Page 75 of Caution to the Wind

It was a helluva way to make friends and keep myself protected.

And more than that, it kept me sane in the monotony of prison life and the isolation from my kid.

When I moved to Entrance after I was released, I’d met Nova––the same kid I’d witnessed Zeus take under his wing so many years before––and the rest was history.

The good kind.

So yeah, there I was, a tattoo artist for one of the most famous establishments in North America with a waitlist longer than my arm and appointments booked six months in advance.

All this to say, an expensively dressed customer walkin’ into the shop wasn’t weird. We had movie stars and rock stars within these walls a fuck ton. This customer shouldn’t’a made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

But it did.

Without turnin’ around to see the intruder, I knew somethin’ waswrong.

Bat felt me tense and went alert himself, body like a weapon coilin’ in the chair.

I turned on my wheelie stool to face the door, and the moment I did, I knew.

Mei’s reappearance had somehow heralded the reappearance of all my fuckin’ demons.

Jiang Kuan stood at the reception desk as if he was waitin’ to talk to the receptionist who was currently on the phone.

But his eyes were on me.

And he was smilin’.

Motherfucker.

I turned off the tattoo gun and tossed it with a clatter to the metal worktable pulled up to my station before I was on my feet prowlin’ toward him.

Jiang didn’t even blink before turnin’ on his heel and calmly walkin’ outta the parlour.

I followed him, aware that Bat, Nova, and one of our artists, Jae Pil, were all at my back.

Jiang stopped around the corner in the small alley between Street Ink and the clothin’ store next door. Even surrounded by four bigger men, the Seven Song triad member just stood casually with legs braced apart and his hands in the pockets of his thousand-dollar suit.

“Henning, it has been a long time,” he murmured in Cantonese. “I wish I could say you look well, but…” A one-shouldered shrug. “Honesty, it is a virtue.”

“What the fuck are you doin’ here, Jiang?” I barked in English for the benefit of my brothers. “A little far outside your territory, no?”

He looked up at the mural on the side of the tattoo shop, the huge-ass image of Lila amid a chaos of flowers with the wordsmarry mebeneath it, and he smirked a little before returnin’ my gaze.

“If you mean Alberta, we’ve…relocated in the past few years. Maybe you didn’t notice, being in prison.”

“I’ve been out for five years,” I said flatly, crossin’ my arms over my chest.

I’d always been a big guy, even as a kid.

Big, slow, and dumb, my dad had liked to say.

Years in the military had honed that size, but it was the three years inside that had turned me into what Cleo called a mammoth. Crossin’ my arms like that just accentuated the idle threat my body always posed.

Jiang’s gaze flicked down the length of me, and the line of his shoulders tensed visibly.

I grinned a grin that was also a threat and watched him blink.

“Yes,” he said, clearin’ his throat. “I’ve kept an eye on you over the years, of course. Which brings me to here and now. I want a meeting with your president.”