Chapter Twelve
Ricky
The old woman hesitates. Then she snaps something in Chinese, and Adriana retorts in lightning fashion. The old woman’s eyes go wide. She gives me a look up and down that feels as deep as a cavity search, and then she nods.
“I apologize,” she says with a slight inclination of her head to me and a nod to Adriana. “Maybe you are a better, bigger man than you seem.”
It doesn’t sound like much of a compliment or an apology — she’s still holding her hairpin knife, and I’m still beat to all hell and wearing a Disney shirt and skinny jeans — but it feels like more.
And there’s a strange heat in her voice, too.
A heat that lingers in her eyes as she gives me a second look that she quickly averts when I glance in her direction.
What the hell is with her?
“Thank you, ma’am,” Adriana says.
The old woman sniffs. “Ma’am? Do not talk to me like I am some soldier dressed in a wrinkled, dirty uniform with the smell of gunpowder and sweat clinging to me like a whimpering child. You may call me Madam Lin.”
“Yes, Madam Lin,” Adriana says.
Madam Lin clears her throat. “My grandson is a doctor. A very smart young man. Single, too, should you come to your senses,” she says with a sideways look at Adriana.
Come to your senses? What the hell is that about?
I think. But before I can raise my voice, she continues, “We are very proud of him. He went to Harvard Medical School. Graduated with many honors. He is coming here to help some others who were hurt. I will ask him to look at you two as well. There are some other men coming as well… one of our members, her nephew is the head of the local Triad. It is a shameful thing, because he did so well in school and could have been a lawyer. He even studied to be one and had opportunities to intern at several prestigious firms, but declined. Despite the shame, he is useful sometimes, too. These men will becoming to clean up. Do not speak to them. Do not look at them. Just let them do their job.”
“Yes, Madam Lin,” Adriana says. She casts a look at me like she wants me to answer, but my mind is still spinning around Madam Lin’s earlier statement about Adriana coming to her senses.
The old woman’s eyes turn to me in a probing way. I feel the weight of her age, her intelligence, her judgment, all in the way she arches one delicately manicured eyebrow. Despite looking down on her, I feel tiny.
“Yes, Madam Lin,” I say.
“That’s better,” she says. “We’ve had enough foolishness for tonight. Behave yourselves, both of you.”
The door closes behind her, leaving Adriana and me alone. An uncomfortable silence falls between us for a moment, as I get busy cleaning myself of Russian blood and wincing over every bruise and injury. Adriana does the same, keeping her eyes on the floor, the ceiling, anywhere but me.
“Did you mean what you said earlier?” I say.
“About getting your cock out of my face?” she says too quickly, in a way that isn’t teasing. It’s like she’s still got my dick on her mind. That’d flatter me if it were anyone but Vanessa’s sister.
Or Madam Lin.
Even in my wildest dreams, even if she were younger, there’s no way in hell. That woman scares me to my bones, and I’m not sure there’s any difference between climbing into bed with her and climbing into an early grave.
“No, not about my cock,” I say.
“Good, cause I wasn’t thinking about your cock at all.”
“No, of course not.” My cheeks flush a little.
Only a little. Blood rushes to a part of me that feels intensely constricted by these skinny jeans I’m wearing.
Adriana’s eyes flicker downward for a moment, then back to mine.
“I meant about me being as bad as they’re judging me.
And about you being ready to throw down if they come after me. ”
She cocks her head for a moment, considering me, and a few strands of hair fall in front of her eyes — shimmering smoky quartz that float in an endless sea of rage, burning vengeance, and something else heated that sends a shiver through me.
“Did I mean it? Did I mean that I’d step between you and whatever Triad motherfuckers come in here to take away the revenge that I have wept and bled for every moment of every day since my sister died?
The revenge I gave up my job for? The revenge I left my home for?
That you’d even fucking question that I’d be willing to add one more risk to the fucking mountain of risks I’m already carrying on my shoulders is just ridiculous. Yes, I fucking meant it.”
“Thank you.”
Those two words hit her harder than any Boris ever has. She takes a step back, then another, exhales slowly, then again, and shakes her head. “Fuck you for saying that. You have nothing to be grateful for — I’m still going to kill you.”
Her voice wavers; I decide to go easy on her. For Vanessa’s sake, nothing more.
“How’d you learn Chinese?” I say, changing the subject.
An eyebrow — adorned and shaped with a bit of dried Russian blood into a spiky ruffle — raises. “It’s Mandarin. I learned it in college, took classes and had an ex who was an exchange student from Shanghai. Why do you care?”
“Because you’re Vanessa’s sister. Because I thought, maybe if I learn a little about you, I might learn a little about her, too.”
“Vanessa never went to college, never studied criminology because she wanted to catch criminals — “
“But she caught them all the same,” I say, cutting her off; there’s a note in her voice I don’t like. A bitterness. And I won’t let anyone — not even Adriana, who might have every fucking right — do anything close to speaking ill of Vanessa. “She caught me. She caught me, and she changed me.”
“Changed you? So you were an even bigger piece of shit when she first met you?”
“Watch it.” I pause, breathe as anger surges through me. It doesn’t help. “You have no fucking idea what your sister did. Maybe you two didn’t have a fancy education in common. It seems like you don’t have your sense of kindness or fucking decency in common, either.”
She clenches her fists, her body shaking.
Her eyes flare. “Decency? You know how many fucking monsters I helped take off the street? How much work I did for the special investigations and organized crime units throughout the fucking state of Illinois? How many people I helped save from being trafficked, kidnapped, murdered? You shut your fucking mouth.”
“I loved your sister. Loved her. And I don’t give a fuck who you are, if I hear anyone — fucking anyone — not paying her the respect she deserves, I’ll fucking take their head off.”
“Even me?” she says, challenge shining at me like a spotlight from those radiant brown eyes.
“Even you.” It’s comfortable to feel angry at Adriana.
Comfortable and welcome. Because that other feeling, that stirring sensation, that rush that sent my heart pumping in ways that were so familiar and so disturbing…
that’s a feeling I cannot allow myself to have.
Not with her. I have to fight it with everything I have. “I’ll kill for the people I love.”
“You’ll kill them, too,” she says, voice ending with a plaintive crack.
The flaming anger in her eyes melts, drips from the corners of her eyes in crystalline pain.
Those drops cool my anger; I want to reach out to her, to quell that agony.
A step brings me forward, but her eyes flare again, holding me in place with their rage. “Tell me the fucking truth.”
“Your sister is dead. I’m the reason she’s dead, and I’ll spend every breath from now until the moment you kill me wishing that she had never met me.”
“You wish you had never met her?” Her voice is a whisper that shakes with all the furious force of an earthquake. Potent in its quietude.
“If I could take back every memory we shared, every moment, every touch, every kiss, just to give her another chance at life, I wouldn’t hesitate — I’d do it. Hell, I’d do anything to trade places with her.”
The look in her eyes shifts, then hardens as there’s a knock at the door. It opens seconds later, revealing a short, paunchy man with mussed hair, a light tan, and wary eyes. He’s carrying a black leather satchel.
“You are the two my grandmother spoke to me about? The shameful one and the woman?”
I shake his hand. “I’m Ricky. You can call me that or ‘shameful one.’ Either’s fine.”
“Adriana,” she says, holding out her hand. He takes it. “And don’t fucking dare call me ‘the woman.’”
“Adriana, Ricky, I am Danny Lin.” His eyes scan the two of us, then focus on my shoulder. “May I examine you?”
“Yes,” I answer.
It doesn’t take him long to diagnose my problem: a stab wound in the shoulder. It doesn’t take him long to stitch me up, either. Then, bandaged and not-bleeding, I’m able to put on the Disney shirt I’d found in the clothing bin, which makes Adriana smile. Maybe this isn’t so bad.
“You’ll be fine, except for some bruising and soreness,” Danny Lin says, finishing with Adriana. “Try to avoid fighting with armed criminals. It isn’t good for your health.”
“I’ll remember that,” she says with a glance at me.
“There is one other thing. My grandmother has requested that I take you elsewhere. Your needless drama is not wanted in her Mahjong club. My car is parked in back. I can take you anywhere you want to go.”
I trade another look with Adriana and nod. She nods, too. After a shower, a beating, and some free, under-sized clothing, there isn’t much more I could hope to take from these old ladies and their club dedicated to playing around with tiles, so we might as well get the hell out of here.
“Fine. Lead the way.”
Danny takes us out of the club through a back door, down the end of a hallway that passes by the club’s kitchen, and empties into an alley next to a dumpster. I grunt at the sight. It figures they’d send us out like they’re taking out the trash.