Page 62 of Caution to the Wind

—Chinese proverb

MEI

Eight years later

2023

I hadn’t beento a hospital in eight years, and three people could have compelled me to change that.

One of them had called me weeping that very day.

“Mei,” Cleo had said, sobbing my name the way a disciple sobs for the mercy of their God. “I’m in the hospital, a-and I need you.”

I hadn’t seen Cleo in just over six months. We still met up every few months now that I lived in Vancouver, but they were clandestine meetings in tucked-away restaurants with low ratings on Tripadvisor because she didn’t want Henning to know that we still spoke.

It hurt to be kept like a secret by my best friend, a forbidden thing hidden from a man who hated me and whom I still loved so fucking much.

But to be kept at all, given the circumstances, was far more than I deserved, so I met Cleo whenever she was down in Vancouver, no matter the time or day. Even if I had work, I found a way to be there for her.

I owed her that and so much more after what I’d taken from her.

She never made me feel bad for it. If anything, she seemed embarrassed and upset by her own desire to keep our continued friendship secret.

“I can’t live without you,” she’d say sometimes, holding my hand too-tightly in a mildew-scented café. “But he can’t live with knowing I still see you.”

He being Henning Axelsen.

The man who’d taken the fall for my actions and spent three years in prison.

I understood Cleo’s conundrum, and I assured her all the time that I didn’t care about being her little dark secret. She meant more to me than anyone else left in my life, save Old Dragon.

I’d do anything for her.

Even if that meant visiting a hospital again for the first time since Daiyu died in hospice back in Calgary.

Even if it meant potentially facing the biggest mistake I’d ever made and seeing Henning again for the first time since I’d gotten him arrested.

My hands shook as I took off my helmet and clipped it to the handlebar of my bike. They kept shaking as I entered the hospital through the automatic doors, the scent of antiseptic and sickness a toxic mix in my lungs. I hit the button to the sixth floor, where Cleo had told me they were keeping her another week to make sure she recovered well from the seven separate surgeries she’d had to undergo to stay alive. They’d taken what remained of her womb from her body, stitched up her brutalized sex, fixed the internal damage from eleven stab wounds, and sewn each one closed.

I squeezed my eyes shut so tightly that white spots bloomed in the darkness of my lids. I had to be strong for her now. I wouldn’t cry when I saw the state she was in. I’d be strong and sure and gentle as a summer’s breeze. I’d be her best friend and her caretaker and her mother and her sister. I’d be whatever Cleo needed me to be.

By the time I reached her room, I was breathing slow and steady, wrangling my erratic heartbeat into something fairly normal.

It all went to shit the moment I stepped into the doorway and laid eyes on her, though.

Cleo lay in the hospital bed, pale as the white sheets, her face mottled and swollen with fading bruises like the skin of a rotten fruit. Her left leg was outside the blanket, casted from hip to ankle, and there were bandages on both hands, peeking out from beneath the collar of her hospital gown.

She looked next to death.

I knew this because I’d watched my mother die in a hospital bed just like this.

Fresh horror and desolation overlaid the echo of both still reverberating through my heart so many years after Daiyu’s passing, and for a long moment, I forgot how to breathe.

My entire body focused so intently on Cleo that I didn’t notice the hulking presence of a man until it was too late.

“Who are you?” a low, smooth male voice demanded seconds before I was shoved into the wall beside the door, punching the air from my lungs.

After years of training, my response was automatic.