Page 5 (1/2)

His underling, To sunlight A dagger appeared in his hands and sliced the plastic ties Her wrists remained bound behind her back

Placed roughly on her feet, she realized she was on the tarmac of some remote airstrip A sleek jet waited thirty yards away Its stairs were down, ready to receive its passengers A figure appeared in the open doorway and stepped into the light

A large splinted bandage covered his broken nose

Dr Hwan Pak

“Ah, our benefactor” Delgado headed toward the jet, checking the Rolex on his wrist “Co after the next few minutes”

9:22 AM

“That’s all you know?”

A hter ached in Guan-yin’s voice She had questioned Gray intently for the past severalto understand how she could still be alive

They had retreated to one of the sofas

Zhuang stood guard beside her Kowalski had wandered over to the fish tank, tapping at the glass, his nose close to its surface

Gray wished he could fill in more blanks for Guan-yin, but even he did not know the full extent of Seichan’s history, only fragh tianization As Gray recounted this past, Guan-yin seehter had taken parallel paths, hardened by circumstances but still able to rise above it, to survive and flourish

In the end, Gray could not paint a full enough picture to satisfy a hter’s life He doubted any number of words could fill that void

“I will find her,” Guan-yin swore to herself

She had already passed down a coado hter They still awaited word

“In the past, I failed her,” Guan-yin said, as one finger rose to wipe a tear froators were cruel, crueler than I suspected even back then They told hter was dead”

“To make you despair To make it easier to break you”

“It only et vengeance, which eventually I did” A glint of fire burned through her haunted look “Still, I did not give up I searched for her, but it was made difficult in those early years, as I dared not set foot again in Vietnaive up”

“It hurt too ,” he said

“Hope is sometimes its own curse” Guan-yin looked to her folded hands in her lap “It was easier to bury her in my heart”

Several longof the fountain in the atrium

“And you?” Guan-yin asked, her voice faint “You have riskedher here, to come to me now”

Gray did not need to acknowledge that aloud

She lifted her face to stare him in the eye “Is it because you love her?”

Gray met those eyes, knew he could not lie—when the first explosion shook the complex

The blast rocked the entire apart-stemmed orchids swayed

“What the hell!” Kowalski yelled

Guan-yin was on her feet