Until You (The Redemption, #1)(34)

My whole body trembles as I try to gain my wits, and it’s only then that the thought hits me.

Kaleo.

He’s hurt. One of the men here—

“Don’t fucking lie to me again.” I almost cry in relief when I hear my husband’s voice, but that relief is followed by a cold trickle of fear. It’s foreign and terrifying and begs for me to look all while wanting me to run. “Mercy is a funny thing,” he says with a chuckle that chills my blood. “The longer you take to tell the truth, the less it will be shown.”

With my heart in my throat, I peek my head up over the edge of the railing and bite back the gasp that hits at the scene below.

Kaleo stands with his gun aimed and an expression on his face that shakes me to the core. It’s pure indifference as he points the gun at two men while another man is crumpled on the deck beside him with a pool of blood beneath him. Rangi stands behind Kaleo, a gun, clear as day in one hand and the same impassive expression that Kaleo holds etched in the lines of his own.

It’s then that I see the rest—the sight of the man clearly dying or already dead so shocking that I missed the bags open on the deck. The bundles inside of them. The lone package cut open with powder spilling out.

I try to process. To comprehend. To believe what I’m seeing while denying it all at the same time.

“So, who’s going to talk? Which one of you is playing both sides?” Kaleo moves the gun back and forth between the two men. The smile on his face amused in the scariest of ways. “FBI? DEA? Who are you with?”

“We’re not. I’ve told you—”

The gunshot rings out and the man speaking staggers backward, hits a chair in his path, and collapses.

Fuck.

I jolt at the sound, my heart lodging itself in my throat, and my knees almost give way.

What just happened? This is like an out-of-body experience—a movie I’m watching and not my life. My husband just shot an unarmed man.

“He lied,” Rangi says to the lone man standing, who is shaking so hard I can see it from where I’m watching. “Are you going to make the same mistake, Sebastian?”

Sebastian?

I know him. We had drinks with him and his associates last night. We laughed and . . . and I convinced him to stay tonight, to come to the party I was throwing, rather than fly home to Los Angeles.

He’s here because of me.

They’re all here because of me.

Their blood is on my hands.

I bite back the nausea that threatens. The dizziness that spins around me.

“There are only two answers you can give. Yes, you are an informant. Or yes, you stole product from me,” Kaleo says and chuckles as he takes a step closer. “And neither of them makes me a happy man.”

My hands are over my ears and my body tucked behind the railing when the third shot rings out. But I still jolt at its sound. This can’t be happening. My husband can not be a . . . killer. He’s Kaleo Makani. From a long line of Makanis.

Shipping.

Kaleo deals in shipping goods. Products. Merchandise. Customers who receive them.

But that bag? The white powder? Those are drugs.

There are drugs on the boat. A lot of drugs.

Does everyone on the boat know or just a select few?

Did they hear the gunshots, or with the other cabins being at the other end of the boat, were they too far?

This can’t be real.

I’ve . . . I’ve lived with this man, I’ve loved this man, I thought I knew this man better than I knew myself and I’ve . . . been wrong.

It’s all . . . all been a lie?

I stagger to the stateroom as my ears ring and my stomach pitches until I empty the contents of it into the toilet.

I’m in a fog. My thoughts are hazy. Disjointed. Never-ending in an eddy of disbelief.

The truth . . . I can’t avoid it as much as I want to, and now that it’s out there, it’s so very different than the “truth” I believed.

It’s all been a lie.

Who I married. The man he is. What he does. The money that supports the life I live.

All a lie that I’ve been too blinded and now feel so stupid that I didn’t see. Or maybe I haven’t been, and I’ve just ignored the truth because it was easier to turn a blind eye.

It takes forever for the tears to subside, for my body to stop shaking, for my mind to stop running in loops on how to get off this boat. On how anyone would believe I didn’t know what was going on right under my nose. On what to do.

If Kaleo somehow finds out that I saw—that I know—will I end up like the men whose blood is staining the deck below?

The thought sends another fresh round of fear through me as the early morning hours slowly wear on.

I don’t know what time it is when the door to the stateroom opens. When I hear the man I thought I knew sigh into the silence of the room after his hard night, and slowly begins to undress. The sound of shoes dropping. The slide of his tie through his collar as he takes it off. The snap of his slacks as he straightens them before laying them over the back of the chair.

If the lights were on, would I see blood splattered on those items now on the floor? On the skin of the man who wore them?

Each second feels like an hour.

The shower turns on.

Each minute feels like an eternity.

It turns off soon thereafter.