—they weren’t from Shanghai. Their Mandarin was wrong. Stiff, offbeat. Their tones carried a harsh rhythm, words clipped and colored with something else. A thick accent. Hong Kong, maybe. I didn’t know then. I couldn’t have. But now… now I could hear it clearly in my head.

So they didn’t come for me?

All this time, I’d believed that I was the target. That my name, my blood, my mother—that was the reason. But maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe I was just… collateral.

My vision began to adjust to the darkness. The faint glow of a single bulb flickered above, yellow and weak, like it was gasping for life. I tried to rub my face, but my right arm jerked and stopped short.

A coarse, biting pressure dug into my wrist.

Some kind of bindings.

I yanked again—nothing. My other arm—same thing.

“Shit…” I breathed out, quieter this time, not from pain but from realization.

I was tied down.

The panic came in a slow, creeping wave, climbing up my chest until it pressed against my throat. My breaths came shallow and uneven as I tugged harder, the ties cutting deeper into my skin.

How long had I been out? Hours? Days?

And then my vision cleared enough for me to see the place around me.

My blood ran cold.

“No—no, no…”

I knew this place. Every inch of it. The padded walls. The way the light never reached the corners. The faint chemical smell that clung to the air—bleach, fear, and madness all mixed together.

It was a chamber modeled after the padded cell in the psychiatric ward.

A room built to keep my mother contained.

Except now, I was the one inside.

The irony clawed at my chest. My mother used to scream about these walls, how they swallowed sound, how no one could hear her cries no matter how loud she begged. Now I knew she wasn’t lying. My screams barely bounced back to me, smothered by the soft, suffocating walls.

I tested the ties again.

Tight.

No slack.