“I’m the one who was supposed to die first!” her father had said, his legs giving out for reasons that had nothing to do with his disease. “Oh, why God, why?”
“I told him I would protect her, but then I….” Han faltered, unable to find strong enough words to castigate himself.
Phantom shook his head. “It’s not your fault. You did everything you could. And she wouldn’t want you falling apart without her.”
“What’s the point?” Han asked Phantom, honestly looking for an answer. “What’s the point of living without her?”
Phantom scraped a hand over the back of his head.
“I guess we’re going to have to find out,” he answered—right before depositing him in the shower, the same way they did Victor back in September.
Han regretted that now.
Not the throwing his brother into the shower part but how he’d judged him at the time. He’d seen it as weakness on display for his brother to lose himself like that over a woman. But now…
Now he found himself happy that Victor wasn’t there.
If he was, Han wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep his envy in check. His brother had not only gotten his bride returned to him, but she’d just given birth to his child.
So yes, Victor had suffered, but he survived his pain and misery and now could live his happy ending with Dawn.
There would be no such happy ending for Han.
She was gone. She was…
“Aw fuck, man,” Phantom said when he came back into the bathroom to find Han sitting on the shower floor, sobbing like a baby, as the water sluiced over him.
Phantom switched off the shower. “I don’t know how to help you with this. I can’t even fucking imagine. But I got some ramen for you. C’mon, let’s eat.”
So that was the unusual way Chen found them when he came through the penthouse’s front door about ten minutes later.
They were both slurping noodles. Phantom in his usual suit and Han in nothing but a clean pair of underwear Phantom had commanded him to put on because “there are limits to this sympathy shit.”
To his credit, Chen just said, “Good to see you out of bed, Boss. Phantom, how are you?”
Phantom, proving why he was rarely the one they sent in to do business that didn’t involve fists, just grunted.
Han’s return greeting was even worse. “Did you find Kuang Jr. and Yaron?” he demanded.
“No, not—”
“Then why are you here and not out looking for them?” Han demanded.
The only reason he was still holding on was because of the promise of torturing the men who’d killed his wife to death as soon as they were found.
Chen answered with a wince. “It’s just….”
He held up an envelope with hibiscuses printed all over it. “The guys downstairs got a weird piece of mail for you in the post. It’s addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Han, and I think it’s from Jazz’s mom—like, maybe she sent it before Jazz….”
Instead of finishing that sentence, Chen brought it over to the table and slipped what looked like a thank you card out of the flower print envelope. He set the card in front of Han’s ramen and opened it for him to see.
“Why are you showing us this?” Phantom demanded.
Phantom didn’t see it, but Han did. The word Jazzy was still intact, but what looked like his name had been scratched out, cards upper layer carefully torn off. And that wasn’t the only instance of missing words and letters. Quite a few of the other letter’s in the written note below the name Jazzy had disappeared under rough slits, as if someone had pressed a fingernail through them to make…
“A code,” Han realized out loud. “This is a code! Chen, give me a pen.”
Phantom looked at him like he was crazy, but Chen handed him a pen. And after Han was done translating, his heart stopped when he read the final note.
Jazzy
s-t-i-l-l
a-l-i-v-e
l-a-c-e-r-d-a-s
a-l-a-m-o-a-n-a
Love
37
JAZZ
“Don’t worry. There’s nothing in the car.”
That was what Bui told me when the cops pulled him over on our way back to the Gold Coast from Electric Beach Park.
But I had a bad feeling as the cops approached. Especially when I saw their guns already out.
That was when I remembered what Han told me about The Silent Triad not having secured all of K Diamond’s cops yet. And I realized soon after that I was right to be suspicious when I recognized who the police officers who’d stopped us were.
The Lacerdas. The Lacerdas were coming straight at us.
“Do you want me to kill them?” Han had asked me back in November after their “interview” was done.
I wasn’t a killer, and I’d been so intent on calling Mika to tell her what we had found out, I’d shaken my head.
A shake of the head. That one gesture had led to this moment.
Everything happened fast after that. Two of the Lacerdas—the father and youngest son—ran up on either side of the car and yelled for Bui and me to get out. Then the other still-living Lacerda brother showed up out of nowhere at my passenger door, practically dragging a woman with brown skin behind him.
