“Jasmine!” Han called to me from somewhere far away. “Jasmine, wake up!”
I opened my eyes with a jerk. Everything ached like I’d been hit by a truck—which, after a few blinking moments, I remembered I had.
A truck had hit Han’s stunning Mercury Cougar. Then we flipped over, and…Han? Where was Han?
I sat up—very, very gingerly. I must have thrown my hands up in front of my face when the car flipped. The tops of my arms were covered in cuts, and whoever had tossed me onto this couch hadn’t bothered to take out the tiny shards of glass still embedded in my skin.
So it hurt quite a bit to sit up and discover that I was in an office—one that had that timeless quality of workspaces run by blue-collar Boomers. I spotted heavy green metal filing cabinets, a desktop that had to be older than me, and an overlarge panel and metal desk that had probably been hauled in here sometime during the prior century.
No Han, though. Where was he? Had they taken him somewhere else to question him, hurt him, or worse? A rising panic made my heart race. I didn’t know what to do. Couldn’t get orientated.
But then, I heard a familiar sound in the background. Water—but not the aggressive swish of the ocean. Was it…? I sniffed like the werewolves in the shifter novels I moved onto in my twenties when I got sick of all the Fae YA.
And…yes, the air here smelled like fish and diesel fuel. So that meant that lapping water sound in the office’s background probably came courtesy of a river.
Warehouse, I figured. Right on the port, judging by the sound and smell.
Piecing together those two guesses staved off the panic and gave me enough orientation to look around for more clues.
I felt a little silly when I spotted a window with slat blinds right behind the couch, a portal to the outside. Maybe I could break it and escape to the outside.
But no…
I didn’t find an ocean when I peeked through the blind’s slats, but a concrete floor situated at least 3o feet below me—the office must be located on the second floor of a tall warehouse.
Many men were standing around—no, not around, I realized upon closer look. They were in a three-way argument with a large group of Asian guys on one side of the triangle. They weren’t Silent Triad, though—they wore tracksuits, not the business kind. And they appeared to be fighting with a bunch of burly bikers and Latino gangsters, dressed in tanks and sagging jeans.
Or maybe the gangsters were arguing with the bikers and the Asian tracksuits?
I couldn’t tell for sure, but they all appeared pissed.
And toward the back of the warehouse, there stood another man.
No—wrong again, there hung another man from a pair of shackles attached to a giant hook. It appeared he’d been beaten pretty badly. His face was swollen and puffy, and his head lolled listlessly to the side.
My heart stopped when I realized it was Han.
I had to…I don’t know…do something. But I couldn’t go with my first instinct to bang on the glass and tell whoever had strung him up like this to let him go. Alerting them to my presence didn’t seem like the wisest move.
So I ran to the door, adrenaline pumping through my veins—only to quickly discover it was locked.
I cursed underneath my breath. But the lock was old, so I went to the desk to see if there was anything that could help me pick it, but nothing—just flimsy pens and wooden pencils, not even a pair of scissors.
More cursing. Plus, now my head was pounding with a possible concussion, and this bra was like, “Oh, you’re sore all over from your car accident? Here’s something more for you. Stab! Stab-stab-stab!”
Seriously, would it be wrong if I stopped in the middle of my escape to take this thing off—
That thought suddenly broke off when a new idea occurred to me.
HAN
“Go ahead, son,” Han was pushed forward, so close to the woman his father had just shot dead, he was almost standing in his blood. “Take a picture.”
Han hesitated, though he knew better than to do that. Delun never hesitated, his father often reminded him. He once gave Delun a gun, pointed his arm toward the enemy, and told him to shoot, and his older son just did. No questions asked.
His father had crowed about it for months to his younger illegitimate son. And Han had told himself that maybe he too could do something like that someday. Kill without hesitation. Make his father proud.
This was not even that. All he had to do was take a picture with the Polaroid camera his father had given him a few weeks ago for his birthday. It shouldn’t have been hard. Not for the secret son of one of Shanghai’s most notorious gangsters.
But this was a woman, not a man. And her large, distended belly held a baby—one that was dying a much slower death than its mom. Also, there was her still alive son—the little boy whose tongue his father had ordered cut out and left at his enemy’s gate…
He threw himself over his mother’s body and wailed in a tongueless animal way that made Han hate his father. Hate himself…
And in the end, Han couldn’t. He couldn’t take the picture.
“Weakling!” his father spat out. He set the gun down on the bed the woman had been sitting on before taking a kill shot to the head. Then he snatched the camera from his useless, seven-year-old son and took the picture himself.
Afterward, he turned back to Han to sneer, “Delun would have….”
His father trailed off when he saw what Han held in his hands. The gun he’d set down…it was now pointed straight at him.
“Son…” For the first time ever, his father’s face softened while addressing him. “Don’t—”
Whatever he’d been about to say next was drowned out by the blast of Han’s gunshot.
The recoil sent Han’s little body flying backward.
“You got great aim,” Victor’s cousin, who made everyone call him Phantom, would tell him years later, the first time they shot guns together. “Anybody ever tell you that.”
No…no one had ever told him that. But Han figured it out that day when he sat up and found his father sprawled out in front of him, dead with a perfectly placed hole in his chest.
The three-year-old who had been crying in that animal way of his over his mother’s dead body had abruptly stopped. And he was staring at Han’s father, staring at the dead body of the man who’d killed his mother.
“What have you done?”
Han turned with the gun still in his hands to see his mother…his fox beauty mother standing in the doorway. Tears ran down her cheeks as she once again screamed at him. “What have you done!”
What have you done?
Han jolted awake with his mother’s question ringing in his ears to find himself in the real nightmare. He was hanging from some kind of dock hook, and his screaming shoulders were just two of many pain points on his body.
It all came back to him in a flash.
The 24Ks who’d flipped his car and brought him here to this warehouse had a great time using him as a punching bag. He was pretty sure they’d broken a few ribs. And based on the labored wheezing coming out of his mouth, the tips were pressing into something vital, like a lung.
The plan was to reel him out, shackled and hanging from the old warehouse’s pulley system if the Reyes and the Reapers put up too much of a fight about swapping their Silent Triad deal partner for the 24Ks.
Han had overheard the other gang talking about it during one of his partially awake phases.
Apparently, that big switch-out meeting was happening now.
He could hear them in the distance, arguing in English.
“This don’t feel right,” Waylon, the president of the Ruthless Reapers, said, his flat Midwestern accent echoing through the warehouse. “Han’s the one that put this together. And I don’t know you.”
“Han will soon be dead along with the other two Silent Triad dragons,” the 24K doing all the talking, assured him. He spoke in the same clear, almost unaccented English as Han.
A purposeful appointee by the 24K Dragon, Han assumed, to further reassure the two factions that the 24K would be a worthy replacement. “So we’ll be taking over the rest of their territories. You can either join us now or be sorry later when we find others to do your job.”
Han had to get out of there.
But not to save himself. He needed to find Jasmine. She was only here because he’d decided to bring her with him to Delaware at the last minute. The street gang and motorcycle club he’d recruited for the start of what he’d hope would become a lucrative partnership were holding out for now. But his death right in front of them would probably be enough to convince them.
Being adaptable to changes, especially those accompanying sudden death, was a foundational rule in their shared underworld.
And there was no telling what the 24K would do to Jasmine once a new deal was set in place. He’d spotted a bar handle door right behind where he hung. There was no way he’d make it far in his condition. But if he could get free of the shackles binding his wrists, find her, and get her outside to the docks where she could call for help—well, the 24K would put a bullet in his head as soon as they realized she was gone. But she’d be safe.
And right now, that was all that mattered to him.
“You trying to threaten us?” Ant, the Reyes leader, asked the 24K doing all the talking.
“No, I am only letting you know that you will have a better future with us than you would have had with Han,” the 24K answered, impatience lining his voice.
Things were escalating. He had to act fast.
Biting down against the pain that sliced across his torso when he twisted his body, Han yanked down hard on the shackle binding his left wrist. If he was willing to break a few bones in that hand, maybe he’d be able to get it out.
And he was willing to break anything to save Jasmine.
But then, she appeared right in front of him, wearing the same peach dress she’d had on earlier.
Han blinked. Surely she was a hallucination, like that old memory of his mother.
But no…her dress was ripped and speckled with blood, and her hair hung down to her shoulders in a ponytail-holder-free curly mess. He’d never hallucinate that. Or her assessing his shackles with a whispered, “Wow, this is a crazy dramatic way to try to kill somebody.”
It was her! Suddenly his pain and misery didn’t matter anymore.
“Door. Behind you,” he wheezed out. “Run.”
She glanced at the door behind him. And her eyes lit up when she saw the easy way out.
Beyond her, he could hear Waylon say, “This doesn’t smell right to me. We’re out. Find another MC to distro your shit.”
“Run,” Han wheezed again. There was no need to modulate his voice as she had. A labored whisper was all he could manage in his condition.
Jasmine ran, and his heart filled with relief. He was doomed, but at least, she would escape with her life—
That thought cut off when she suddenly reappeared, this time with her arms wrapped around a massive bag of grain, which she carefully set down right in front of him so as not to make a sound.
Seeing such a small woman handle a bag of grain nearly as heavy as her might have struck him as comical if the horror of what she was doing didn’t eclipse anything else he might have felt.
“Go without me!” he wheezed. “Order…that’s an order.”
“Okay, you’re obviously in bad shape, so I suggest you save your breath and hold still while I try to get you out of this shackle,” she answered.
He didn’t notice the object in her hand—what appeared to be a bra’s underwire—until she stood on top of the bag and stretched on her tiptoes to get to the shackles above his head.
“Awesome, these are old, too…just got to put enough pressure on the lock, and you’ll be free—there!”
His right hand suddenly fell free, which allowed his other hand to come down from the hook as well and introduce much needed relief to his arms.
But his freedom came at a great price. The chains rattled. Loud enough to echo throughout the warehouse.
There came a beat of dangerous silence. Then the Reyes leader asked, “What was that?”
At the same time, the MC said, “Da fuck?”
Right before the unmistakable sound of guns being cocked and aimed filled the warehouse.
27
HAN
“Run! Jasmine, run!”
Han woke on a gasp, but then…
The image of him and Jasmine stuck in a warehouse cleared to reveal concrete walls. An unfinished basement—he pieced that together based on the gray walls and the still, cave-like temperature. And he was lying almost upright in a hospital bed.
His body ached but in a dim kind of way that felt more like a suggestion than reality. He was on something, something that not only alleviated the pain but fuzzed out his mind.
Somebody had tended to his wounds, wrapped his torso in elastic bandages, and taped pieces of fabric over the cuts on his arms.
As crude as the set-up was, there was an IV in his right hand, letting him know where the drugs were coming from and possibly other fluids to keep him hydrated while he recovered from his injuries.
He wondered about his face, which had taken quite a few hits. But when he tried to raise his non-IVed hand to check it, he found it too heavy to lift.
No…not too heavy… somebody was lying on top of it, someone with a dark head of loose curls that she usually kept tied back in a ponytail.
A smile spread across his face, and his battered body filled with sunshine.
“Jasmine,” he whispered.
She came awake like a fairytale princess, blinking into a new day.
Her eyes widened, and a smile spread across her face when she found him looking down at her. “You’re awake. They said you’d wake up eventually, but I was scared. So scared. I’m sorry that I didn’t believe you about K Diamond. Obviously, he and his dad are monsters if they did this. And your car….”
Her eyes filled up with tears, and his heart filled up with questions. How long had she been lying here at the side of his bed? Holding his hand? Waiting for him to awaken?
“It’s OK. I don’t care about the car. I am only glad to see you alive.”
He took back his hand, but only so he could wipe her tears away as he added, “Who is ‘they?’”
As if in answer to his question, the door swung open to reveal the Ant, the DE Reyes’s leader. And to Han’s further surprise, Phantom walked right in behind him.
“Look at that. He’s awake, right on time for your visit,” Ant said to Phantom.
Phantom scanned Han over. “Your sister did a good job patching him up. IV too.”
“I told you she’s the best,” Ant answered. “Best street doctor on the East Coast. I keep telling her she needs to leave her nursing day job and come work for me full time. Plus, she gave him some of that good shit for the pain from my private supply. How you feeling, Han?”
Han nodded. “I agree. She did an excellent job. Please thank her for me.”
“If you really want to thank her, tell your girl she’s got to go upstairs to get those cuts patched and a check over. Mi hermana’s been trying to get her stitched up since we got you in here, but she wouldn’t let go of you. It’s like she’s trying to catch a infection.”
Han had been so busy soaking in Jasmine’s sunshine, he hadn’t noticed the cuts and scrapes all over her arms until Ant brought it up.
“Go see his sister,” Han immediately told Jasmine.
“But—”
“That’s an order,” he commanded before she could get out the rest of her protest.
Jasmine’s eyes flashed with the defiance he’d gotten to know so well over the last few months. But in the end, she did as he said, letting go of his hand and storming toward the door.
“My sis’s room is up the stairs, two doors down the right,” Ant called after her.
As soon as she was gone, he threw Han an
impressed look. “You got her jumping on command like that. Nice. She’s loyal, hot, and knows how to take an order.”
Han knew Jasmine was gorgeous—that any man in his right mind would want her. He was also aware that he owed the gang leader a debt of gratitude for tending to his wounds. But he had to warn him, “She’s mine. Do not even think about approaching her.”
Ant held up his hands with a chuckle. “Relax, homes. I’m not coming for your ruka. She made it obvious by her death grip in the car ride here that she wasn’t here for nobody but you. I’m just saying I might have to go to Hawaii. Get me one of those aloha hotties.”
For danger of saying something Phantom might have to shoot them out of, Han gritted out, “I need a moment alone with Phantom.”
“Yeah, of course, I’ll just go next door,” Ant answered with a shrug. “Make sure your girl gets what she needs….”
The instantaneous rage must have made its way to Han’s face because Ant broke off with another grin, “JK, JK, homes. Waylon got clipped in the gunfight, so I’m going to go check on him.”
“He was shot?” Han said, disbelieving. “Why did you not give him the hospital bed?”
Another shrug from Ant. “I don’t know him. You never got around to properly introducing us, ‘member?”
With that, he loped toward the basement stairs, laughing at his own joke.
“Want me to clip him?” Phantom asked, signing as they often did when they were in unknown territory and wanted to converse in secret.
Han almost laughed at his fellow Dragon’s no-questions-asked loyalty. But laughter produced the kind of pain that the drugs couldn’t entirely mask.
And that pain cleared his mind enough to say, “No, just give me the report.” Signaling to Phantom that they were back to business.
“Well, the 24K tried it,” Phantom answered with a shake of his head. “Lucky, that Waylon guy doesn’t adapt well to change. He opened fire. A lot of those thieving-ass 24Ks got away, but a few of them got dead for trying to cross us—by the way, if this was all a plot to snap Victor out of his shit, good job, it worked. All I had to do was tell him somebody tried to come for you, and he was up and out of bed, issuing orders to round up every 24K involved. Don’t worry. We’re gonna serve some serious payback for what they did.”
HAN: Her Ruthless Mistake: 50 Loving States, Delaware (Ruthless Triad Book 4) Page 19