Chapter Twenty-Five. House of the Blackhill #2
In flashes, she was vaguely aware of rustling, of rough hands, of darkness and the smell of earth, of a different woman altogether. She flailed and there was a burst of light. “Tian,” she gasped, before something came down hard on her temple again, and it all went black.
Adeline jolted awake to a sharp smell and found Lilian Leong leaning over her with a pungent bottle.
She jerked forward, only for ropes to bite into her wrists and ribs.
She was tied to a chair, in an unfamiliar air-conditioned room.
Her hands were swaddled in rough cloth and bound to the arms of the chair in front of her.
Panic shot through her. As Lilian leaned in, Adeline thrashed and snapped at her nose.
“Hey!” Salts scattered onto the floor. Water doused Adeline’s lap from the mug Lilian had been holding in her other hand.
The back of Adeline’s head throbbed, and her hair felt hard and crusted. She knew, somehow, from the smell or the oppressiveness of the windowless room, that they were in the hill. They were in the Blackhill house, the Three Steel house. But Lilian?
“Let me go.”
Lilian chewed her lip. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have come again. They saw the first Butterflies a few days ago.”
Hwee Min and Mavis. Hadn’t Adeline seen…? But her head was swimming and there was something she couldn’t remember. She did, however, remember running, remember being hit. There had been a chase? They hadn’t been alone. “Where’s Tian?”
“Got away. Nine Horse helped her.” Adeline’s relief didn’t last long, though. “They’re going to make her trade for you,” Lilian said.
It hadn’t been ten days, but Adeline knew it didn’t matter. They’d made the first move. “You shouldn’t have come,” Lilian repeated.
There was something loaded about the way she said you that gave Adeline pause, like she meant Adeline specifically.
She tilted her head, staring, and Lilian backed away.
She was a babbler when she was stressed, Adeline remembered.
“People have seen you together.” Lilian sneered a little, even as her voice thinned and her cheeks gained a creeping flush.
“People know. Even when I worked with her, even when she was younger, everyone knew.” Her mouth worked. “It’s not my fault.”
“Stop talking to her.” A man’s voice interrupted before Adeline could snarl. A stout Steel put a warning hand on Lilian’s shoulder. The Prince of Night had ranted about her going out with one of them.
People know. Adeline wanted to tear her pouty lips from her face.
Instead she said, “Why? You think I’m going to seduce her? You don’t make her happy? I can’t blame her. I’ve been told I’m pretty. You look like you got dragged out from the river. I wouldn’t mind. I think your girlfriend’s—”
The man cracked her across the face. Harder than she’d expected, if she was being honest, and she swallowed the sudden nausea that had sprung up with her already pounding head. “Mouthy bitch.” Behind him, Lilian averted her gaze. “Kee Hong! Where are you?”
A boy who couldn’t be older than fifteen rushed in with a pail of water. He stopped at the sight of Adeline, as though he hadn’t expected to see a girl, much less a girl close to his age.
She smiled at him, audacity the only thing keeping her together. “Never talked to a girl before?”
The boy glanced at Lilian’s boyfriend, clearly looking for instruction.
The teen was wearing a singlet, but unlike Lilian’s boyfriend, who had both arms covered in white tattoos, his were bare save a sword running down his left bicep.
He was new to the gang. If Adeline had to guess, he was still proving himself.
When his gaze returned to her she met it with contempt.
He saw it, flinched hard, and then swung the bucket.
Ice water doused her head to toe. She coughed, blinking the water out of her eyes. “That’s it?” she demanded. She shivered and scoffed as he looked at his older brother again. “If you need him to tell you what to do, you’re not going to last long.”
Lilian’s boyfriend just shot Adeline a thin smile. “Fan Ge wants to meet you. Get comfortable.”
Very quickly after they left, Adeline found out what he meant. The air-conditioning was on full blast. Within minutes, her teeth began to chatter.
She had never been cold before. Not just this cold, but cold at all, and so this cold hit her all the way in her bones.
They had sat her right in the roaring streams of freezing air.
She couldn’t feel her fingers. The cold had seeped into her at first, leaching the heat she’d relied on all her life.
Then it had set in and twisted, forcing her into shivering spasms, her teeth chattering so hard she thought she would bite her tongue off.
But worse was the void that cold brought.
Adeline was used to apprehension and fear, but fire had always been there to bury it.
Without that heat, however, it was like every nerve exploded in her mind, turning it into a warzone she didn’t recognize at all.
Every shiver shot a new alarm through her.
It was like she could see a thousand futures all spiraling out in front of her, solidifying in the cold.
She’d seen the bodies, heard the stories, knew what Three Steel was capable of.
Her imagination was too fertile with terrible outcomes: herself dead, carved up; Tian dead, carved up, bled out; Red Butterfly dead, carved up, burnt.
She didn’t want these visions. She wanted the fire.
She wanted to burn all the thoughts away.
But she couldn’t reach it, and the thoughts kept coming.
When the door next opened, in walked the White Man. She was shivering violently, but she found enough hatred to pull herself together and stare Fan Ge head-on as he approached, all his steel glittering. Unfortunately, he didn’t balk as easily as a teenage boy.
He cupped her chin and she flinched instead, not just at his presence but at the unexpected warmth. Of course, with all that metal in his body, he must have baked every time he stepped outside. She smiled grimly, and his eyes narrowed. “What are you smiling about?”
She kicked him in the stomach. Or at least, she tried to.
Instead, her ankle crumpled against steel, a flare of pain shooting up her leg.
The chair gave way beneath the recoil. Her head slammed into the floor, hands unable to break the fall, and she lay there on her side, dazed, as Fan Ge squatted to look her in the eye.
He and the men behind him swam in and out of focus, accompanied by a static ringing in her ears.
“Insects,” he said, gazing imperiously down at her. “Pain in my ass.” He cuffed her casually in the face. It shouldn’t have been a strong blow, but his knuckles met her cheek like a hammer. Something cracked in her mouth, and she tasted blood.
“Insects bite you in the ass?” He hit her again. This time whatever had cracked dislodged; something solid fell against her other cheek, and she spat out something white and red. She swallowed the blood, but the fury was harder to suppress, and the dizziness worse. Somehow, he smiled.
“At least she didn’t raise you soft.” He made a gesture as he pushed himself to his feet, and the next moment two Three Steel members were pulling Adeline’s chair back upright.
“This is about my mother again?” she muttered. She still tasted salt.
“When your mother is a conduit, it will always be about your mother,” Fan Ge said darkly. “Not many kongsi have children while they are still under oath. Too dangerous, too big a gamble. But there are a few. In that, we’re the same.”
She shivered again. “You wish.”
“My father was our tang ki ko until the Japs got him. They saw his tattoos and rounded him up with the others. But they couldn’t stab him!
Their bayonets and bullets couldn’t break his skin.
So they pumped his stomach full of water and jumped on him until he died.
Then they couldn’t cut his head off and put it on a pole like they did all the other gangsters, so they got a thin knife and hung his skin on a stick instead.
And then I became the leader of Three Steel.
” He paused, but when she didn’t offer him a response he said, “I’ve been around longer than any of you have been alive, little Butterfly. ”
Adeline flashed her teeth, knowing they were stained red. “That just means you’re dying first.”
Fan Ge smiled thickly. “We’ll see. You can summon the fire?”
She said nothing. His eyes roamed over her, excruciatingly slow. Every inch of her skin crawled in the wake of his gaze. “Where is your tattoo?”
“I don’t have one.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I’ll send you to ask my mother, if you want to know so badly.”
“We’ll all end up in the same place.” He was still studying her, circling her, and something sour rose in her throat.
She could feel the eyes of the other Three Steel members traveling over her.
She wanted to burn their eyes out of their sockets, but she was stuck here in this chair, shivering, the forming bruises starting to ache viciously.
“A lot of men would pay good money for a girl like you. Looking like this, real educated. They like to feel like they’ve made a well-bred girl a whore.
They’ll pay enough for the illusion, but the real thing…
” He rubbed a lock of her hair between his fingers. “We could find your secret.”
The tugging on her scalp sent shivers down her spine.
“Don’t touch me,” she ground out, but she could hear her heart racing.
She knew anger too well and she had experienced terror—her house swallowed by the sun, her mother toppling from the flames—but she had never felt fear quite like this: slow, suffocating, taking its time.
She had never realized quite how small she was.
She’d never felt so watched. Suddenly, she was so inherently breakable.
Fan Ge glanced at the tattoo on her wrist and seemed to dismiss it instantly, though what tipped him off she couldn’t tell.
Then he yanked down the neck of her blouse, ripping the fabric off her shoulder.
There was that first butterfly there, just over her breastbone, and it burned under his gaze.
She shrieked, but he backhanded her across the face, licked his thumb, and ran it over the tattoo. It felt like a wet knife.
“You weren’t lying,” he remarked, genuinely curious. “Not the god’s mark.”
She kicked at him again, got hit again.
“Don’t make me break your fingers. You’re useful alive, but all I need is you breathing.” He leaned down again and his breath tickled her neck, sickeningly warm. “Like I told your girlfriend, maybe we can fix you both.”
Adeline froze. “I will kill you,” she managed to spit. Her vision was pulsing with white spots.
“You think you’re important,” Fan Ge said brusquely. With that he left, and the door clipped shut behind him, sealing Adeline in with the cold.