The four walls of the apartment seemed to press in on him, the silence so profound he could hear the frantic thud of his own heart. Kai lay on his bunk, staring at the stained mattress springs above him, the initial, fizzy relief of surviving his audience with Wong having curdled into a cold, leaden dread in his gut. He replayed the meeting in the green-lit office on a loop. The scratch of the silver pen. The unblinking, magnified eyes. He knew you'd be back tonight.
The thought was an ice pick chipping away at his sanity. Had it all been an elaborate test? Not of his ability to kill, which was a simple, brutal metric, but of his capacity for independent, strategic thought? The possibility was far more terrifying. A simple thug was predictable, a tool to be used and discarded. Wong seemed to be testing for something else entirely—a lieutenant, a potential successor with a mind behind the fists—and Kai had no idea what the correct answers were, or if there even were any. He had stepped off the script and, against all odds, had been rewarded. It felt less like a victory and more like stepping into a deeper, darker labyrinth.
He thought of Chan, the old fisherman. By now, the man would be a wreck of frayed nerves, checking and re-checking his boat, staring at the dark, indifferent water, praying the life-saving deal struck in the rain wasn't a monstrous, final trick. Kai had thrown him a lifeline, but it was a line that ran directly through the heart of the Wo Shing machinery. If this fabricated shipment went wrong—if Chan lost his nerve, if the Coast Guard happened by, if the fictional contact failed to appear—Chan was dead, and Kai's lie would be exposed in the most final way possible. He had traded a swift execution for the slow, gnawing agony of suspense, and he wasn't sure which was worse.
The soft, metallic scrape of the key in the lock, followed by the click of the door latch, broke his spiralling thoughts. Lok slipped in, moving with a careful, hushed tread that was entirely unlike his usual boisterous entrance. In the faint, orange-tinted light filtering through the window from the neon signs below, Kai saw his friend's face was pale and drawn. One eye was swollen and purpling, a nasty, split cut adorned his lower lip, and he held his left arm slightly stiffly, as if protecting his ribs.
"Lok?" Kai's voice was rough from the long silence.
Lok jumped, clutching his chest. "Aiyah, Kai! You scared me. I thought you were asleep." He tried to shrug, a gesture that was supposed to be casual, but he winced immediately, a sharp hiss of air escaping through his teeth. "It's nothing. Just a… misunderstanding. Over a Mahjong debt." The lie was clumsy, transparent.
Kai sat up, the mattress groaning in protest. He didn't need the details. He could picture it with perfect, horrifying clarity: Lok, emboldened by the growing legend of the "dog catcher," trying to emulate his brother, puffing out his chest and picking a fight with the 18K to prove he was just as tough, that he was a force to be reckoned with. They, smarting from the humiliation at the Golden Sun, would have been eager to teach the upstart a lesson, to remind the Wo Shing that for every rising star, there were a dozen foot soldiers who could be punished.
"You shouldn't have done that," Kai said, the words tight, compressed by the guilt constricting his throat. His actions were a stone thrown into still water, and the ripples were now washing over Lok, the one person he was supposed to be protecting. His success was becoming Lok's vulnerability.
"Why not?" Lok shot back, a flash of hurt and defiance in his good eye. He dabbed at his bleeding lip with a crumpled tissue, his hand trembling slightly from the adrenaline comedown and the pain. "We can't let them push us around. You showed them what happens. I was just… holding the line. Reminding them who controls Temple Street." He said it with a fragile, desperate bravado that made Kai's heart ache. Lok was trying so hard to be worthy of this new, violent world they inhabited, a world Kai himself was only faking, a performance that was getting dangerously real.
"You hold the line by being smart, not by getting your face smashed in," Kai said, his voice low. He swung his legs to the cold concrete floor and stood, his own body protesting with a symphony of aches from Lamma Island. He found a semi-clean cloth, ran it under the tap at the small sink, and wring it out. He gestured for Lok to sit on the lower bunk. "Here. Press it on the eye. It'll help with the swelling."
Lok, his brief defiance evaporating, sank onto the mattress with a grunt of pain. He took the cloth, his fingers brushing against Kai's. The simple, brotherly act of care seemed to deflate him completely, the tough-guy act melting away to reveal the scared young man beneath.
"They were three of them," Lok mumbled, his voice muffled by the cloth pressed to his face. "I got a few good hits in on one, I think. Broke a bottle on the table, like you did. But then… yeah." He looked up, his expression a complex mix of shame, pain, and a strange, stubborn pride. "But I didn't run. I stood my ground. For the Wo Shing."
For the Wo Shing. The words were a knife twist in Kai's conscience. He looked at Lok's bruised face—a direct, physical consequence of the reputation "Jin Kai" was building. Every time he fought, every time he stood up to the 18K, he was putting a larger, brighter target on Lok's back. He was corrupting the one pure thing in this entire operation, their friendship, turning it into a liability that could get his oldest friend killed. He was the poison, and Lok was drinking it willingly, calling it loyalty.
"Just be careful," Kai said, the words feeling hollow and useless even as he spoke them. "Picking fights you can't win isn't bravery. It's stupidity. It gets you dead."
"You're one to talk," Lok retorted, but without any real heat. He gestured vaguely in the direction of the city center. "Solo missions for the White Paper Fan… you're the one walking the dangerous path, brother. Not me." He finished dabbing at his face and leaned back against the wall with a weary sigh. "What even was the job, anyway? Everything… settled?" He asked the question carefully, his eyes searching Kai's for a clue.
Kai met his gaze evenly, the lie now a familiar, cold stone in his hand, ready to be placed in the ever-growing wall between them. "It was a collection. Out on Lamma. It's handled." The simplicity of the statement was a shield.
Lok, too tired, in too much pain, and too trusting to press further, just nodded. "Good." He pushed himself up, moving with the stiff care of the recently beaten, and climbed into his bunk, the frame groaning ominously under his weight. Within minutes, his breathing evened out into the deep, untroubled sleep of the physically exhausted and the spiritually unburdened.
Kai remained sitting on the edge of his own mattress, the cold from the floor seeping up through his bare feet. Lok saw him as a hero ascending, a brother climbing the triad ladder, their shared childhood dreams of power and respect finally coming true in this violent, twisted form. He had no idea that Kai's "solo mission" had been a brush with a fate far worse than a street brawl—a psychological chess match played on a cliff's edge, where a single miscalculation, a single flicker of doubt in his eyes, would have meant a silent, anonymous death on a deserted beach. The distance between their realities was a chasm, and with every passing day, every necessary lie, Kai was the one digging it deeper, standing on the precipice of a collapse that would inevitably bury them both. The ghost was thriving, and the man was drowning.