Page 70 of Caution to the Wind

“Just to say,” he added, and I tensed again, knowin’ he was about to land a final blow. “Cleo obviously kept in touch with the kid. She obviously loves her the way Cleo loves everyone in her heart. Balls to the wall, ride or die. Your girl is agiver, just like her dad. Seems to me, if she called Mei, it was ’cause she needed her right now. And she needs her right now ’cause the road she’s on to healin’ from this horror? She’s gonna need totake,and there are only a handful’a people Cleo feels comfortable doin’ that shit with. You get me?”

I swallowed the stone that was lodged in my throat and actively worked to unclench my fists.

Yeah, I knew.

I knew firsthand just how ironclad the bond was between souls bound together by trauma. I’d watched a normal childhood friendship between girls blossom into a relationship the likes of which I’d never seen ’til I moved to Entrance and watched King with Mute, Boner with Curtains, Harleigh Rose and Lila, Cress and Lou, Zeus and Bat, and Bat and Dane. Some friendships would never die, even when you buried them alive, and I knew in my gut Cleo and Mei’s was one of them.

The thing that pissed me off as much as it scared the hell outta me was that after my reaction seein’ Mei today, I was worried our relationship was one of them as well.

And I didn’t know if I had the strength I needed to put the final nail in that coffin, just as I didn’t know if I’d be able to survive another betrayal from that girl I used to love.

MEI

The drivefrom Vancouver to Entrance wasn’t long, especially without traffic clogging the winding artery wrapped around the mountains along the coast of British Columbia, and the scenery was gorgeous enough to make the time slip by pleasantly enough.

Unfortunately, neither the mountains nor the silvery blue-grey of the ocean under a wintery cloud-covered sky or the dulcet tunes of Labrinth through the Bluetooth in my helmet could take my mind off impending doom.

And doom they would be because eight years after being scorned by Henning Axelsen, I was on my way to his very doorstep.

I had no doubt if he was home, he’d slam the door in my face.

Maybe he’d even call the cops.

But I told myself I didn’t care.

Eight years might have passed, but what bearing did time have on the storage capacity of the human heart? Ma had died almost a decade ago, and I missed her every single day. It was nearly the same for Kate. Cleo and I hadn’t seen each other for ages, and she’d still called me from her hospital bed days after a psycho fucking serial killer cut her up from the inside out and left her to die in a fallow field.

Eight seconds, eight years, eight decades, I didn’t give a damn.

My Cleo needed me, I’d do whatever it took to be there for her.

Even if it meant I had to face the biggest mistake I’d made in my life.

My palms were slick with nervous sweat in my leather gloves, and the hum of the bike beneath my body didn’t soothe me the way it usually did. I drove a Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle, a far cry from the growling rumble of a Harley, but today it reminded me too much of being on the back of Henning’s bike, the sensation of his strong body manipulating the heavy machinery with ease, the feel of his warmth soaking into me through the leather on his back.

Even though Cleo and I had kept in regular contact with emails, Skype calls, texts, and the occasional letter, and then, after I moved to Vancouver, with infrequent coffee dates, I still felt the loss of her presence in my life like a phantom limb every single day so the idea of seeing her again, of holding her, and caring for her after this new nightmare she’d endured was a gift I would cherish no matter what.

No matter that it meant facing Henning after his violent reaction to seeing me at the hospital six weeks ago. I’d only seen such fury on his face twice before. The day he found Kate strung from the ceiling of the House of Horrors and the day Rooster’s Fallen Men had betrayed him.

To think he might hate me as much as he did Rooster Cavendish or the people who killed Kate made acid eat through the lining of my gut.

But I’d never been the kind of woman to shy away from confrontation, not when I was fighting for something that mattered.

And Cleo mattered to me more than almost anyone.

When she called me two weeks ago for our weekly check-in, she’d been sobbing. These great, tearing sobs seemed to crack open her entire chest. She hadn’t begged me to be there for her, but she’d come close, and I’d never heard Cleo beg for anything before. Her body was healing, but she was living in a state of perpetual fear since the assault. I’d read once that fear and trauma made people regress to an earlier state. Hospital patients frequently asked for their favourite childhood stuffed toy or their mothers.

Cleo couldn’t have her mother, but I was happy to be stand-in for her stuffed rabbit. If she wanted me by her side through her journey of healing, I’d be there. Even if it meant fighting her own father to do so.

I shivered in my leather jacket and opened the throttle a little more.

Years ago, after what went down, I’d written to Henning.

Letters and emails, so many of them I had a drawer stuffed with “return to sender” envelopes and a folder in my inbox labelled Henning filled with emails he’d probably never even opened.

After my first visit to the prison, he refused to add me to his visitor list, and when he got out of prison three years later, I was too much of a chickenshit to try to visit him again.

He’d made his decision clear.