Page 12 of Deadly Aloha
But the last one wasn’t tossed out. Instead, the man inside the truck hefted her onto his shoulder before hopping out. My eyes landed on her ass as she squirmed in the man’s grip. He said something that I couldn’t hear and slapped her panty-covered cheeks hard. Her legs kicked. Her long, tanned legs.
Legs that I knew… No, it couldn’t be. Fear like I’d never known seized my heart like a lariat and pulled tight.
I was walking forward, as if that could get me a better view from my distance. The man hadn’t just slapped her ass. Now he was fondling it. Iknewthat ass. Motherfucker. No! No! No!
“Wait, a minute,” I heard from behind me. “Is that…?”
It did not surprise nor anger me that Tangaloa would recognize Lu from just the back of her legs and her ass. In the next moment, the man turned towards the storage line, carrying her himself rather than handing her off as he had done the others, and Lu’s face came into view. Her long, thick black hairwas disheveled, her dark eyes blocked from my view, and a cloth or towel was pulled tight between her lips.
“I can’t stay, Aloiki… I’m suffocating here…”
A part of me died the day Lu handed me back the engagement ring I’d given her. I refused to take it, frozen as she stood in my kitchen offering it back to me. Her suitcases were already in her car when I’d come home. She’d been waiting for me.
To this day, I don’t know which would have been worse. Seeing her leave, or having come home to find her already gone. At least, I’d had the chance to see her one last time, to hear her reasoning and not read it in some fucked-up Dear John letter, but I also had the image of her walking out my front door seared inside my head.
The man stepped closer to the building. Lu was flailing on her stomach, his shoulder pressed into her belly. His grimy hands were all over her.
“Stop him!” I barely heard Tangaloa’s shout.
My binoculars fell from my hands, crashing to the dirt under my feet. I was charging towards the edge of the ridge, truly having no plan in mind other than it was the fastest way to get toher.Strong arms wrapped around me before I got anywhere close to the edge. I fought like a madman. Kicking, punching, scratching, snarling… Anything and everything to get the massive arms around me off.
“I’m going to marry you someday…”
Rage tasted like ash in my mouth. My slippahs skidded in the dirt, unable to find traction as I tried to move forward. One slipped off as I was forced backwards. I didn’t care. It could burn. It could all burn. They didn’t understand, I had to get to her. She was in the hands of that fucking Bloody Scorpion. He was getting closer to the door. Only steps away! I had to get to her!
Voices around me made little sense, though I was fairly certain I heard Tangaloa say Lu’s name.
He wasn’t hers to say her name. She wasmine. Allmine. Always had been, always would be.
What could she possibly be doing back here? She’d taken a job on the Mainland. Or, that was what she told me anyway. Had she been here this whole time? So close and yet so far.
Agony pierced my heart like a spear when that fucking storage facility door shut, closing Lu inside with all those Bloody Scorpions. How many had there been? Twenty-six, twenty-seven? And she was in just herunderwear, bound, helpless…
Somehow I was wrangled into the back seat of the SUV. The vehicle shook, but it wasn’t until Tangaloa reached between the driver and passenger seat to sucker punch me in the face that my battle paused.
But did not stop.
It would never stop.
Not until she was safe.
And back in my arms.
“Aloiki,” Tangaloa snapped. “Brother, listen to me. You can’t help her. If you go charging in there, you’ll be dead before you even get a chance to find her! She wouldn’t want you to die for her. Think, brother! You need to live to save her!”
My eyes landed on that fucking door. I hated that fucking door. What was happening to her inside? What was she suffering through? Why hadn’t I burned that fucking building down before she evenarrived?
A worse, gut-wrenching thought occurred to me. Had she beeninsidethat truck when I’d been tailing it today?
I’d done a lot of despicable things in my life. Kalea would never know that Tangaloa and I had turned her first boyfriend, who turned out to be an abusive asshole, into living chum. I’d slit the throats of men who had walked onto sacred ground. Whenmy neighbor’s daughter was kidnapped and raped, I’d dug an imu pit in my field before roasting her attacker alive like a kalua pig.
But if Lu had been in the back of that truckall fucking day, and I hadn’t done anything to save her?That, that would be the most heinous and unforgivable thing I’d ever have done in my lifetime. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t known. It didn’t matter that I thought she was living on the Mainland and nowhere near the potential danger I’d been investigating.
I should have known. I should have helped her. I’d donenothing.
Fire burned inside me, hot and smoldering. I didn’t know who I was more pissed at: the soon-to-be-dead Bloody Scorpion that had had his hands all over her or myself.
My eyes landed on Tangaloa. He knew. Of everyone on this fucking planet, he knew everything about what had happened between Lu and me. He was the only one who could ever understand.
