“And Pualani? You know she’s yours.”
I expected him to be disgusted or to have no reaction at all to the acknowledgement that he’d fathered Kalea’s daughter. “Yeah, she did fuck with my plan. Once I learned Kalea was pregnant, I was going to force her to give you a whole litter of my bastards, but then that bitch couldn’t even carry the kid to term properly. I fucking swear, I’m surrounded by incompetent idiots at every turn. You found out and ran like the limp-dick coward you are. And after that, fucking her just lost its appeal.”
“But you weren’t done fucking with her,” I clarified. “You started to demand money.”
He snorted, legs shifting again. “Like I even wanted her kid, but she believed me when I said I’d have her taken away. So fucking gullible.”
“Maybe,” I offered, “but at least she can count.”
Kayl froze, his eyes immediately looking around for the trap. His arrogance fell off his shoulders like an unbalanced sail. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” he demanded, his thumb unbuckling his hip holster.
I struck, sending the fork clean through the air like a missile. The prongs embedded into his skin, just below his right elbow. Crying out in shock and pain, Kayl’s hand lost its grip on his gun.
“You forgot our basic training, Kayl.” I wiped my mouth with a napkin before dropping the used paper onto the remainder of the casserole. “Twenty-one feet. Inside twenty-one feet the gunman has the disadvantage.”
As I stood, he let out a shout of pain before ripping the fork from his forearm. “That fucking hurt!” he sneered through his teeth, reaching for his gun.
I bolted across the room, catching his wrist before he could take aim. A quick snap and bend later, and the gun toppled to the floor as his shoulder popped from his socket. “I’d offer you an apology,” I told him evenly over his shout ofpain, “but then I’d spend the entire night apologizing, when I’d much rather spend it killing you.”
Kayl did not go down easily. Oncehe realized I was not in the mood for a shootout, he gave it all he had—but he hadn’t spent the last five years sparring with Aloiki Ka’ana’ana who had an axe to grind. If he had, maybe he would have gotten in more than a couple strikes. His house was closer to the neighbors than I would have preferred, so I couldn’t drag the fight out as long as I wanted.
Instead, I used his own police issued cuffs to bind his right hand to his left ankle behind his back and an extension cord to do the same with his other two limbs. I found a pair of his underwear in the dirty laundry and shoved that into his mouth before wrapping duct tape over his lips and around his head. And when he tried to bite me, I kicked him in the balls.
I used his own cage to bring him to my warehouse. Two car butchers I knew of were waiting for me as promised. Once I pulled Kayl from the trunk, they took the vehicle away to never see the light of day again.
None of my employees were present. I sent them home for the night without explanation and with a bonus.
I dumped Kayl unceremoniously onto the unforgiving floor. “I never even suspected you,” I confessed without looking down at him. “When Kalea told me what happened, how she’d come to be pregnant with Pualani, I never even considered you.” I touched my hand to my left ribs where he’d gotten a lucky strike with a kitchen knife. My hand came back bloody but wasn’t too bad. I’d had worse. “But I suppose that was the point. Why would I suspect someone I loved like a brother could do that to my wife?”
I glanced down at him to see him glaring at me as he huffed for air out of his nose. An overwhelming sense of sadness hit me at the sight of him. I was losing a friend tonight—but then again, maybe I wasn’t. Maybe he’d never been my friend at all.
I bent down and wrapped my fingers around his ankle. My floor was not filthy with grime and mold, but it was certainly dirty. It was a warehouse, after all. We moved crates of all shapes and sizes, day in and day out. Sweeping was only occasionally a priority. Dragging him behind me, I headed to a back room. This warehouse was one of my biggest, though it was only nineteen thousand square feet. I did have a legitimate side of my business that I needed to keep up appearances with.
The back room required a security code that I punched in, not caring if he saw the numbers. An aroma of wood, earth, and spices hit me as I continued inside.
I dropped his ankle and looked around proudly. “My personal collection.” The twelve by twelve room was filled from floor to ceiling with shelves of large wooden barrels. “I learned a long time ago that money isn’t the only value in trade. Some of my best clients have bartered all sorts of valuables. And why not? Keeps me from having to pay to clean the cash.” I reached over and rubbed my hand along the flat surface. “One of my clients trades only in Scottish whiskey.” I smiled down at Kayl as he took in the quantity of barrels within the room. “I’ve moved a lot of weapons for him,” I added unnecessarily.
I’d never drunk any of my collection, their burned seals and untouched status adding value to each. And I had so many barrels now that I was considering moving my collection to a bigger room. I had several barrels in cradles on the floor now, because my shelves were all full. It would not be an easy feat, though. Each barrel weighed a hundred or so pounds when empty. Filled? Easily four to five hundred.
In my struggle to remove Kayl’s clothing and bind him to oneof the barrels, the wound on my side opened up even more. Cursing, I left to head to my office. I had a suture kit in there. Bringing it and a chair into the room, I entered to find Kayl testing his binds, but the fucker wasn’t going anywhere. At least I hadn’t taken the gag out of his mouth. I wasn’t ready to hear him spew his filth yet.
I took a seat in front of him, propping my foot up on the edge of the cradle as I slouched down to get a good angle on the cut. It was only a few inches long, but the damn thing would not stop bleeding.
“Keep struggling,” I encouraged as I threaded the needle. “That barrel survived two shipwrecks and a hundred years at the bottom of the North Atlantic Sea. You have more of a chance of dislocating your other shoulder than you do of breaking it.”
I had him draped over the barrel on his stomach. Using handcuffs with a longer chain, I bound his wrists together under the cast-iron cradle—which easily weighed a hundred and fifty pounds on its own—and then each ankle was connected to the cradle by a thick binding of rope. Even if he wasn’t injured from our fight, he wasn’t going anywhere.
Once I was sewed up to the point where it no longer looked like I was offering a blood sacrifice to Ku, I put the suture kit away. Any other injuries that occurred tonight would not require mending.
“Do you recall your wedding gift to me?” I asked him as I unbound the duct tape from around his lower head. Hair and skin pulled, but I did not stop in my efforts. “Tried to pass it off as some priceless piece you took off a thug you arrested. Now he either lied to you and you had no idea or you knew it was a knockoff and were trying to fool me.”
As soon as the duct tape was off his mouth enough for him to move his jaw, Kayl spat his dirty underwear out, coughing andgagging. “What the fuck, brah? If you’re going to kill me already, just do it! I don’t need a fucking history lesson.”
“See, but I do.” Without saying anything else, I walked back out of the room. I heard his shouting and the rattling of metal against metal behind me, but ignored all of it. I grabbed what I needed, taking my sweet time just to fuck with him some more, and then returned to the room. He hadn’t so much as managed to scrape the cradle an inch across the floor.
I showed him the wedding gift. “Heritage Rough Rider .22 Revolver with a pearl handle. Decent gun, but certainly wasn’t used in the American Civil War. But then again, what would my not even single working brain cell know about historic weapons?”
I pulled back the hammer with my thumb, aimed at the back concrete wall, and pulled the trigger. Kayl jumped at the loud discharge, the bullet now embedded in the wall several feet behind him.