Consciousness slowly surfaced through a haze of buzzing.
Everything before Jiang Xun's eyes was black. Something had stuck his eyelids shut, and he couldn't open them. His mouth tasted of rust, and when the tip of his tongue brushed his palate, he tasted blood.
The dull pain at the back of his head throbbed with every heartbeat. He instinctively tried to reach up and touch it, but his arms were held tight behind his back.
Hemp rope wound around his wrists, biting into his flesh, and his fingers were swollen and numb. His legs were bound from his ankles to his knees, too. Every movement made the coarse rope saw a line of burning pain across his skin.
He tried moving his jaw. There was a faint click. The bones probably weren't badly hurt.
There was movement outside the door.
Deliberately hushed voices drifted indistinctly through an iron door.
Jiang Xun remained lying on his side, keeping his breathing as faint as possible as he shifted half an inch toward the door.
"Has the kid woken up yet?" a rough, hoarse voice asked.
"The boss hit him pretty hard. He'll be out for a while yet." The other voice was high and thin, with an oily slickness to it. "This pretty boy really is something. Even better-looking than on TV."
"Don't get any ideas. The boss said we can't touch him for now. The Jiang family has already gone crazy. Every cop in the city is looking for him."
"You think that Shen Wangjing will really hand over the evidence for this kid?"
Evidence.
Jiang Xun's pupils abruptly contracted in the darkness.
"He has to, whether he wants to or not. We've got what matters most to him. He was lucky the collapse down in the mine didn't kill him