“You’ve protected your heart.”
“You’re trying to exploit my weaknesses just as you’ve abused the weaknesses of the people, but it won’t work.”
But even as she contradicted him, she knew that he’d hit the core truth about her. She didn’t deserve happiness. She had never been strong enough to protect the people she loved, whereas the real Liu Hulan had loved so much that she’d been willing to lay her life down to save an entire village.
“Actually,” Michael said, as though reading her thoughts, “you would let your body go in a minute. That is why you have always put yourself into positions where you could die.”
“I’m not brave. If you knew anything about me, you’d know that.” She looked down at Captain Hom and squeezed his shoulder. “But this man is a hero, and he’ll be remembered as a martyr when you’re revealed as a fraud—a foreign one at that.”
Michael’s eyes flashed angrily. Could she provoke him into making a mistake? Again he seemed to read her mind, because with the gr
ace and speed of a qi gong master he’d grabbed her gun and tucked it into his belt even before she could begin to react. Then he motioned to Officer Su, who set down his sponge, picked up an ax, and in two brutal motions chopped off both of Hom’s feet. Hulan heard Hom’s muffled screams through his gag. Su looked at Michael, who motioned for his underling to put the ax on the stone platform next to Hulan. She wasn’t sure if he was tempting her to pick it up or warning her that her end was inevitable.
Michael resumed his niggling. “You marry this David Stark, but you don’t really love him.”
“Of course I do.”
Michael shook his head knowingly. “The man loves you— anyone can see that—but you don’t love him with your whole heart. Your heart is a fortress against happiness.”
In spite of herself, Michael’s dime-store babble was getting to her. She broke eye contact with him and looked down at Hom. “You can’t know what’s in my heart.”
Hom’s eyes were glassy. His skin, which had always looked jaundiced and unhealthy, was even more depleted, wrinkling as the life ran out of him.
“Your husband gave up so much to be with you—his homeland, his career, his happiness. You can’t do that to a man.”
“I tried to make him happy.”
“But you failed. You failed in the one way a woman must never fail.”
She turned back to Michael. His smile was beautiful, and his skin glowed in the candlelight. “Yes, Hulan, I’m talking about your daughter.”
“How do you know about her?”
“You were after us, Hulan. It was important for me to know everything about you.”
Hulan knew what she was dealing with now. Michael Quon was not a psychopath. He’d gotten to this point with the cold and deliberate plotting of a mathematical mind.
“You should have done more,” he said. “You should have protected her.”
She’d been trained never to be tricked into giving personal revelations, but she couldn’t stop herself. “I did everything I could.”
“Why didn’t you take her to the hospital sooner? Did you not want to make a fuss because no girl child is worth it?” He paused, then recited, “‘When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son.’”
Hulan could almost hear her father grinding those words into her as a child. “I never thought that way about Chaowen.”
“No, because you’d been too corrupted by the West,” he said in a mocking voice. “You probably thought the whole world was open to her.”
Why didn’t he just kill her and get it over with?
“You’re a thoughtful person, analytical in your own way,” Michael continued. “Think about that night. Were you embarrassed that your daughter was sick?”
Each word he spoke smashed deeply into Hulan.
“Were you afraid people would think you weren’t a good mother?”
Her heart ached and she felt utterly defenseless, yet something strange was happening. She was beginning to relive those last days. She was seeing them as they were, not as her grief had warped them.
“Did you delay in going to the hospital because you didn’t want people to see you fail again?”