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“Mong zi sing lung,” I murmured to her. “Parents hope their children will become a dragon among men. That we’ll be special.”
“Because there is strength in softness too. There is purity, success, and happiness in finding balance between yin and yang. If you don’t learn this, the tragedies of your life will overtake you.”
She was gone. But Henning sprinted up the stairs like Atlas used to carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, and seconds later, they disappeared.
“In real life, Dr. Axelsen, white knights rarely get happy endings. Only broken hearts.”
Looking back, that was the start of it for me. Falling in love with him. Ruining his life. They would become one and the same, but right then, it was pure and simple. I loved him the way a child loved a superhero.
“Who said women cannot compete with men,” he murmured in Cantonese, and I recognized the phrase from the opera Hua Mulan because it was one of my mother’s favourites.
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.
As quickly as I realized I would love him forever, I realized I would never have him.
A dragon among men.
“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.”
And I knew he’d never love me the way I loved him. Like I was the oxygen he needed to breathe. But at least he loved me like this. Like losing me would be living with half a lung.
“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?”
“In my experience, ghosts haunt us even when we leave the place they died. Sometimes there’s no exorcising them.”
It seemed like so many Chinese folklore tales Old Dragon had grown up telling me, the tragedy of the Butterfly Lovers and the Legend of the White Snake, like even Madame Cheung had told me in the red tent that night at the carnival, I was doomed to love and live alone.
It was Bat who said, “Not sure I ever met anyone who matched Axe-Man for stubbornness.” “He’s stubborn; I’m stubborn. It’s always been a little complicated,” I admitted.
“What does that say about us, huh? That we measure love by our willingness to die for each other?”
“You’re a dragon, all right. Teeth and fuckin’ claws.”
Even when I hate you, you’re mine.”
“For her sake, then, you should put a stop to the games you’re playin’,” Wrath murmured. “’Cause I might’a been wrong ’bout the look on your face, but anyone with eyes can see she lives for you, and she’d die for you in a second.”
“Axe-Man,” she said, but she said it the way she would say Henning. Like it was made of magic, like it could open doors and move worlds.
