Ice water doused her head to toe. She coughed, blinking the water out of her eyes. “That’s it?” she demanded. She shivered and scoffed as he looked at his older brother again. “If you need him to tell you what to do, you’re not going to last long.”
Lilian’s boyfriend just shot Adeline a thin smile. “Fan Ge wants to meet you. Get comfortable.”
Very quickly after they left, Adeline found out what he meant. The air-conditioning was on full blast. Within minutes, her teeth began to chatter.
She had never been cold before. Not just this cold, but cold at all, and sothiscold hit her all the way in her bones. They had sat her right in the roaring streams of freezing air. She couldn’t feel her fingers. The cold had seeped into her at first, leaching the heat she’d relied on all her life. Then it had set in and twisted, forcing her into shivering spasms, her teeth chattering so hard she thought she would bite her tongue off.
But worse was the void that cold brought. Adeline was used to apprehension and fear, but fire had always been there to bury it. Without that heat, however, it was like every nerve exploded in her mind, turning it into a warzone she didn’t recognize at all. Every shiver shot a new alarm through her. It was like she could see a thousand futures all spiraling out in front of her, solidifying in the cold.She’d seen the bodies, heard the stories, knew what Three Steel was capable of. Her imagination was too fertile with terrible outcomes: herself dead, carved up; Tian dead, carved up, bled out; Red Butterfly dead, carved up, burnt. She didn’t want these visions. She wanted the fire. She wanted to burn all the thoughts away. But she couldn’t reach it, and the thoughts kept coming.
When the door next opened, in walked the White Man. She was shivering violently, but she found enough hatred to pull herself together and stare Fan Ge head-on as he approached, all his steel glittering. Unfortunately, he didn’t balk as easily as a teenage boy.
He cupped her chin and she flinched instead, not just at his presence but at the unexpected warmth. Of course, with all that metal in his body, he must have baked every time he stepped outside. She smiled grimly, and his eyes narrowed. “What are you smiling about?”
She kicked him in the stomach. Or at least, she tried to. Instead, her ankle crumpled against steel, a flare of pain shooting up her leg. The chair gave way beneath the recoil. Her head slammed into the floor, hands unable to break the fall, and she lay there on her side, dazed, as Fan Ge squatted to look her in the eye. He and the men behind him swam in and out of focus, accompanied by a static ringing in her ears.
“Insects,” he said, gazing imperiously down at her. “Pain in my ass.” He cuffed her casually in the face. It shouldn’t have been a strong blow, but his knuckles met her cheek like a hammer. Something cracked in her mouth, and she tasted blood.
“Insects bite you in the ass?” He hit her again. This time whatever had cracked dislodged; something solid fell against her other cheek, and she spat out something white and red. She swallowed the blood, but the fury was harder to suppress, and the dizziness worse. Somehow, he smiled.
“At least she didn’t raise you soft.” He made a gesture as he pushed himself to his feet, and the next moment two Three Steel members were pulling Adeline’s chair back upright.
“This is about my mother again?” she muttered. She still tasted salt.
“When your mother is a conduit, it will always be about your mother,” Fan Ge said darkly. “Not many kongsi have children while they are still under oath. Too dangerous, too big a gamble. But there are a few. In that, we’re the same.”
She shivered again. “You wish.”
“My father was our tang ki ko until the Japs got him. They saw his tattoos and rounded him up with the others. But they couldn’t stab him! Their bayonets and bullets couldn’t break his skin. So they pumped his stomach full of water and jumped on him until he died. Then they couldn’t cut his head off and put it on a pole like they did all the other gangsters, so they got a thin knife and hung his skin on a stick instead. And then I became the leader of Three Steel.” He paused, but when she didn’t offer him a response he said, “I’ve been around longer than any of you have been alive, little Butterfly.”
Adeline flashed her teeth, knowing they were stained red. “That just means you’re dying first.”
Fan Ge smiled thickly. “We’ll see. You can summon the fire?”
She said nothing. His eyes roamed over her, excruciatingly slow. Every inch of her skin crawled in the wake of his gaze. “Where is your tattoo?”
“I don’t have one.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I’ll send you to ask my mother, if you want to know so badly.”
“We’ll all end up in the same place.” He was still studying her, circling her, and something sour rose in her throat. She could feel the eyes of the other Three Steel members traveling over her. She wanted to burn their eyes out of their sockets, but she was stuck here in this chair, shivering, the forming bruises starting to ache viciously. “A lot of men would pay good money for a girl like you. Looking like this, real educated. They like to feel like they’ve made a well-bred girl a whore. They’ll pay enough for the illusion, but thereal thing…” He rubbed a lock of her hair between his fingers. “We could find your secret.”
The tugging on her scalp sent shivers down her spine. “Don’t touch me,” she ground out, but she could hear her heart racing. She knew anger too well and she had experienced terror—her house swallowed by the sun, her mother toppling from the flames—but she had never felt fear quite like this: slow, suffocating, taking its time. She had never realized quite how small she was. She’d never felt so watched. Suddenly, she was so inherently breakable.
Fan Ge glanced at the tattoo on her wrist and seemed to dismiss it instantly, though what tipped him off she couldn’t tell. Then he yanked down the neck of her blouse, ripping the fabric off her shoulder. There was that first butterfly there, just over her breastbone, and it burned under his gaze. She shrieked, but he backhanded her across the face, licked his thumb, and ran it over the tattoo. It felt like a wet knife.
“You weren’t lying,” he remarked, genuinely curious. “Not the god’s mark.”
She kicked at him again, got hit again.
“Don’t make me break your fingers. You’re useful alive, but all I need is you breathing.” He leaned down again and his breath tickled her neck, sickeningly warm. “Like I told your girlfriend, maybe we can fix you both.”
Adeline froze. “I will kill you,” she managed to spit. Her vision was pulsing with white spots.
“You think you’re important,” Fan Ge said brusquely. With that he left, and the door clipped shut behind him, sealing Adeline in with the cold.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIXHEART OF STEEL
