Page 21 of Caution to the Wind

“No one would even care!” she cried, that sadness lurkin’ in her eyes suffusin’ her entire face ’til it was almost grotesque with agony. “Ma is dying, and Dad doesn’t give a flying fuck I’m alive.”

“What about Old Dragon?” I demanded, but the heat had gone out of me, leavin’ a mess of smolderin’ ash in my chest. Fuck, but this girl had so much tragedy in her small frame, so much poison. A part of me wanted to suck it out of every one of her wounds, ingestin’ it myself so she didn’t have to. “You think that old geezer wouldn’t miss you like crazy? What about Cleo? That girl loves you more than she loves anyone else in this world apart from me. She wouldn’t know how to live without you.”

Mei blinked at me, her slim nose wrinkled with the effort not to cry.

“You think I wouldn’t care?” I asked softly, the words scourin’ up my throat like knives. “What do I have to do to prove to you that you’re loved, Mei?”

Unbidden, her gaze dropped to my right bicep where, beneath my leather jacket and tee, Cleo’s and Kate’s names were tattooed in a ring of fire.

“Mei…” I said ’cause I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do.

There was no way I was gonna tattoo a seventeen-year-old’s name on my body when she wasn’t my kin.

Mei read my mind, and her expression shuttered completely, iron doors slammin’ shut over those expressive dark eyes and that mobile mouth. She struggled in my arms ’til I dropped her, and she turned to pick up her discarded backpack without lookin’ at me.

“I get it.” Her words were quiet, tender like bruised flesh, and it killed me to hear that ’cause Mei never spoke that way. “But Kate loved me, and I loved her. That’s between me and her memory whether you like it or not.”

When she set off down the hall toward the principal’s office for detention, I was still standin’ there like a bastard tryin’ to figure out how to love a girl who desperately needed love when it was socially unacceptable for me to love her any more than I already did.

HENNING

I told Mei to quit lookin’for Kate’s killers, but that didn’t mean I’d stopped or that I ever would.

The police found fuck all in their investigation. As in, they found enough to assume a local Chinese triad was involved in the murder, and discoverin’ this, they decided to turn tail and run as far from the murder of a former prostitute as possible. It was easier for them to blame her death on the sins of her past––a disgruntled or psychotic former john or an affiliate of Jimmie Page, the Chinese-Canadian pimp who’d been released from his latest stint in jail just months before Kate’s murder––than it was to sink into the swampy, treacherous waters of Chinese-affiliated gangs.

But the connection to them was obvious.

There was shit all known about Chinese gangs compared to the usual organized crime outfits. Enough movies and books were written about the Italian, Irish, and Russian Mafias to fill the entire city of Calgary. Even motorcycle gangs, Mexican and Latin American Cartels, and backwoods American drug dealers were researched enough to produce a metric shit ton of books and fuckin’ TV shows and movies.

But not the Chinese triad system.

Those motherfuckers were shrouded in so much mystery, the only information I could find disappeared almost as soon as it was uttered in the wind.

One thing was certain, though, the way they’d killed Kate was ritualistic. The punishment for betrayal based on the concept of the triad’s oath of five thunderbolts. A public, symbolic murder of death by a “thousand” cuts, known asLingchi, to serve as a warnin’ to others not to fuck up the same way she had.

Five years on, and I still didn’t know how my wife had fucked up.

Probably ’cause I’d never had any goddamn clue my Katie Kay was involved with a Chinese triad. The only reason I knew that much was, indirectly, ’cause of Mei.

Almost a year after her murder, I’d been porin’ over everythin’ I had on the investigation I’d been able to cajole outta the police, secure from my connection with The Fallen MC in Calgary, and find out myself through a few lengthy conversations with some witnesses from the fairground that day that involved my fists.

It was nothing. A whole fuckin’ pile of nothin’.

I had my elbows to the desk, fingers tunnelin’ through my hair when Old Dragon had wandered into my office, obviously havin’ arrived to pick up Mei from her hang out with Cleo. I didn’t shift away from the old man when he shuffled up beside me and peered over my shoulder.

There was a rapport between us that had never been confirmed with words.

The demons in his eyes matched the demons in my own.

We’d done things, the two of us, our families would never know about, and we carried that burden with stoic grace.

So, when Old Dragon’s surprisingly strong hand clamped over my shoulder, I was instantly alert to the change in his energy.

He recognized somethin’.

Or, it would seem, someone.

“This man,” he murmured, crushin’ the tip of his index finger into the photo of Kate with her arm wrapped around a client in front of a Sold sign. His fingernail cut a half-moon into the neck of a man carefully lingerin’ in the background of the shot, as if he didn’t want to be documented. “This man is Kasper Kuan of the Hong Kong Kuans.”