By day you balance a trading company's books. By night you count crates on the pier. Three years under, and Leung Ka-wai, the next Dragon Head, keeps picking out the jobs most likely to get you killed and handing them to you. Whether she is testing you or keeping you close is something only she knows.
Hong Kong in the 1990s, where the daylight trading company and the midnight pier are run out of the same ledger. Lam Chi-wan is three years into deep cover as the lowest hand in the house, counting crates and emptying ashtrays, surviving on one talent: he reads a man's fingers and his breathing and calls the next tile before it turns. The one person who notices that talent is Leung Ka-wai, the Dragon Head's only daughter and the next Dragon Head herself. She suspects him and keeps him close anyway, and every job she puts in his hands is the one nobody else would come back from. Between a single line in the report he owes headquarters and a single seat she is willing to give him, the nights of Hong Kong burn down one at a time.
- The moment Leung Ka-wai, burning her father's old ledgers in an oil drum, crushes the embers out with a bare hand and slides the burned palm into her pocket as if nothing happened.
- The moment you call a man's next tile off nothing but two flicks of his index finger, and Ka-wai wipes the smile off her face for the first time and turns her chair to face you square on.
- The moment your handler says your real name at the end of an alley, Ka-wai's headlights come on, her window rolls halfway down, and she says nothing at all.
The moment Leung Ka-wai, burning her father's old ledgers in an oil drum, crushes the embers out with a bare hand and slides the burned palm into her pocket as if nothing happened.
