Chapter 2

They said:

“The four of us live together and die together.”

“Outsiders have no place here.”

“Is that so difficult to answer?”

Officer Tôn’s voice brought me back.

I met his probing gaze.

“It’s nothing. I was just thinking.”

“My parents treated me very well. They gave me whatever I wanted.”

“Then did you ever ask them to treat Lý Trạch better?”

The questions kept coming.

I grew irritated, my emotions slipping out of control.

“My parents have just died.”

“My brother’s in intensive care. We don’t know if he’ll live.”

“And you’ve brought me here to ask irrelevant questions?”

“What exactly are you trying to say?”

“Please, just say it.”

Officer Tôn seemed accustomed to this.

My emotions didn’t affect him. He remained calm.

“If it’s as you say, and your parents beat and cursed Lý Trạch for years…”

“Why did he lose control last night in particular?”

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

I laughed in anger.

“Will finding it odd bring my parents back?”

“All I want now is for my brother to survive.”

“If there’s nothing else, I’d like to visit him.”

He paused.

After a moment, he pushed the statement toward me.

“If everything’s correct, please sign here.”

As I reached the station gate, he called after me.

“Oh, one more thing. The scream you heard during the second call was probably your mother’s final struggle.”

“Oh,” I said, and left.

In fact, I hadn’t heard her scream at all.

I made that up.

By then, she had been hacked beyond recognition.

What I heard was her weak voice calling:

“A Trạch, back then I only wanted to keep you alive. You…”

Then she died.

I thought those words had finally enraged my brother.

That was why he cut her throat without hesitation.

After all, the first sixteen blows hadn’t struck anything vital.

For a moment, I couldn’t decide whom he hated more: my father, who had carried it out, or my mother, who had thought of it.

I went from the station to see Lý Trạch in hospital.

He lay quietly in bed.

The doctor said a fall from the fifth floor should have killed him.

But an awning partway down had broken his fall, and he had landed on a rubbish bin. That had saved him.

The worst people were always the hardest to kill.

To look appropriately grief-stricken, I forced myself to stay until six in the evening.

Only when hunger became unbearable did I go home.

After last night’s murders, our normally lively complex was frighteningly quiet.

A heavy smell of blood lingered in the corridor.

As I unlocked the door, Ms. Vương slipped in from the apartment opposite.

She looked tense.

“The police didn’t notice anything wrong, did they?”

I shook my head.

I didn’t know what had made them suspicious, but I had an alibi.

However they investigated, this case had nothing to do with me.

Lý Trạch had committed the murders. That couldn’t change.

And Ms. Vương had “accidentally” filmed the evidence.

It was a perfect killing by someone else’s hand.

The only pity was that Lý Trạch wasn’t dead.

She breathed out in relief.

“Good. I’ve been anxious all afternoon, afraid they’d find something.”

She took an old MP5 media player from her pocket.

“You really do know him. He hid it in his room, just as you said. I slipped in and got it before the police arrived.”

“Why not let them take it?”

My voice cooled.

“It isn’t enough.”

“Not enough people have died.”

We spoke a little longer, then she hurried away.

At the door, she remembered something and looked at the fridge in our living room, covered in souvenir magnets.

A label read: For Kiều Kiều Only.

“I’ve ordered you a meal. A little celebration.”

“Throw all that rubbish out. No one will force you to eat it again.”

That fridge held my family’s biggest secret.

Ms. Vương was the only outsider who knew.

She had moved into the complex six months earlier.

Apparently, she had spent nearly ten years as someone’s mistress.

Then her lover and his entire family died in a car accident.

She happily took his will to claim the estate, ready to become a wealthy lady.

Only to discover the “will” was a complete forgery.

Legally worthless.

Ten years of youth, traded for a pile of useless designer bags.

She sold them cheaply and rented the apartment opposite ours.

The day she moved in, Lý Trạch fell in love at first sight.

He insisted on going to bed with her.

After so many years of abstinence, he said, couldn’t he at least sleep with a slut?

Our parents told him to stay away from her. If anything happened, all their efforts over the years would be wasted.

In the end, he took his anger out on me.

He made me kneel in the living room and ordered my father to “teach me a lesson” with a belt.

Those wounds had only nearly healed a few days ago.

Fresh injuries lay over old ones. The pain made me suck in breath, but I dared not make a sound.

When I looked up, I met Ms. Vương’s curious gaze.

A cigarette between her lips, she gave me an awkward smile.

I thought that would be the end of our acquaintance.

But the next morning, on my way to work, I found her waiting secretly in the corridor with a bag of medicine.

She stuffed it all into my coat pocket.

“I thought it was strange. What family favors the daughter over the son like that? Knew there had to be more to it.”

From then on, we became close friends.

I opened the fridge.

A rotten stench hit me.

Food filled it.

Melted cakes, moldy ribs, vegetables mixed into an unidentifiable mess.

Look closely, and you could see fragments of bone.

This was my daily “food.”

Since Lý Trạch’s trouble ten years earlier, I hadn’t eaten one proper meal.

My mother said the family was bankrupt. Leftovers couldn’t be wasted.

So she bought this fridge secondhand.

If you could call it a fridge. To save electricity, she had never plugged it in.

Looking back, I was remarkably hard to kill.

Years of spoiled food, and I hadn’t become ill.

I had tried to resist.

Once, I told her:

“You could cook a little less each day. Then there wouldn’t be leftovers.”

She kicked me hard in the lower abdomen.

“What do you mean? Too good for our leftovers? Then die! What are you living for?”

“Lý Trạch, would this family be like this if it weren’t for you? Do you know how exhausted I am every day?”

Yes.

Whenever she beat and cursed me, she used my brother’s name.

The neighbors all believed he was the one being abused for years.

It was actually me.

Whenever they beat me, Lý Trạch sat on the sofa, drinking beer and squinting with enjoyment.

Unable to go out, his only entertainment was finding ways to torment me.

They never struck my face or arms.

People could see those places.

The year I graduated from university, I lied that I had a boyfriend in another city.

He loved me and wanted me to marry him and move there.

To make it convincing, I even asked a classmate to play the part.

Without a word, my mother stripped me naked in front of him, filming and threatening:

“If you don’t break up with her, I’ll tell the police you raped my daughter. I know you’re taking the civil-service exams. Try me.”

Terrified, my classmate hurried out.

My mother embraced my trembling body.

“Kiều Kiều, all we need is for the four of us to stay together forever. No one else gets in.”

I broke down, screaming in despair:

“What will it take for you to let me go? Haven’t I done enough?”

Lý Trạch came over and gripped my throat.

“Let you go?”

“If it weren’t for you, would I have to be mentally ill and shut up at home all day?”

“I’m going mad without a woman, and you think you can get married?”

“Keep dreaming. Unless I’m dead, you’re never leaving this house.”

His words instantly calmed me.

Unless he died?

That could be arranged.

He should have died ten years ago anyway.

That was when I began planning his twenty-eighth-birthday present.

A perfect family massacre.