Page 32 of Caution to the Wind

“I bet.” I swung my backpack up onto one shoulder and turned to face my mother before leaving.

She was wafer thin, her body barely making an indent in the sheets. Dad had brought in expensive ones, fluffy pillows, and a velvet blanket in Ma’s favourite lucky red, but nothing could detract from the horror of her brittle bones so easily seen beneath bruised skin. From the fact that she was dying, and every single hour she breathed was a miracle.

I sucked in a deep breath, but there wasn’t enough oxygen to fill the emptiness in my chest.

“I love you more than one hundred hearts, Ma,” I whispered to her in Cantonese again before pressing a kiss to the middle of her forehead.

When I pulled back, Dad stared at me with dry, red-rimmed eyes. He startled when I walked around the bed, as if he’d forgotten he was sentient and not watching the scene like a ghost.

“I haveIn the Mood for Lovecued up on the laptop if she wakes up,” I told him. “We already watched it today, but…”

“It’s her favourite movie,” he finished on an anguished breath.

I nodded, biting my lip as I stared somewhere over his shoulder. It had been weeks since I could bring myself to look in his eyes. I found I could control the onslaught of rage and abandonment I felt if I didn’t make eye contact.

“You know I’m dying inside, too,” he whispered, the words constricted and breathy like he could barely speak through a too-tight throat. “You don’t know what it’s like to watch the love of your life just…” He flapped his hand ineloquently.

He rarely showed emotion. Unfairly, I wondered if the meeting today had gone badly. Rationally, I knew he loved Ma to distraction. It was easy to forget that sometimes when he was so cold and distant with everyone else. Especially me.

My gaze flicked up to his face, the sheen of old sweat on his skin, the mouth tight with pain, and the eyes…the eyes dark with regret.

Fury ignited so deeply inside me, the burn took a moment to reach my lips. “I don’t know what it’s like to watch the love of my life die? No. No, I guess I don’t. Because I’m only seventeen, Dad. But I do know what it’s like to watch my mother die. And I sure as hell know what it’s like to go through that without a father.”

“Mei Zhen Marchand,” he snapped, grabbing my arm almost painfully as I made to storm past him. “You do not speak to family so disrespectfully.”

“You’re right,” I agreed, staring up at him with all the defiance I felt bristling across my skin. “I don’t speak to Ma like that. To Old Dragon or Henning and Cleo. Justyou.”

Dad’s eyes flashed. “Are you going to him now?”

I didn’t have to ask who he was talking about. That kind of hatred was reserved for Henning alone.

“No, but really, it’s none of your business. You’re more of a stranger to me than he is.”

I wrenched my arm out of his hold and pushed through the cracked open door into the hall. My black Converse thwacked against the linoleum as I stalked down the corridor, only nodding respectfully at the nurses’ station instead of stopping to give them proper thanks the way I usually did.

I didn’t have it in me.

All I had was a helpless rage against the insensitivity of my father, against the decline of my mother, against the tragedy that had torn my other mother away from me five years ago.

Only, I wasn’t helpless against the latter.

Not really.

Because I had a plan.

And it was beyond time to set it properly into motion.

It was harderto become a criminal than you’d think.

Trust me, I put some effort into it.

Because it wasn’t just about becoming a criminal only to get caught as soon as you broke the law. It was about becoming a wraith, a shade travelling in the shadowed recess between the law-abiding and flagrantly felonious.

In order to enter that slim margin, you basically had to be invited by the right people.

Finding those people, let alone earning their respect enough to elicit an invitation to the dark side was a nearly impossible task. These men and women made their living under the radar, so it wasn’t as if I could look them up in the phone book.

The only way to find trouble was to throw caution to the wind andbuyit.