Page 47 of Caution to the Wind

He’d’ve done research on me. Doctor, dropout, tattoo artist, single dad, and widower. But you couldn’t read a person’s soul in a report. You couldn’t test the strength of their character from a collection of facts found on the internet.

I wasn’t just a thug and he’d expected that.

Under other circumstances, I might’ve sighed at the common judgment.

Then again, how could any man who went by the name of Axe expect to be seen as anythin’ other than a weapon?

“What are you proposing exactly, Mr. Axelsen? Sitting here without the weight of your president at your back, you’re hardly in a position to negotiate a truce.”

“Actually, I am.”

Jiang cocked an eyebrow.

I sucked in a discrete deep breath, ready to gamble everythin’ on this one conversation. “Rooster’s a sack of shit and most of the brothers are unhappy with him. Might not have his support, but I got the support of the mother chapter of The Fallen, and there’s no authority higher than Zeus motherfuckin’ Garro.”

Jiang flinched just slightly, a coilin’ of tension in his spine drawin’ his posture even straighter. It caused a hank of styled hair to fall over his forehead into his right eye, and for a moment before he fixed it, surprise in his eyes and youth in his features, he looked like a young man. Just a boy really sittin’ in a slightly dilapidated inn in Chinatown.

“And, with the sanction of Zeus Garro at your back, you propose what exactly?”

“A division of assets. You keep the heroin and meth trade; we stick to weed and weapons. We don’t step into each other’s territory, and we got any disputes outside of that, we have a sit-down like fuckin’ gentlemen.”

“Outlaw gentlemen?”

I shot him an appraisin’ look. “Says the man in head-to-toe designer shit.”

His eyes sparkled as he nodded, and I could tell he was havin’ fun. That, no matter what circumstances had driven him into crime, he enjoyed its seedy underbelly.

I recognized the look, maybe, ’cause despite my conflicted feelings of shame around it, I did too. There was no way to mimic the high stakes of war, the metallic bite of adrenaline on the back of your tongue, in real life like a life of crime.

“It’s not rocket science, but it’ll keep bodies from pilin’ up,” I allowed. “Neat and fuckin’ tidy so long as you agree to it.”

“You’d go behind Rooster’s back on this?” he murmured, leanin’ forward slightly for privacy even though we were alone outside the thugs waitin’ at the door.

I knocked my knuckles against the table lightly. “If you’re ready to go behind your brother’s.”

More shock, fairly well guarded by the shutterin’ of his lids as he took a sip of rice wine. He hadn’t expected me to know about the tension between them.

Truthfully, I hadn’t, not for sure.

But Old Dragon had briefed me a little about the infamous Chinese brothers from Hong Kong. Kasper was older by ten years, more established but also more set in his ways. He’d come to Canada a grown man whereas Jiang had only been a teen. It made a difference, and even if it was just a small one in ideologies, it was enough of a crack for me to wedge open with a fuckin’ crowbar.

“You say this because you know my brother does not work with white men. He will not go quietly away from the idea of vengeance. You killed one of our own and stole from us. I’m a more forgiving man than he.”

“We’ll return what was stolen. We got no use for those drugs anyway. And I’m not talkin’ to Kasper for a reason, Jiang. I came toyou’cause your brother might be Dragon Head of Seven Song, but this isn’t Hong Kong, and I think you get that more than he does. You want to survive in Canada with the bikers, the Quebecois mafia, the Indigenous gangs, and all the rest, you got to learn to play nice when it counts.”

“You speak Cantonese. Your wife had dealings with Chinese foreign nationals and Chinese-Canadians through her real estate business. So, I imagine you think you know something about our culture? This can’t be true if you sit there straight-faced asking me to betray the trust of my brother. Family, Henning Axelsen, comes before all else. And honour is a very close second.”

“It does,” I agreed, openin’ my palms to reveal my trump card. “Which is why I’m sittin’ here askin’ you to make a decision independent of your brother, not against him. If this conflict escalates, if we got a gang war on our hands in the streets of Calgary, no one is safe. Fuck you or me, we signed up for this shit. But what about my daughter?” A pause, a little pocket of silence that exploded between us when I whispered, “What about your boyfriend, Eero?”

Jiang was across the table with a gun to my temple in an instant.

Happily, I’d known that was comin’ so I had the rice wine cup smashed, a shard of ceramic in my hand and raised to his jugular in about the same amount of time.

He breathed heavily, a bow strung taut across the table ready to release all his fear and fury at the threat of me.

I didn’t flinch.

I didn’t even bat a fuckin’ eye.