I’d never before contemplated how zombies must feel. To be alive and yet dead. When I’d discovered Kalea’s betrayal, I felt gutted and angry. I knew that removing myself from the situation was the only way to save her life. I’d have never harmed Pualani—she hadn’t asked to be born—but there was a high possibility I would have endedbothher parents’ lives.
I never asked who the father was. I didn’t allow myself to. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to kill him or thought sleeping with my wife wasn’t a good enough reason to die. But learning his name would have been the straw that broke my back. I wouldn’t have stopped.
And maybe I didn’t want to know. I left and went to the one person Iknewwasn’t her lover: her brother.
I was broken. Not a father and no longer a husband.
Now, I was dead.
It took a lot of whiskey to get me to sleep after I left Bacon’s house. I didn’t work the next day. Hops was pissed because it was my shift at the brewery, but I didn’t give a fuck. The day after that,I nearly fucked up an arms deal by shipping the wrong items. If one of my guys hadn’t caught the mistake, I would have had a lot of explaining to do.
Then there was yesterday. Samantha saw me from across the yard and came running to me. Fuck, I missed that girl. I didn’t allow myself to miss her mother.
Samantha’s English was better than it had been, but she still had a long way to go before she was fluent. “Bike, Tangy!”
My motorcycle was behind me. I’d been on my way to oversee a delivery, but the moment Samantha had demanded a ride from me, that became more important.
I looked at her mother, trying not to notice or acknowledge how bloodshot and irritated her eyes were. “You good if I take her for a quick spin?”
Caroline nodded stiffly.
I’d never taken Caroline riding before. That was a line I couldn’t cross, but Samantha and I were frequent riders together. I stuck to the backroads, keeping her firmly in front of me, and never sped. My saddlebag also housed her little helmet that looked like it belonged to a doll next to mine.
I was feeling guilty about keeping my distance from Samantha too. I took her for a longer ride than usual and ended up stopping at an ice cream truck to get her a treat before heading back. As she ran to her mother, I had a flash of myself at her age, being exchanged like a borrowed book by my parents.
Staying in the barn sucked. How was it even possible that I would miss that fucking couch I’d come to despise so much?
The twins were fucked up, to say the least. Their pet snakes, which they had smuggled onto the island, creeped me the fuck out—and not because they were banned as a species in Hawai’i. The twins let them loose around the barn to hunt, and one had crawled into bed with me.
I was sleeping in one of the beds they used in the porn shoots. After a change of sheets, I kept telling myself it was no different than sleeping at a hotel. There were no doors on the stalls. Like a movie set, any doors were props. But after I’d woken up to a Club Cunt blowing me on my second morning, I decided that a door was necessary and haphazardly installed one.
It took me nearly four days for me to wonder if I’d overreacted. Given Caroline’s history, maybe she had a plausible reason to ask me that question. I didn’t know what that reason was, but I also hadn’t stuck around to find out. Add “coward” to my growing list of characteristics I hadn’t even known about myself. Because this was the second time in my life when I’d removed myself from a situation without finding out the details why.
I felt stilted, jolted. I couldn’t hate Caroline for her question. Maybe I should. Maybe it would knock her off the pedestal I’d put her on.
A light tapping on the door I’d installed reached my ears, but I ignored it. If it was the twins wanting a sex toy from the closet in the corner, I was going to end up shoving it down both their throats. I wasn’t ancient, but I certainly felt it around those two. Where the fuck did they get that much stamina? Was there a Club Cunt theyhadn’tfucked yet today?
The tapping started up again. The empty bottle of whiskey on the nightstand was still there from the other night, and I kept glaring at it for not having an auto-refill feature.
The door creaked open. I looked up from where I was cleaning a pair of French officer pistols made by Gounouilhou of Bergerac. I’d appraised them myself as being circa 1820, but they were in desperate need of a cleaning before I could find them a home. I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure I wasn’t keeping them, but an avid collector would pay anywhere between seventy-five to a hundredthousand for them.
I had two pistols, one for each twin. Too bad they weren’t loaded. “What the fuck do you want?”
I snapped my jaw closed. It wasn’t the twins standing at my crooked door. It was Holly.
I didn’t know muchabout Bacon’s woman. She was an oddball, but I tried not to hold that against her. Many of the things she said or did hinted at an unusual upbringing. She wasn’t extraverted by any means, and I’d seen her take down a man twice her size in half a second, even when he was armed and she hadn’t been.
She was about Caroline’s height, leanly muscular, with cropped blonde hair. I placed her slightly younger than me, either late twenties or early thirties.
As she stepped into my temporary room, I stood. I searched for any sign of Bacon behind her, but it appeared she was alone. That was odd, though it wasn’t like there was a rule against it. She was an Ol’ Lady, and had as much free rein as the rest of us.
She didn’t look at me specifically. Her eyes scanned the room as if she was searching for clues.
I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I thought you were the twins.”
“Pretty sure Master Mal wouldn’t know what to do if there were two of me,” she quipped, though she had yet to look at me. Regardless of where they were or who was around, Holly referred to Bacon as “Master Mal”, a show of respect for her Dom.
I gestured to the chair I’d just vacated. The stall had a queen bed, and I’d moved the kitchen table and a single chair in from the stall across the hall so I could work. It made the place cramped, but it wasn’t like I had to worry about fitting a crew in here too.