Audrey returned to her scrubbing, and when her hands were finally just stained a light shade of pink, she removed her jacket and stuffed it in the trash, covering it with wads of paper towels. Taking one last look in the mirror to make sure she had washed away the stranger’s DNA, she barely recognized the damp, haggard woman with dark circles under her eyes staring back at her.

It was after midnight by the time Audrey made it to the hospital in Hong Kong. The janitor was buffing the floor as she moved down the corridor that had become her second home over the past six months. She entered her son’s room to find him sleeping peacefully. Cartoons yammered quietly on the television. Audrey grabbed the remote control and switched it off.

She lowered herself to her knees by her son’s bed. Clasping her hands together, she pressed them tightly against her forehead as she prayed. She begged God for salvation—not for her, but for the boy. Please don’t punish him for my sins, she pleaded. As long as the boy survived, she would accept whatever tribulations her Maker felt appropriate to saddle her with. She was willing to burn in hell if only her son could rise from her ashes.

Audrey’s body began to heave with grief as the emotions overwhelmed her. Tears rolled down her face.

The boy woke at the sound of his mother’s inconsolable sobbing. Though he did not know exactly what she had been through, he clearly knew she had been through a lot and hadn’t been sleeping. He placed his hand on her head, caressing her hair.

“It’s okay, Mom. It’s going to be okay.”

Audrey nodded, desperately wanting to believe him, then leaned in close and kissed the boy on the head as she embraced him.

CHAPTER 47 EVERYONE HAS A PRICE

CHAPTER 47
EVERYONE HAS A PRICE

kowloon

Knight drunkenly swirled his glass of scotch, then knocked it back as he sat alone at the hotel bar at the Peninsula. The high-rises twinkled just across Victoria Harbor. The lights blurred together, just as they always did.

Knight was drained both physically and emotionally, and he could feel gravity pulling him into the stool as if he were on the surface of Jupiter. In his younger years, this was when he would have slipped off to the men’s room for a bump of cocaine to get back in the game. But he had quit the drug a few years back, after learning that it typically spent a lot of time up someone’s ass and possibly had led to a few deaths on its journey to New York. It was one of the few moral lines he had ever drawn in his life.