Page 36 of Caution to the Wind

I shivered as he stalked out of the room, leaving Kang to give his lowly teen soldiers the details of our chores, but it wasn’t just fear that cut through me like a knife.

It was the dark, sweet joy of revenge finally coming close enough to grasp.

MEI

“Silly goat,”Lin clucked as she fussed with my hair. “Sit still.”

I adjusted one more time in the kitchen chair with a sour grimace that made Cleo giggle in the chair across from me.

It was the evening of our prom, the final dance of our high school careers.

I would rather pluck out my own eyeballs with a hot poker than go, but Cleo had begged me, and of course, I couldn’t find the will to tell her no. She was a beautiful girl and popular, but she still had a shyness and an edge of fear from what had happened to her mum, making her hesitate about social situations. If it made her feel better to go with me, I’d happily go as her guard dog.

Lin muttered again under her breath in Cantonese, cursing because my sleek, straight hair just wouldn’t hold a curl.

“Just leave it,” I told her, batting at her nimble fingers as they tried to coil another lock around a hot barrel. “I’ll just wear it down.”

Henning’s stepmum stepped away to frown down at me, her finely creased face pretty even in its scowl. “You should try to be a girl sometimes, hmm? Maybe then you’d have a boyfriend.”

Lin told me the same things nearly every week. I didn’t think it was actually about wanting me to have a boyfriend as much as it was her despairing over my lack of femininity. My baggy black clothes and clunky boots were the anthesis of her carefully made-up face, polished fingers and toes, and perpetual high heels. She was a talented aesthetician, and she hated that I wouldn’t let her make me beautiful.

Lin’s love language was giving people shit, so I laughed. “I don’t care about boys, Lin.”

Henning entered the kitchen then, drying off his paint-smudged hands on an old rag that he then tucked into the back waistband of his jeans. His hair was collected in a messy knot at the back of his head, streaks of honey, caramel, and gold shining in the red-gold light of sunset spilling through the big window over the sink. There was a smear of vermilion acrylic paint on his cheekbone and some turquoise on his stubbled jaw. The tee stretched too tight over his broad chest was old, thin enough to trace the planes and hollows of dense muscles. My mouth went dry at the sight of him.

“Boys, maybe,” Lin muttered.

I jerked my gaze away from Henning, but Lin was already puttering with the makeup Cleo had spread out over the dining table.

“At least some lipstick,” she encouraged, lifting a tube dramatically.

I rolled my eyes.

“You’d look pretty with some lipstick, I think,” Cleo said in that soft, lyrical voice that had provided so much soundtrack through my life. “Not that you don’t always look pretty. But this is a special night, Rocky.”

Henning emerged from the fridge with a beer, popping the top off on the edge of the counter with one knock of his big fist. He raised a brow at me as he took a sip in a silent challenge.

He didn’t think I’d wear the lipstick.

That I could put on a pretty dress and be a kid for one night.

I’d known him long enough to read every word written in his expression, and it made me glare at him.

His lips twitched with a smile around the mouth of the beer bottle.

“Fine,” I declared, pursing my lips. “Do your worst, Lin.”

Her face lit up with glee. She owned a little salon in Chinatown that did hair, makeup, and nails, and I’d never let her do anything more than my hair before.

The instant she undid the top of the lipstick and a brilliant shade of red appeared, I regretted my decision, but it was too late.

Behind her, Henning chuckled.

Damn manipulative bastard.

“Just tell me when you need a ride to the dance,” he told Cleo, already moving out of the room, probably back to his studio in the garage.

“Um, I thought maybe Zander could take us?” Cleo asked hesitantly.