Deer Luhan, With Love

43

Chapter 43 – In Which Luhan’s Terror of Steamed Buns Surpasses His Terror of Heights

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.