Chapter 291 Shoes? In MY House?

[WARNING - More Eye Trauma]

Li Yue Niang pulled out the stake from his eye, narrowly dodging the spray of blood and eye fluid. She let go of the man, causing his unconscious body to slowly slide down against the wall, leaving a trail of blood that looked like it belonged in the first five minutes of every slasher film.

"Now there's one more left…" Yue Niang nodded to herself, pleased with her handiwork. Despite a decade of inactivity, her skills weren't too rusty, even if her back muscles were protesting the sudden exertion. Her arms burned with the strain, but she planned to just stick a few heat plasters all over herself when this was over.

She turned to the shivering man that was still conscious.

Ding Fei shuddered. He wanted to slap his past-self in the face - when he had first noticed the woman observing the room, he should have just jumped out to knock her out! But then he didn't, because he thought she would just leave after getting what she came for. After all, their main target was her daughter.

Curse his own stupidity! How could he have failed to determine she was a threat?!

"How… how did you know? We were here?" Ding Fei croaked weakly.

"I could smell you," Li Yue Niang replied, stalking towards him like a tigress watching a wounded gazelle. Ding Fei was a manly man, which was why he whimpered in a very manly way and tried to scuttle away, only for his back to hit the wall. He tried to get up, only to stumble. He was forced to lean against the cupboard door for support.

Now he couldn't even stand upright! His vision was blurring with blood loss!

He was out of places to run. Even jumping out the window was out of the question, since his eye was so injured, he didn't even have the depth perception necessary to walk in a straight line.

"And you entered my house without taking off your shoes," Yue Niang glared at him, spitting the words from her mouth. "Do you know how much dirt and germs you're tracking into my home, young man? You utter fool! Were you raised by Neanderthrals? Or white Americans? Didn't anyone teach you not to wear shoes in the house?!"

Yue Niang screamed at him, and Ding Fei shook his head instinctively in fear, causing more blood to spurt out from his eye.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please don't kill me, I won't do anything to you," he pleaded, trying to buy time. He still had two other team members - if they were smart, they'd use the distraction to kidnap their target.

"Of course you wouldn't," Yue Niang scoffed as she looked down at this pathetic snivelling man. "But you're in no condition to make demands. Now you'd better tell me what you're doing here in my daughter's room before I turn you into a blind man begging for spare change alongside the road."

"I'm robbing the house!" He bluffed anxiously. Yue Niang looked at his twitching body and snorted.

"Nonsense. Do I look like I was born yesterday?" She easily shoved his shaking body to the floor, looming menacingly over him. She purposely hovered the stake over his unhurt eye, causing him to go cross-eyed in a bid to keep it in view.

And when he did, he wished he hadn't. The wooden stake was now a dyed reddish brown, and if he looked carefully enough there was a faint translucent membrane that used to be a part of his eye.

Or it could have been his partner's eye. Just the thought made him retch, but Yue Niang grabbed his throat with her other hand and squeezed.

"Don't vomit in my house," she growled out. "Have you not made a big enough mess for me to clean?"

Ding Fei gulped, but there was no saliva he could swallow. His mouth was drier than a desert.

"Now, you'd better tell me the truth before this little friend of mine meets your eye. Maybe I'll let them meet anyway, since you don't need your eyes to talk!" She whispered in his ear, and unlike Ding Fei, she wasn't bluffing at all!

Yue Niang deliberately brushed the tip of the makeshift stake against Ding Fei's lower lash line, as though she was a makeup artist trying to put eyeliner on a reluctant client.

Ding Fei squirmed, frantically trying to avoid the wooden stake still hovering ominously above him, less than a hair's breadth away from his very unprotected eye.

Yue Niang let out an impatient 'tsk' at that. She gripped his throat hard enough that he began wheezing, shivering as every cell in his body begged for help.

It was terrifying to realise that he got it wrong from the very beginning; she wasn't the one trapped in the room with them - they were the ones trapped in the room with her!

"So… are you going to talk?" Yue Niang repeated, watching how that sole eyeball darted around in fear.

"I… I… " Ding Fei choked out.

"Ah I guess not," Yue Niang said, and began slowly pressing the stake down against his exposed eye. Ding Fei began screaming in pain.

"I'll talk! I'll talk! Please let me go!" Ding Fei cried out, tears forming in that one eye. Yue Niang removed the stake, and watched as his eye slowly turned red, thanks to the blood vessels exploding in his eye.

"You have three seconds." Yue Niang said, blinking placidly.

"What?"

"Three seconds, two seconds, -" Yue Niang counted, and the stake brushed against his lower lid with false gentleness. Her fingers dug harder into the man's throat.

"Kidnap! We were supposed to kidnap Sun Jingwei and your daughter!" Ding Fei burst out, his voice garbled. He nearly wept from his one remaining eye. "Please, stop holding this damn thing! I don't want to go blind!"

"Thank you, was that so hard?" Yue Niang said, not expecting an answer. "But that's not enough. Who sent you?"

She found it exceedingly hard to believe that some low life thugs would bother to kidnap Sun Jingwei and her daughter for some cheap ransom! The effort wasn't worth it - even if they succeeded in the beginning, Sun Jingwei's family would overturn the whole country looking for him.

(Of course, she and Tai Cheng would probably kill an empire's worth of people if it meant recovering their daughter. But most people didn't know that! Case in point, the pathetic man groveling at her feet.)

""It's… It's…"