The Last Heiress

Chapter 1 - Who Wants To Live Forever?

The first bullet smashed the Jingdezhen tea cup on my nightstand.

I had been idling in bed when it happened. The next bullet struck the lampshade on the unoccupied side of my bed and then the couch where I had discarded my wine-stained, plum-colored silk dress from the party last night.

If I had been sleeping in my usual spot, I would have left half of my skull splattered across the black elmwood of my latticed headboard.

Instead, I was fortunate enough to have been hanging off the side of my bed after throwing up in a drunken stupor sometime around midnight. The bullets left holes in my drapes. As the light fabric ballooned serenely in the morning breeze, they looked more like innocent moth holes than bullet holes.

Was this real? Or was it just a nightmare?

I got a grip on myself. No, this wasn't a feverish, drunken dream. We were under attack.

Get a hold of yourself, Angela!

There I was, still lounging in bed, barely awake enough to differentiate the sounds of gunfire from the illusion of nightmares. I was wearing only the barest of undergarments because it was sweltering this time of the year.

The scatter of blue and white glass shards across my light, summery linen blanket perplexed me. Was this a dream? What was going on? Then, I noticed a drop of blood from my cut hand drip onto my bed. It bloomed red as it soaked into the linen blanket. My hand was bleeding. In a shocked haze, I recalled I instinctively used my hand to shield my face when the first bullet came.

What stuck in my memory and haunted me for days after was neither the blood nor the exploding tea cup.

Rather it was the water dribbling down the side of my inky black table with mother-of-pearl detailing.

The water seemed to run in black rivers down the top of the table, down the lacquered side in a sinister waterfall, and slowly soaked the sheets on my bed. But no, as I followed the miniature river down, it ran clear and innocent as it seeped into my linens.

Not dark with ancient, forbidden mystery. Just water.

My breathing stopped. For the smallest of split seconds, I thought the assassins had brought more than just bullets to take me down. They brought poison, our family poison, the same poison they accused my father of making. Even as I had smiled alongside him and called it medicine, in that brief moment, as it dripped toward me, my mind screamed poison.

Guilt.

The mighty Angela Liang, as she faced certain death, finally admits that Black Waters is exactly what everyone knew it to be — the cursed substance that drove its drinkers mad.

I didn't say it out loud. But even thinking the thought, I felt like I had betrayed my father — no, my entire family — somehow.

Snap, snap, snap.

Almost like bamboo fireworks during the Lantern Festival.

Except now, the twenty-year-old girl lying naked in bed was the monstrous Nian they were trying to kill.

Perhaps, in their eyes, I was worse than any fairy tale monster.

Deep down, I always knew my father destroyed more than the rafters and mud walls of the farmer's houses. He destroyed the architecture of human minds.

I rolled out of bed, trying to shield myself in the foot of space between the bed and my nearby couch. With one hand, I reached for my dress and managed to yank it on over one leg.

Purple was the color of immortality. Last night, I had chosen that dress to flaunt my disregard for our family's impending threats.

Liangs, we rise with the dangerous winds to which others bend.