256 How Could You Do This To Me

Taking a deep breath and while fidgeting his fingers, he started. "Jin Qingling, I... I have known you long before you moved to New Orleans."

"So?" Jin Qingling looked confused with no inkling of what was going to be revealed to her. "How does that make any difference?"

"It does." Gen nodded his head slightly. "It does. You will soon understand."

His face was marred with nervousness and anxiety as he continued talking. "I knew you even before you left China. I worked at the same company as you. I saw you there every day."

"How is that possible? I never saw you there!"

"Well... Our departments were different. And I have always been the kind of person no one notices, so you see... Anyway, I fell in love with you during that time only and not in New Orleans. I had tried a lot to gain your attention or be friends with you, but you never spared even a glance at me. Only I know how desperately I have loved you." 

The direction of his words had already started to give Jin Qingling an ominous feeling in the pit of her stomach. Feeling utterly confused she managed to throw a question to him, answer to which even she was not sure if she wanted to hear. "Why are you telling all this to me now?" 

Without answering her question, Gen continued his story. "Do you remember the last anniversary celebration organized by the Wu Corporations, after which you left China?"

Jin Qingling nodded her head and Gen continued. "I was there that night and saw you leaving with Wu Zihao— drunk." Before she could ask what he was doing there, he answered it himself for her. "I went there with my father, he was the manager of that place then. And that is when I met Jin Qinggee, who ran into me when I was standing there... on the verge of crying." He spoke the last word very softly, not wanting her to hear that, or anything that he was speaking.

"We had been meeting for a while, to co-ordinate with the event. She saw me standing there, heartbroken, and asked me if I loved you. And that was the moment where it all started."

"Don't go around in circles! Just tell me already what did you do." Jin Qingling snapped at him, her patience running thin.

Gen looked at her, his eyes filled with tears of remorse. "When she asked me if I loved you, I said 'yes'. And then she told me that she loved Wu Zihao. She wanted him and I wanted you, so she convinced me to work together with her and pull you two apart."

Seeing the hatred for him in her eyes, Gen felt a lump forming in his throat, making it hard for him to answer. Getting no response from him, Jin Qingling stepped closer and grabbed him by his collar and screamed at the top of her voice, "Tell me what did you do?!"

"I– Everything..." His gaze got fixed on the floor and he broke into tears himself. "Everything that happened with you, after you left China, I did all of tha—"

"Slap!" She had hit him so hard that she felt the sting in her hand as well.

"Neither of us knew how it will turn out, and we had decided to go with the flow. We took the gamble by Jin Qinggee lying to you about her and Wu Zihao's relationship. Everything that she said to you about Wu Zihao was a lie and the rest kept happening in our favor, the first being how easily you believed her. Wu Zihao is a very nice man, he has always loved you, always."

He looked at her face and she looked shocked. She had her doubts about her sister deceiving her, but she didn't want to accept it. She didn't want to believe it even when Wu Zihao told her everything, because she thought it would help her to keep going with Gen, whom she felt so grateful for.

"We were keeping tabs on you and it was on Jin Qingling's advice that I approached your landlady and in exchange for some money, she agreed to kick you out. And very soon, I knew that we had won this gamble when I found out through your sister that you were pregnant. When I met you for the first time. it... it was not a coincidence. It was all pre-planned."

Jin Qingling went quiet as if she was analyzing something and then when the realization struck her, she asked, "When I went to meet Wu Zihao, those goons, they were not his, were they?" The desperation to seek his confirmation was evident in her voice.

He looked at her hatred filled eyes, with his remorse-filled ones and slowly shook his head, more tears flowing out from his eyes at the same time. "No," was all he could whisper.

"Slap!" Another loud echo resonated in the room and Gen took it all, without retorting. 

"How could you do this to me you bast**d?! How?!" Her face was drenched with her own tears but she didn't care about it.

"All this while I kept thinking, he sent the goons because he was not ready to take the responsibility. And that is why I never forgave him. But it was you. It was you who almost killed my daughter. 

"Killed? We had no intention to kill her Lingling... It was just to scare you so that you didn't go back to him and not to kill he—"

"Really?" She sneered with disgust. "They came to my apartment for 5 days constantly, telling me to leave the country, threatening me to kill my daughter, rape me, and what not! And you still call it just 'to scare you' thing?"

"What? I- I have no clue about it. It was not a part of the plan..." He drifted to some thinking and then looked at her again in realization. "It must have been Jin Qingge."

He immediately covered the distance between them. "Trust me Lingling, I didn't know about it and you also never mentioned it after coming back."

"Because you were still a stranger to me and I just wanted to forget that incident!. That is why I didn't tell you. But does it matter now? What matters is that because of you and Qinggee my daughter would have almost died from the stress that I had to go through at that time. The girl out there," she pointed towards the door of the study room, where Xiao Li was sitting outside, "she thinks of you as her father. You are a father figure to her! And what you did back then, would have killed her even before she could see the world!"