Caution to the Wind (The Fallen Men, #7)

by Giana Darling

It taught me to protect my loved ones at all costs. It taught me to seek revenge for injustices. It taught me that no wrong goes punished unless people are brave enough to risk themselves to see them penalized.

“I just wanted to say thank you. I know you do a lot of things for me you wouldn’t usually want to do, and it means a lot to me.” Something funny happened to my heart, a too-tight feeling like it was expanding in my chest. “You mean a lot to me, so it’s no big deal.”

“That’s just the thing, Mei. It is a big deal. The truth is, I don’t know how I’d survive without you. You make me feel safe, you know?” My chest was so full that I could barely draw breath. I took a moment to compose myself and squeezed her hands. “Yeah, I know. Same goes.” She smiled before raising her curled index finger and thumb between us. “Best friends for life.” “Best friends for life,” I agreed,

I wanted a man to tremble as he held back his strength to touch me like I was made of glass, not because he thought I was weak, but because he thought I was precious. I wanted a man to change his career because it would have meant too much time away from me even though I’d never ask him to do so. I wanted a man who’d join a criminal motorcycle gang just to find justice for my murder. I wanted a man who would always try to save me, even when I tried to sabotage myself. I wanted what Cleo had, but not how she had it. I wanted Henning. Not as a father figure. But as a man. My man.

My God, I was in love with Henning Axelsen.

Maybe love was that simple, to see and be seen. So simple and so impossibly complicated because I couldn’t bear for Henning to know what I knew now. That I loved him. Not tenderly, not softly like a song or a poem. I loved him in all my dark places. In the way I would die for him, impaling myself on a sword intended for his side. In the way I would kill for him––a happy murder, a giggling death with blood on my teeth that tasted like love and sin. What cruel, tragic irony that he should be so forbidden to me. My best friend’s dad.

She grinned, holding her hands up in surrender. “God forbid Mei Zhen be soft and adorable.” “Damn right,” I agreed, but some of Cleo’s sweetness seeped beneath my skin like anti-venom to battle the toxicity of my love and heartbreak. “No one ever called a dragon cute.”

Lin peered down at the photo on the screen of the camera and grinned. “Henning and his girls.” Henning and his girls. And there I was, aching with the desire to be his woman. Damn, I was so going to hell one day.

“It would be a fuckin’ crime not to have at least one dance with you in that red dress.” He tugged me then, a fast jerk that had me falling off-balance in my heels to land hard against his chest.

“You are,” he agreed, finally tilting his gaze down to mine. It was startlingly sombre. “Rén zhōng zhī long.” A dragon among men.

Whatever the reason, I found the courage to throw caution to the wind, rise up on my toes again, and kiss him.

It only lasted for three heart-pounding, bone-quaking moments, but they were the purest moments of my entire life. Followed swiftly by the most mortifying. Henning shoved me away roughly, staggering back as if I’d stabbed him. His expression was broken open with horror and something too like disgust for my trembling heart to suffer. “What the fuck, Mei Zhen?” he demanded,

“Dammit, Mei. Why?” I laughed, a bitter little thing that clogged my throat. “Why? I think the question should be why not? You’re the best man I’ve ever known, Henning. You saved Kate and Cleo first, but there’s no doubt you saved me, too. I wouldn’t have survived what happened at the carnival without you. I wouldn’t be surviving Mum’s illness now without you either.”

“Don’t romanticize me. I’m a fuckin’ outlaw biker, for fuck’s sake, Mei.”

“My love for you isn’t conditional on you loving me back,” I told him even though my heart hurt, my head hurt, my very soul hurt. “So this won’t ruin anything between us unless you want it to. I hope you don’t. I know I’ll never be yours that way, but having you in my life is better than nothing. I…I don’t have many people I love, and I’ve already lost too many.”

The words hit me like a bullet between the eyes. I rocked back in my seat, mind blanked with white noise and pain.

“Well, she fucked one of ’em, and then she fucked one of ’em right over. That’s why these motherfuckers are comin’ after my club now. ’Cause’a you and your whore ex-wife.”

“Well, let me tell you this. When Hazard got his hands on him in the back alley, the bastard admitted there’d even been a kid there. He thought she’d probably died that night too.” Mei.

“It was him.” The words dropped from me like a stone, heavy and sure. Rooster’s grin was a slow, mean curve of his thin mouth. “It was him, brother. And tonight, you get your chance to confront the motherfucker.”

What was that sayin’ about lookin’ a gift horse in the mouth? “What’s his name?” I asked, already standin’ up to leave.

“Kang,” he said. “Kang Li.”

It was a popular choice for underage parties because it was outside of Calgary in the middle of nowhere.

“The key is not to look nervous,” Kang told me dryly as we divvied up the drugs between us.

Kang didn’t have to know I was meant to be here to find whoever killed Kate.

“Okay, I’ll be close by, but you take the barn, and I’ll do the house. We’ll meet out back by the field in two hours and check in. If you haven’t managed to sell shit, this is the end for you.”

Something about Kang unnerved me. He didn’t blink enough, his predatory gaze unflinching. It alerted something primal in me, an urge to flee. Don’t trust this man, my gut cried.

“Daddy’s good little girl too prudish to do a line of coke with me? How do I know you aren’t some kind of narc?”

“’Cause she’s with me.” The answer didn’t come from me or from Michael. But I knew without turning exactly who that voice belonged to. The low, quiet weight of Henning’s voice would be familiar to me underwater or whispered down a faulty telephone line. I knew it better than I knew my own. But why the hell was he here?

“You listen to me,” Henning hissed. “You ever heard of The Fallen MC?” Michael nodded hard.

“Good. So you get if you touch one hair on Mei Zhen’s head, I’ll take every one of yours along with your fuckin’ scalp. You get me?”

“Oh, the Vanguard will forgive you that. You caught the white whale, Mei Zhen. Don’t worry, you will be rewarded generously. Not punished.”

If Kang thought abducting Henning was anything but the worst kind of punishment for my thirst for vengeance, he was fatally wrong. I thought fatally because I’d killed Kang before I let him do anything to Hen.

All that mattered was saving the only hero I’d ever known.

Kang had been one of the triad soldiers to kill Kate.

“I could shoot you where you stand,” Jiang offered. “Or I could let you get away, say goodbye to your loved ones, and go to bed one last night knowing I’m coming for you.”

Henning was looking over my shoulder at Cedar, his gaze solemn. “You did what you had to do for your mum, man, but fuck, do this for me. Get Mei the fuck outta here.”

“I’m so sorry, brother. This…this wasn’t how I wanted it to go down. But they had Mum, and you know, I owe her everything.” “Don’t got time for that shit, Cedar. Please, you’re forgiven if you take Mei.”

I shivered and fell to my knees, dislodging Cedar’s hold so I could walk on my knees to Henning. “Don’t make me leave you.”

“I’d pay any price for you,” he whispered fiercely, his blood-soaked hands clutching at my face so hard it almost hurt. “Is that enough love for you, Rocky?”

“I won’t be gone long. Five years tops for manslaughter or some shit like that. I’ll ask Zeus over in Entrance to use his club’s lawyer. It’ll be fine, Rocky girl.”

“You gotta get goin’. Now, Mei.” “I love you.” The words burned through my belly and throat like dragon fire.

“I love you,” he promised, and it was an oath.

I didn’t even know then that it would be the last time I saw Henning Axelsen for eight long years, and the next time I did see him, he’d hate me just as much as he’d once loved me.

I hadn’t been to a hospital in eight years, and three people could have compelled me to change that. One of them had called me weeping that very day. “Mei,” Cleo had said, sobbing my name the way a disciple sobs for the mercy of their God. “I’m in the hospital, a-and I need you.”

We still met up every few months now that I lived in Vancouver, but they were clandestine meetings in tucked-away restaurants with low ratings on Tripadvisor because she didn’t want Henning to know that we still spoke.

It hurt to be kept like a secret by my best friend, a forbidden thing hidden from a man who hated me and whom...

“I can’t live without you,” she’d say sometimes, holding my hand too-tightly in a mildew-scented café. “But he can’t live with knowing I still see you.” He being Henning Axelsen.

I hit the button to the sixth floor, where Cleo had told me they were keeping her another week to make sure she recovered well from the seven separate surgeries she’d had to undergo to stay alive. They’d taken what remained of her womb from her body, stitched up her brutalized sex, fixed the internal damage from eleven stab wounds, and sewn each one closed.

My entire body focused so intently on Cleo that I didn’t notice the hulking presence of a man until it was too late. “Who are you?” a low, smooth male voice demanded seconds before I was shoved into the wall beside the door, punching the air from my lungs. After years of training, my response was automatic. I jerked my knee into his groin and drove my knuckles into his throat simultaneously.

“I’m Mei,” I told him coldly. “I’m here for Cleo.”