Chapter 11
June
Wake up.
I opened my eyes.
Darkness.
My heart tightened as a small wooden hut appeared in the middle of nowhere.
I had just escaped from it. At least it had been a shelter.
I took one hesitant step toward it. Then another.
Should I go back?
Maybe I should have stayed. Maybe I should have waited. Maybe someone would have paid for my life.
I turned away from the hut and kept walking.
I didn’t know how long I walked. Minutes. Hours. Maybe days. There was no sun. No clock. No sense of time.
Then I saw it.
A lake.
Someone was inside.
Calling my name.
I bent down, but the water distorted everything. Faces appeared and disappeared like reflections on broken glass.
A little girl appeared.
I reached for her.
I gasped and jolted upright in bed, air rushing into my lungs so violently my chest hurt. For a few seconds, I couldn’t remember where I was.
I’d known it was a dream while I was in it. I knew I was dreaming, but I could never wake myself up.
I was forced to stay. Forced to watch. Forced to feel everything, like I didn’t belong to my own body.
I turned toward the white digital clock beside the bed.
8:27 A.M.
Ten hours.
I must have slept for at least ten hours. I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.
The last thing I remembered was sitting in bed, reading everything I could find about triads: Wikipedia pages, old articles, online forums. Anything.
Because no one here would tell me anything. Not Kai. Not his people.
Without Squirrel, contacts, or any real access to what was happening on the ground, the internet was all I had. Fragments of information. Old structures. Outdated articles. Rumours written by people who probably knew even less than I did.
Nothing that mentioned Dannie.
Of course not. Why would it? He’d spent most of his life trying to erase that part of himself. He’d wanted to go legitimate. Build something clean. Something better.
I didn’t even remember falling asleep. I hadn’t slept properly in weeks, maybe months. Dannie used to get up for Maru every night, even when he shouldn’t have, even when he was sick. I woke at every sound she made—the little cries, the restless movements. My body never truly rested.
Maybe that was why I’d slept so deeply. Maybe it was yesterday—the fear, the adrenaline, the crash afterward. Or maybe it was this place. For the first time in months, I hadn’t been listening for a baby crying in the next room.
I yawned, and the urge to go back to sleep scared me more than anything. I couldn’t afford to, not now. Not when Dannie’s life, his people, and everything he’d spent years building were falling apart around him.
Somewhere deep inside, I knew the truth I didn’t want to admit: the only way forward was to work with Kai.
Not trust him. Not forgive him. Not forget everything he’d done. Just work with him.
For now, that would have to be enough.
I pushed the blankets aside and sat on the edge of the bed. Hong Kong pulsed beneath the glass—restless, impatient, alive. Cars streamed through the streets, horns sounded somewhere below, and the city carried on as if my entire world hadn’t been turned upside down.
I closed my eyes and forced myself to reset. Think clearly. Figure out what came next.
The kidnapping was scary. Fake or not, my body didn’t know the difference. My hands still remembered the ropes, my wrists the pressure, my lungs the panic. If anything, knowing it had been staged made it worse, because it had been real for them. For Lincoln. For Kai. For Dannie.
I’d only tasted it, and already I felt like I was breaking.
“I can’t let this keep happening,” I muttered. Not to me. Not to them. Not to Maru.
I turned on the tap and splashed water onto my face. Once. Twice. It did nothing. Back in the States, the water had been freezing, sharp enough to jolt me awake. Here, it was room temperature, leaving my thoughts slow and heavy.
I lifted my head and stared at my reflection. Pale. Tired. Eyes dull from too many sleepless nights.
Then I saw my wrist.
A raw pink line cut across my skin. The memory returned instantly—the grip, the restraint, the helplessness. My stomach twisted.
What if that had been Maru?
I gripped the edge of the sink, pressing my hands together to stop the tremor, but it didn’t work.
“You done with the bathroom?” Kai’s voice cut through the silence.
I flinched. “Why? Couldn’t you find another bathroom in this mansion of yours?”
He sighed and rolled his eyes. “All right. Let’s start over, shall we?” He straightened and gave me a mockingly polite nod. “Good morning. How did you sleep last night, princess?”
Princess.
The word hit me like a trigger. The eighteen-year-old version of me would have melted at it. I had lived for that word, loved the way it sounded coming from his mouth.
But I wasn’t that girl anymore.
And he wasn’t the same man.
I forced a smile. “I slept great. Thanks to being kidnapped, villain. Highly recommend it.”
Something flickered across his face.
Kidnapped wasn’t just a word anymore. Not after Lincoln. I’d already known what it felt like to be afraid of losing my brother. Then Kai. Then Dannie.
Three different people. Three versions of the same nightmare.
And now me.
Maybe the word should have been banned from my dictionary. Any dictionary.
I got ready quickly and joined the morning briefing, which apparently someone had decided would be held at eight every morning from now on.
I glanced around the room, surrounded by security, bodyguards, and cameras. Read their notice board. Listened to their plan.
Then I realised something. There was no plan. They were waiting.
“For what?” I interrupted the meeting.
A few heads turned. Kai didn’t.
“For Squirrel,” one of the men answered. “He’ll reach out when it’s safe.”
Safe.
The word settled inside me like a stone.
Safe according to whom?
How long were we supposed to wait—a day, a week, until Dannie was dead?
I looked at Kai, still staring through the windows, his expression calm and unreadable.
Maybe he really believed waiting was safest. Maybe after everything he’d been through, he couldn’t see another way.
But I couldn’t sit here and wait for someone else to save us.
That meant handing control of my life back to the people who had already taken it from me once, and I wasn’t willing to do that again.
“That’s it?” My voice came out sharper than I intended. “That’s the plan? We sit here and wait for someone to maybe contact us?”
No one answered, because that was the plan.
Finally, Kai met my eyes. “That’s how this works,” he said calmly. “That’s what Dannie wanted. Remember?”
“No.” I stepped closer. “That’s how you lose.”
It struck me how carefully everyone watched Kai. They weren’t just listening to their boss. They were waiting to see whether I was allowed to challenge him.
“They’re moving,” I continued. “Laura and your uncle aren’t sitting around waiting for Squirrel. They’re out there hunting him while we sit here and do what? Hide?”
“We’re not hiding.”
“It looks like hiding.”
His jaw tightened. “We don’t move without information. This can be dangerous, June.”
“So?” His eyes narrowed.
“What if the information never comes? What if Squirrel has already been compromised? What if he’s dead?”
“Enough.” The word cut through the room.
I stared at him. “You don’t get to shut me down. Not after what you did.”
His gaze hardened. “What I did kept you alive.”
“No. You made sure I had no choice.”
No matter how hard I tried to move past it, that word kept finding its way back into my life. What I couldn’t understand was how Kai could deliberately kidnap me. He knew firsthand what it would do—the fear, the helplessness, the loss of control—to me. To someone he had once cared about.
Unless he didn’t care anymore.
The thought hurt more than I wanted it to.
“Stop fighting me.”
Somehow, it made me want to fight him even more.
“I’m not.”
The words left my mouth, but I wasn’t sure I believed them. Nothing Kai was doing made sense, yet he still expected me to follow along.
I pushed my chair back and straightened my shirt. “I need food.”
Before he could respond, I headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” he called.
“Getting food. You coming?”
I got downstairs and climbed into the car waiting outside. Dave and Kai followed.
My reflection stared back from the mirrored wall. I looked tired—more tired than I wanted to admit—but at least I was moving. Doing something was better than sitting in that penthouse, waiting for someone else to decide what happened to us.
Fifteen minutes later, we pulled into the older part of the city—the Hong Kong I remembered.
Narrow streets squeezed between old buildings, faded signs hanging above tiny shops, air-conditioning units jutting from walls, and laundry strung between buildings as though nobody cared whether strangers could see into their homes.
The driver stopped beneath a no-parking sign.
“Wait nearby,” I told them but didn’t wait for a response. “Follow me.”
The shop was still there, exactly as I remembered it. Small, narrow, almost ridiculously ordinary, with faded tiles covering the walls, a slightly cloudy glass display case, and an air that smelled of warm pastry, sweet custard, freshly baked bread, and old wood.
It felt like stepping into a memory.
The old couple were still there. The woman looked up first, and for a second, I wondered if she remembered me. Then her face softened into a smile.
Something inside me loosened.
I stepped inside. There was still only one table, the same one, and I slid into the seat facing the street just as I had before. For a few seconds, I let myself pretend nothing had changed. Not Hong Kong. Not Dannie. Not Kai. Not me.
“I think this is takeaway only,” Kai said.
He stood across from me, looking around the tiny shop as though he’d only just realised we’d brought an entire security operation to a place barely large enough for four customers.
I smiled. “Sit.”