The hotel corridor's geometric carpet stretched endlessly, each repeating diamond pattern pressing into Luna's soles like a thousand tiny guillotines. She paused before Suite 8206, her reflection warping in the brass room number's polished surface. The air smelled of industrial lavender and imminent betrayal.
Xavier opened the door shirtless, vodka fumes preceding him like an advance guard. "Punctual as ever," he slurred, the scar along his ribcage twitching with each ragged breath. That wound had come from a different lifetime - a hunting accident when they were teenagers, Luna's steady hands stitching him up while he cursed her dead mother's name.
She stepped into the suite's gilded cage, her stilettos sinking into carpet thick enough to bury secrets. "Where is she?"
A cough rattled from the bathroom - wet, consumptive, hauntingly familiar. Luna's spine straightened. That particular cadence of suffering lived in her bones; she'd memorized its rhythm during the endless nights her mother wasted away.
Xavier blocked the bathroom door, his forearm braced against the frame. "First, we—"
The fire alarm screamed to life.
They froze as sprinklers erupted, icy water sluicing through designer suits and antique furniture alike. Luna's silk blouse became a second skin, the fabric clinging to the dagger strapped above her knee. Xavier's drunken grin dissolved into a snarl as red lights strobed across his face.
"You did this," he spat.
Luna backed toward the exit, hands raised in mock surrender. "You overestimate my sentimentality."
The bathroom door burst open. A wraith emerged - silver hair matted to parchment skin, eyes milky with cataracts and unspeakable truths. "Xiao-Yue?" The endearment cracked through decades of silence. "Your mother's jade... you still wear it?"
Luna's fingers found the pendant instinctively. The carved lotus leaves bit into her palm, same as when she'd clutched it watching the coroner zip her mother's body into a black vinyl bag.
Xavier lunged.
Later, Luna would recall the sequence in freeze-frames:
Lin Aunt's skeletal hand seizing the ice bucket
Crystal shards arcing through strobing red light
Xavier's howl as blood bloomed across his bare thigh
The old woman shoved Luna toward the fire escape. "Run, child! They'll skin you alive for what's buried in—"
Gunfire split the air.
Lin Aunt crumpled, crimson seeping through the peony embroidery on her threadbare qipao. Luna's scream tangled with the fire alarm's wail as Xavier staggered backward, his nickel-plated Beretta smoking.
"Should've... accepted my offer..." He grinned through bloodied teeth, weapon swinging toward Luna.
The fire escape door exploded inward.
Caleb entered like vengeance personified - tailored suit jacket abandoned, shirtsleeves rolled to reveal forearms mapped with scars older than their fragile truce. His first bullet found Xavier's shooting hand; the second, his left kneecap.
"Check the bathroom," he ordered without turning, his voice cutting through chaos. "There's a safe behind the mirror."
Luna moved on autopilot. The medicine cabinet swung open to reveal a biometric lock already disarmed. Inside lay photographs yellowed with age - her mother laughing at a dockside café, a younger Lin Aunt hovering protectively behind her shoulder. Beneath them, a ledger's pages whispered of offshore accounts and pharmaceutical bribes.
Xavier's guttural laugh bubbled through the mayhem. "You think... this ends with me? The Carters... the Sus... we're just..."
Caleb's dress shoe connected with his jaw. The crack echoed through the dying fire alarm's sputters.
Luna emerged clutching the evidence, her eyes meeting Caleb's across the ruined suite. Water dripped from the ceiling onto his ruined Oxfords, onto Lin Aunt's still form, onto the Beretta now cradled in Luna's trembling hands.
"Your timing needs work," she said.
His smile held no mirth. "You're welcome."
The elevator dinged. Security swarmed the corridor. Caleb pressed a keycard into Luna's palm - the Thorn family crest embossed in blood-warm metal. "Penthouse suite. Don't answer the door."
As he turned to handle the approaching storm, Luna caught his wrist. "The woman who answered your phone—"
"Dead." His thumb brushed the jade lotus at her throat. "Like everyone who crosses me."
The elevator doors closed on his retreating form. Luna stared at the keycard's embossed thorns digging into her flesh, Lin Aunt's final warning echoing through the ledger's damning pages: They'll kill you like they killed her.
In the penthouse's soundproof luxury, she spread the photographs across Italian marble. The past stared back - her mother's arm linked with a man who wasn't Richard Carter, their faces illuminated by fireworks over Victoria Harbour. A date stamp placed them in Hong Kong three months before Luna's birth.
Her phone buzzed with Lila's latest text: Remember that winter you saved a stranger's life? Turns out frostbite wasn't the only thing you thawed.
The attached surveillance stills showed a younger Caleb Thorn staggering into a rural clinic, his face ravaged by hypothermia and something darker. Luna's breath caught. The memory surfaced like a corpse from frozen lake - the cave's mineral stench, the man's delirious mumblings about poisoned boardrooms, the way his ice-crusted lashes had fluttered as she rubbed life back into his limbs.
You, she texted.
Lila's response came instantly: Merry Christmas. Now ask him about the 17th-floor incident at Thorn Tower.
The suite's floor-to-ceiling windows framed the city's twinkling skyline. Somewhere below, Caleb Thorn cleaned up her messes. Somewhere beyond the horizon, a storm gathered - one that would demand every scar, every lie, every winter-hardened truth she possessed.
Luna poured two fingers of bourbon, the liquor burning away the last vestiges of doubt. Let the Carters scheme. Let the Sus plot. She'd survived worse than their gilded treacheries.
The elevator dinged. Caleb entered with the predatory grace of a man who owned cities, his knuckles freshly split and eyes glittering with unleashed fury.
"Still here," he observed.
"Still breathing."
The admission hung between them, charged as a live wire. When he reached for the decanter, their fingers brushed - a spark that had nothing to do with static electricity.
Outside, the first snowflakes of winter began to fall.
The man she'd saved?
Memories clawed their way through Luna's consciousness like frost creeping across windowpanes. Twelve years old - that brittle winter when survival meant stripping herself of warmth to share body heat with a frozen stranger. How the howling blizzard had swallowed her screams as she dragged his ice-encrusted form into the cave's meager shelter. Breath crystallizing between them as she'd peeled away layers of frost-stiffened clothing, her child's hands trembling not from cold but terror. To her, it had been simple arithmetic: two beating hearts versus the mountain's indifference.
Yet Claire's venomous whispers had warped that desperate act into something sordid. Xavier's accusations burned fresh in her mind - "You spread your legs for some vagrant at twelve?" As if trauma could be distilled into tabloid headlines. Even now, Lila's disgusted echo made her throat constrict. But beneath the shame coiled something fiercer - the memory of cracked lips murmuring gratitude against her frost-nipped ear, calloused fingers pressing cold jade into her palm with promises of return.
The stolen pendant's absence still ached like a phantom limb. She'd kept it hidden beneath winter sweaters, that smooth green stone warming to her body heat until the day her dresser yawned empty. Another theft to lay at Claire's altar.
Her phone vibrated with Lila's text, coordinates blooming across the screen like bloodstains. Rural outskirts. Lin Auntie's prison. Luna's boots crushed gravel with renewed purpose as night air stung her cheeks. No time for Caleb's persistent calls vibrating in her jacket pocket - each ignored notification a stitch sewing shut her dependence on him. Let the bastard stew in his penthouse while she carved her own path through this darkness.
Across the city, Caleb's private jet tore through cloud cover, its shadow rippling over Highland's skyline. Jaden adjusted his glasses as the limousine swallowed their trio whole. "Your bride's playing hooky, boss. Left the manor fifteen minutes ago."
Xander's snicker died at Caleb's glacial glare. "Track her. Now." His knuckles whitened around the phone, mind racing through possibilities - had she finally tired of their game? Or stumbled into danger too deep for her to swim? The limo's interior suddenly felt suffocating, all polished leather and the cloying scent of Xander's cologne masking the metallic tang of dread.
Meanwhile, Luna's stolen sedan ate up backroads, headlights carving tunnels through the oppressive darkness. The safehouse emerged like a rotten tooth - sagging roof tiles, boarded windows leaking strands of jaundiced light. The stench of medicinal herbs assaulted her before she crossed the threshold, cloying and thick enough to choke on.
There, amidst stained bedding and the sour reek of neglect, lay Lin Auntie's skeletal form. Moonlight through cracked planks striped her sunken face, highlighting bruises that told stories Luna couldn't bear to hear. "Little phoenix," the old woman rasped, papery fingers brushing Luna's cheek, "he said you'd come... but the price..."
The coughing fit sprayed rust-colored droplets across yellowed sheets. Luna's medical training kicked in - thready pulse, labored breathing, pupils contracting unevenly. "We're leaving," she growled, sliding arms beneath brittle shoulders. The door's explosive crash sent splinters raining down as Xavier materialized in the doorway, fury radiating like a furnace blast.
"Still playing the whore, I see." His boot crushed a discarded syringe as he advanced. "First that mountain tramp, now crawling back to Caleb? You really think-"
The roof exploded.
Shards of terracotta tiles hailed down as rappelling lines snapped taut. Caleb descended through the chaos like wrath personified, custom-tailored coat flaring behind him. Xander's grinning face appeared in the ragged hole above, assault rifle casually braced against one shoulder. "Sorry we're late to the party, Mrs. Thorn. Traffic was hell."
...To Be Continued