Page 179 of Caution to the Wind

The woman stared at the girl as if looking through her for a long, silent moment and then cupped the palms in each of her small, dexterous hands and bent over them.

“Such a long love line, broken not once, but twice, but scandal,” she murmured in breathy Cantonese. Her nail traced the lines on the girl’s palm.

After a moment, she stilled, her breath heavy in the tent. The girl remained still even when the woman raised her hands to examine her face with cold, soft fingers.

“Rivers and mountains,” she murmured. “I’ve seen this curious face before.”

“You have,” the girl agreed. “You told me once I was too focused on death and the dark. You warned me it would make me unlucky.”

“Well,” she demanded, “was I right?”

The girl smiled, a curl of ribbon beneath the blade of a knife. “I guess that depends on your definition of luck. I lost two mothers, went to an adolescent rehabilitation clinic, lost most of my family for eight years, and nearly died a few times.”

“Mmm,” the woman hummed with a satisfied smile, but narrowed eyes. “And?”

“And now, I’m married to the love of my life, and I have more family than I know what to do with. So, I guess, in the end, you were right about one thing. I needed to find the balance.”

“Between light and dark.”

The girl shrugged. “Between being too afraid to be the girl I wanted to be and being too stubborn to evolve.”

“Rivers and mountains,” the woman murmured.

“Rivers and mountains,” the girl agreed.

“Is this why you came to me? To tell me the outcome?”

“No,” the girl leaned across the table and planted a red-lipsticked kiss on the woman’s papery cheek. “I came to tell you it took years, but I figured out who spoke outside your tent that day, and I came here to kill him.”

The woman froze, and when she recovered enough to press, the girl was gone, the red flap of her tent waving as if in goodbye.

A few blocks away,at a busy eatery overlooked by tourists but frequented by locals who loved fresh, hot seafood prepared traditionally, an older man sat at a small table drinking tea and reading the paper. It wasn’t a Chinese paper, but theCanadian Globe and Mailbecause though he hadn’t been back to that country in months, most of his business dealings took place there. He was reading an article about the trial of four high-profile Chinese triad members who were being indicted for fraud and money laundering through a private bank in Vancouver. His hand shook as he turned the page and then reached for his tea. The porcelain was hot against his fingers, the tea too strong and a little bitter as he slurped it back.

The paper told him what he already knew, Seven Song triad as he’d once known it was done. His brother, Jiang Kuan, ran things on Canadian soil now, and Kasper himself had been forcibly retired. He wasn’t the kind of man who retired. He was the kind of man who took back what was his. He was the kind of man to…

The burn in his mouth from the hot tea had traveled down his throat and curdled in his belly, a tight heat that made sudden nausea bloom viciously behind his teeth.

He opened his mouth to beckon the server for some water, but a sharp pain in his chest stole his breath. And then another, sharper still, like a blade puncturing a lung, slipped just so between two ribs.

His face contorted with the awful pain, hand pressed to his chest like he could stop the bleeding, only there was no blood. Just pain, pain, pain, flashing through every inch of him until even his tongue ached.

In the moments before that pain overtook him, Kasper Kuan’s head fell to the table, mouth gaping and closing, a fish out of water, glossy eyes pinned unseeing out the window into the busy Hong Kong street.

If he hadn’t been so focused on dying, he might have noticed a thin slip of a young woman with streaming dark hair and a hulking blond man sitting at a café across the road. He would have noticed them, first because of the size of the foreigner and then because of the beauty of the girl. Then he would have noticed they weren’t eating or drinking a thing. Perhaps he would have recognized them, the girl he’d once condemned to death and the man he’d indirectly sent to prison. In the end, it didn’t matter anyway because he died, not fifteen minutes after sitting down. The server noticed when he went to deliver Mr. Kuan his hot pot, and he called the ambulance, but it was too late.

By the time the lights reflected off the windows on the street, Kasper was dead and the couple across the street had moved on, catching a plane to Singapore to carry on with the rest of their honeymoon now that business and vengeance were served.

They might have been living their happily ever after, but they were still Rocky and the Off-White Knight, Mei Zhen and Henning “Axe-Man” Axelsen, and necessary deaths would always be a part of their lives. Mei would say later on the plane, holding her husband’s four-fingered hand, that it was all about balance.

The End.