“You should be flattered.” He looked over her, then swept the Butterflies, all of whom had come rapidly to surround each other. “I did think it would be the other one. Where is she?”
“Say your piece.”
Fan Ge shrugged. “You die now or you die in ten days.”
Tian tensed. “Not even an offer for me to swear to you instead?” Her voice was flat. She was concealing her shock well, if she had it, but Adeline caught her alarm nonetheless. Somehow they had thought themselves still beneath Three Steel’s notice, at least while the bigger gangs fought.
“I’m not interested in oaths from little girls. You are unnatural and your god is an abomination. Insects should be crushed.” Fan Ge’s gaze fell on Christina, turned mocking, then dropped onto Adeline. She curled a fist, but Christina clamped her wrist before she could do anything untoward. His appraisal was less common leering and something more studied.
“You don’t respect the other gods either, if you’re killing them off,” Tian said. Fan Ge’s attention swung back onto her, dismissive. She stood her ground, shoulders a hard-set line.
“The kongsi are weak because we’re divided. The police carve us up because brothers spend their time fighting petty brawls with each other. They have novision. Some of us must have the gall to survive. If we’re to survive, we must adapt. Sacrifices are always involved. Those other gods have done nothing for me. Better one than none.”
“Then go unite all the others and leave us.”
“Don’t think I underestimate you. I know exactly what your kind is capable of and I don’t intend to have that running around. I do things properly. I killed the man who tried to kill you before. Now this is conduit to conduit. Now I’m being generous. You have the ten days to get your things in order, and then you die quickly, and your sisters get out of my way. Or you insist on making it difficult, and you won’t be the only one that ends up dead.” He paused, then leaned in and murmured something only to her.
Tian went rigid.
Then she flashed a knife.
Fan Ge backhanded her as the blade glanced off the side of hisface—she’d been going for the soft of his eyes—and threw up a hand at the volley of guns that had suddenly appeared in his men’s hands. Tian, bleeding from the corner of her mouth, staggered away with vile loathing on her face. “You can have your ten days,” she snarled. “It won’t be me that’s dead.”
“I’m a man of honor,” he said. He touched his eyebrow, which bore the tiniest nick where the blade had managed to slip between tattoos. “Wecando this the easy way. You know how to contact me, when you decide.”
He got back in the car, wasting no time. Only when his door shut and his car began moving off did the other men do the same, the cars rolling on past as though they had never stopped at all. Tian watched them go.
Adeline reached for her. When they touched, Tian whirled and caught Adeline’s wrist.
Adeline finally saw what Pek Mun must have seen—gold veins breaking up the blacks of Tian’s eyes, and the fractured black shards flickering. Beneath her grip, Adeline’s tattoo began to heat. Then Tian blinked and snatched her hand away.
“Say something,” Adeline said, but Tian couldn’t look at her all of a sudden.
The silence dragged, underscored only by the tinny sounds of the radio still playing inside. It was Christina who finally asked, “Tian. What are you going to do?”
“I…” Tian glanced at her side, as though expecting to see someone there. “I don’t know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONEINTIMATE CONFESSIONS
“What did Fan Ge say to you?”
Somehow it was the second day of Tian’s impending deadline, because no one had seen her for the first. She had vanished, coming back reportedly at four in the morning roughed up and smelling like smoke.
She had also been avoiding Adeline since that night, so when Adeline had woken this morning to find Tian gone again, she’d made a point of spending the day in the living room, watching television listlessly until programming ended for the day and she heard Tian’s bike outside.
Now Tian, ambushed at the door, wiped her mouth in frustration. She looked like she’d been in another fight. “Were you seriously waiting around for me?”
There were a lot of things Adeline could have said in response to that, including how it had been Tian, if anything, who’d clung to Adeline in all their successive trysts and breathed her in like she was drowning. But for once Adeline was thinking about something other than getting the upper hand. “I’m not the one who’s been running away. Everyone wants to know what you’re doing.”
“Nothing,” Tian said, stalking past her and heading for the kitchen.
“He’s going to kill you,” Adeline snapped, going after her. “Or he’s going to kill a bunch of us. And you want to do nothing?”
Tian sucked in her cheeks, but she continued into the kitchennevertheless, rummaging through the cupboard. “I shouldn’t have done this,” she said behind the door. “You shouldn’t be here.”
Adeline stopped. “Excuse me?”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
