Deer Luhan,

Not totally sure how you managed to make Xiumin quite as angry as that.  What you said must have been really, really bad.  But hey, one fewer hitlist that you’re on now.

Leigh

Yi, Feng and various other important people were not in the least bit amused or impressed, but Luhan and I just couldn’t stop laughing.  After all, it wasn’t my fault that nobody had told me the basement Luhan’s aunt had been kept in was more of an underground hideout and that the explosives in it, apparently left there to blow up Luhan’s aunt if he didn’t deliver on the drop the next day, had been set up with an electronic device that had been more or less directly underneath where I’d let off the EMP.  At least the explosives had largely been at the other end of the building, or we would have died.

“You have all the freaking luck!” Luhan chuckled as a medic put his arm in a sling and another attendant iced his shoulder.  I grinned sheepishly at him.  Things could have been extremely nasty if the explosion hadn’t thrown one of the mafia thugs onto the pair of us (Luhan had described in vivid detail how the guy’s body had saved us from being impaled by fragments of metal as he hadn’t passed out when I had – apparently he wasn’t in the least bit squeamish, which I found bizarre since he really couldn’t handle heights).  Luhan had also somehow managed to drag the insentient me back out onto the bridge, where he’d thrown up (apparently only once, which he was proud of) and waited patiently for Yi to pull us out.  It had been another air rescue.  That said, Luhan had confessed he preferred that to being in the dark on a walkway that had been partially destroyed by the detonations and was beginning to list dangerously into an abyss.  He’d spent most of the helicopter ride back to the central police station, where we now were, trolling Yi and the others in the aircraft by pretending he was me, which had worked until the copter went in for landing and he got a peek out of the window and turned a nasty shade of green.

“What’s going to happen to your aunt?” I asked Luhan, wincing as a nurse applied disinfectant to some scratches on my arm from the metal debris that had resulted from the explosion.

Luhan looked across to where the woman was sleeping in a chair, covered by a blanket that a police officer had purloined from somewhere.

“They’re taking her to a safehouse to recover,” he said.

“And why are they looking for your mum?”

Luhan’s smile faded and he let out a sigh.

“It’s twice I’ve heard them mention your mum now,” I mused, eyeing him sideways as he ruffled his hair.  After a moment or two, Luhan gnawed his lip, debating over whether or not to spill.  He decided to bite the bullet.

“Well, about seven years ago, my mum had a high office in the police and ended up in an advisory position to the governmental national security.  She pretty much screwed over the mafia while she was there and within a couple of years had arrested the guy who had a chokehold on Hebei and got him executed.  I had to flee the country—”

“Seriously?  You became an idol because you were on the run from the mafia?”

“It was too dangerous for me to go to school here,” he huffed, “and I needed an education and I was bright, so I wanted to go to the best place on offer.  What was I supposed to do?”

“Maybe not get a career as a celebrity?”

He wrinkled his nose, considering that, and then admitted defeat and continued with the story.

“Anyway, about three and a half years ago, they did a clean-up operation and managed to get various other top mafia bosses from this area imprisoned.  I was supposed to return, but by that point I’d been accepted as a trainee and thought I might as well stay on.  My parents weren’t exactly happy about it, but that’s life.”  He shrugged and winced, earning a reproving glare from the woman who was icing his shoulder.  “And then just after debut, the little brother of the boss my mum got executed and one of his cronies – he was the guy in charge today, I think, I’ve seen him before but never the top brass – escaped from jail and announced he was going to make a public example of my mum for killing his bestest bro, and my mum at that point was advised to go into hiding, so she did.  It kind of left the mafia confused.  Wasn’t until about November last year that they found the rest of the family and that’s quite probably—” he winced, “—because we had our breakout with Growl and suddenly got really famous and I was recognised.  They couldn’t get at me at that point because we were largely in Korea and then went on tour.  Dad says they went after him first, but he’s an ex-military official, so it wasn’t hard to draft in help there.  He’s been hiding out in a small family apartment in Beijing he inherited from my grandparents, though.  Got poisoned when he went out for dinner with a business partner.  He was able to handle everything about running the business except for important deals from home and my aunt basically took over as the actual CEO people could see.  I only found out most of this when we got to England, so I kind of freaked out and demanded leave and… well, you know the rest.”  He shrugged again, this time receiving a knock on the head from the people looking after him.  “I still find it morbidly amusing that they only figured my aunt was related to me when she got admitted to hospital.  Especially since she was kind of high profile after pissing the government off about this time last year.”

“So, basically, all this mess is because these people want to find your mum?” I summed up.  Luhan nodded.

“Oh, wait,” he suddenly remembered.  “The mafia here managed to get most of the mafia organisations in China on their side, which I think has screwed up their ability to organise things, seeing as three separate groups have independently tried to kill me and my dad when the guys here are adamant about taking hostages until they find out where my mum is.”

“Your mum must be absolutely awesome,” I concluded.

Luhan preened himself.  “Who do you think I got my manliness from?”

I gave an ungainly snort of laughter.  Lay had once mentioned something about Luhan being the mood-maker of the group, and with him being like this, is was very easy to see why.

“This is a bit of an odd revenge story, though,” I observed.  “Your mum appears to have pissed off multiple branches of the mafia—”

“The regional ones the most,” Luhan butted in.

“So they’ve all banded together to get back at her, but the ones she’s pissed off the most want to get their hands on her whereas the other ones think that killing all her relatives will be adequate revenge.”

“Yeah.”  Luhan paused.  “That lot are beginning to back down, though.  Maybe they only wanted to kill us because they didn’t initially think they’d have a way of getting hold of my mum.”

“Do they?”

“Only if I’m enough of an idiot to blab about where she is.  I wasn’t lying about being the only one who knew, you know.”

“And what was the whole thing with ransoming your aunt?”

“Ah….”  Luhan started fiddling with the hem of his t-shirt.  “One of the conditions on the ransom was that I would be there in person to drop the money, which was why my dad was adamant I couldn’t do it.”

“So they wanted to swap you for her, right?”

Luhan heaved a sigh.  “Probably not.  My guess is that they would have used her for leverage to kidnap me and gone laughing to the bank after scamming my family out of half a trillion yuan.  There might have been a shootout between them and the police, but they knew we wouldn’t really be able to do much about protecting me, my aunt or the money with her in their grip.”

I spluttered.  Sure, I’d known Luhan and his family were loaded, but with that kind of money?

Luhan hummed.  “I suppose that concludes my life story.  What time is it?  You might want to get back before the other members freak out at your absence.”

I glanced at my watch.  It was already one in the morning, and I winced.  I’d told Kris I’d be back just after midnight, and he was probably going to be worried because I wasn’t.  Grimacing, I booted up Luhan’s phone.  Once I’d waded through all the communication that wasn’t from people I knew personally, the only two relevant ones were from Kris and Tao.  Tao had called but left no message at around five to midnight, and Kris had texted quarter of an hour after that (in English, bless him) to tell me that the manager was taking them out for a late-night drink as a form of bribery to behave well for Zhengzhou (I’d almost forgotten about the padlocks at the fanmeet) and that he’d made excuses for me and not to worry if I got back to the dorm and found nobody there.

“Zhengzhou,” I remembered, eyes widening.  I turned back to Luhan, who was peering curiously over my shoulder.

“Kris found out?” he asked.

“Yeah, this morning.  I mean yesterday morning.  I was going to tell you when I tried to ring and realised you were in trouble.  But are you sure you still want to do Zhengzhou when you’re….”  My eyes trailed over his injured arm and leg.

“Yes,” he said firmly.  “You’ve done enough for me and you saved my life today, so you deserve a lie-in.”

“Wow, I should save somebody’s life every day,” I said sarcastically.  “Then I’d never have to get up before ten in the morning.”

He laughed.  “Are you free on Saturday?  We probably ought to start looking into visas and flights to get you home.  I don’t want you in any more danger than you’re already in now they know there’s two of us