Kai sat in the passenger seat, laptop balanced on his knees, fingers moving quickly over the keys. “Security footage from the hotel is gone,” he said. “The system wiped itself the second the alarm went off.”
“That means he was ready,” Lian said.
“Or someone was ready for him.”
She didn’t reply. Her eyes stayed on the road, jaw tight. The night felt heavy, thick with the kind of tension that didn’t come from noise but from everything that hadn’t been said.
They reached the edge of the city where the buildings gave way to the sea. Lian parked under a rusted awning beside a row of fishing boats. The sound of water hitting metal filled the silence.
Kai closed his laptop. “We need to move. If LSK finds out we were in Macau, they’ll lock down everything from here to Zhuhai.”
Lian leaned back in her seat. “Let them.”
He turned to her. “That’s not a plan.”
“It’s a start.”
Her tone was calm, but Kai knew it wasn’t peace. It was control. The kind that came right before something cracked.
He got out of the car and leaned against the hood, letting the rain hit his face. The ocean smelled of salt and gasoline. “You killed him,” he said quietly.
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you anything else?”
Lian stepped out and joined him, standing just close enough that their shoulders almost touched. “He said our family wasn’t targeted. They were erased.”
Kai frowned. “What does that even mean?”
“It means there’s more to this than revenge.”
He looked at her. “There always was.”
She glanced toward the sea, eyes following the shifting horizon. “You should get some rest. We’ll leave at dawn.”
Kai nodded, though he knew she wouldn’t sleep. She never did after a hit.
They found an abandoned warehouse a few blocks from the docks. Inside, the floor was slick with rainwater leaking from the roof, and the air smelled faintly of rust and old fish. They set up in a corner with their gear — a small camping stove, a few ration packs, and the faint blue glow of Kai’s laptop lighting their faces.
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He worked while she cleaned her weapons. The sound of cloth over metal filled the space like a metronome.
After a while, Kai spoke without looking up. “You think he was lying?”
“I think everyone lies,” she said.
“But about this? The family?”
She paused, setting down the gun. “You want the truth, Kai? I don’t care if he was lying. I just care who he was afraid of.”
He finally looked up. “You think someone higher up silenced him?”
“I think he was already dead when I walked in that room.”
Kai blinked. “You mean figuratively?”
“No,” she said quietly. “I mean it literally.”
The rain got louder, hitting the tin roof in uneven bursts. Kai leaned back against the wall, watching her in the faint light. “You scare me sometimes, you know that?”
She gave him a small smile. “Good. Means you’re still human.”
He laughed softly, the sound fading quickly in the hollow room. “You remember when we were kids, and Dad used to take us to Sai Kung to fish? He’d make us gut the catch ourselves.”
Lian nodded. “You cried the first time.”
“I was eight.”
“You also cried the second time.”
He grinned. “You held the fish up like a trophy. You were always proud of doing things that scared me.”
“Someone had to.”
The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It felt like memory, shared and wordless.
Kai’s eyes drifted to the screen again. “I found something. Before the hotel servers wiped, a fragment of the data bounced off an old LSK relay in Guangdong. Just one image file. Blurry, timestamped three weeks ago.”
He turned the screen so she could see. The image showed a group of people around a table — lab coats, monitors, documents. In the corner, blurred but unmistakable, was the outline of a man they both recognized.
Lian stared at it. “The doctor.”
Kai nodded. “He’s alive.”
Lian’s expression didn’t change, but her grip on the chair tightened. “Then we’re getting close.”
“Close to what?”
“To the reason all this started.”
He closed the laptop. “We’ll need to move carefully. He’s protected. LSK wouldn’t let him walk around unguarded.”
“Then we won’t walk. We’ll run.”
Kai smiled faintly. “You make it sound simple.”
“It is simple,” she said. “It’s just not easy.”
She stood and stretched, her body tense but controlled. The faint morning light started to bleed through the cracks in the warehouse walls.
Kai packed up their gear while she checked her weapons one last time. The air outside was cool, almost clean after the rain.
“Where to?” he asked.
“Back to Hong Kong,” she said. “Everything leads back there.”
They loaded the car in silence. As they drove, the sun broke through the clouds, turning the wet streets gold. For a moment, the city looked almost peaceful.
