Page 80 of Caution to the Wind

Cleo sighed, an unwinding ribbon of weariness. “You know, he wasn’t so mad in the beginning. Even those first few weeks in prison. I think he kept waiting for you to show up. It was only when you didn’t, when he realized you’d left us, that he started to hate you like that.”

Hearing that did something dangerous to my chest. A lightening, a sensation that floated through me that felt terrifyingly like hope.

Because if he hadn’t hated me that night at Turner Farm for putting him in that position, if he hadn’t hated me when the police showed up after I’d been spirited away and hauled me to the station in cuffs, if he hadn’t hated me when he’d been charged with manslaughter after Florent Marchand promised to send him away for good, and he’d only started to feel that righteous fury when I’d disappeared for good, what did that mean?

It was impossible not to love a man who was willing to go to prison for you, but I’d never thought about the heart of a man who was willing to go to prison for a girl.

Because a man like Henning wouldn’t go to prison for just anyone.

A family member, certainly. Maybe a friend who’d done or would do the same for him like Bat.

But the only reason a man like that went to prison for a girl like me was because, maybe, some part of him considered herhisgirl. Not romantically, no, but still, something strong like family, family we’d chosen for each other.

My heart thundered, and suddenly, I couldn’t breathe.

The thought of Henning sitting there in a dark cell during those first few months, waiting for me to visit, willing me to be there because he loved me and he believed I loved him, only to slowly realize that he was wrong.

And I hadn’t.

It broke my heart all over again.

The last time I’d spoken to my father, I’d threatened to hit him if he ever showed his face to me again. Now, I wished I could see him, just to take out this poisonous anger on his stupid, arrogant face.

“Rocky?” Cleo murmured. “I know Dad was mean, but don’t trust it. He’s all bark and no bite.”

My laugh was a one-syllable cough. The Henning I’d known was exactly the opposite—no bark and serious bite. I doubted he’d lost those cruel teeth after a stint in prison and almost a decade with the most notorious outlaw MC in North America, but it was sweet of her to say so.

“Mei Zhen,” Henning barked from somewhere in the house.

Cleo bit her lip. “You’d better go. But…you’ll come back tomorrow, right? Dad works at Street Ink Tattoo Parlour. He’s taken lots of time off to be with me, but I think it’s good for him to have his routine. It’s good for me, too. He takes off around ten every morning to go to the gym before work, so I’ll see you after that?”

“You will,” I promised, carefully wrapping my arms around her still-towel-clad body to give her a hug. “I won’t break a promise to you again, okay?”

When I pulled away, I offered her my curled index finger and outstretched thumb. A glimmer of a smile pulled her lips before she met my fingers with the mirror of my own, forming a heart the way we had so often when we were young.

“Think about what I said,” I urged her as I started to back away. “I’m Old Dragon’s granddaughter, after all, so I’m very wise, you know?”

This time, a full smile. “Sure, you are.”

“And the hair, think about that, too.”

“Pink,” she blurted, a little surprised by herself, eyes round, before she tried to shrug it off, awkward with one arm casted and wrapped in crinkly plastic to keep it from getting wet. “If I did it, I’d want it to be pink.”

I beamed at her. “Pink dye and coffee at ten-oh-five tomorrow morning, Glory. See you then.”

And even as I walked toward the kitchen, feeling like I was approaching a gangplank and my talk with a hateful Henning Axelsen, I felt lighter than I had in years. Because I’d made Cleo smile three times, and it was only my first day with her.

AXE-MAN

The sight of Mei holdin’Cleo reverently in the bathroom, sunk to her knees on the unforgivin’ slate tile to be eye level with my girl while she promised her that Cleo’d done no wrong in fallin’ for the psychopath who’d assaulted her would be seared into my brain for the rest of my livin’ days.

It wasn’t only that Cleo hadn’t let anyone but Bea, Harleigh Rose, Cressida, and me touch her since the assault. Not even Lin, her grandmother. Not even Loulou or Lila or Buck’s wife, Maja. Only Bea, ’cause they were best friends, and they’d bonded over their association with the sick fuck Seth Linley. Only Harleigh Rose, ’cause she’d been assaulted by her ex-shit-for-brains-boyfriend Cricket before she’d put a knife in him and ended his life. Only Cressida, ’cause she knew the weight of staggerin’ grief after thinkin’ she’d lost King for months last year and ’cause she was Cressida, everyone in the club’s touchstone––sister, mother, friend––even to the ones who didn’t bond in the usual ways.

It wasn’t even that Cleo’d refused to take a bath since she got home from the hospital, and I suspected it had a lot to do with bein’ vulnerable for any period of time in a half-naked state.

It was that I hadn’t seen the beauty of that connection between Cleo and Mei in eight years. I’d forgotten, somehow, buried under the layers of history and shit shovelled over top of it, how they made each other shine brighter.

Somethin’ about Mei’s strong-willed spirit relaxed Cleo as if she trusted her friend to deal with the harshness of the world so that she herself wouldn’t have to bear the weight of it as much. And somethin’ about Cleo’s trust and gentleness eased the restless, vaguely antagonistic aura Mei often used as a shield.