Chapter 12 #3
She was up in Pualani’s room when I entered. I expected to find her packing in a rush or hiding in a dark corner as she waited for the monster to appear. Instead, I found her leaning over Pualani’s crib, watching as her daughter played with a toy.
My anger dissipated as I stepped into the room, replaced with sympathy and pity as the depth of Kayl’s betrayal hit me. He hadn’t just been mine and Aloiki’s friend, but Kalea’s too. He’d known her just as long as I had, and she had trusted him just as she would me.
I stepped up beside her, looking down at the little girl with new eyes, trying to find one of my closest friends in her features.
“How could you not tell me?” I was surprised my voice was so steady, but accusation rang clear.
The entire ride over here, I couldn’t figure it out. Had she hit someone with her cage and called Kayl to clean it up? What could be so bad that she couldn’t tell Aloiki and me?
She ducked her head, curling her face into her shoulder. “You know.”
Neither of us said his name out loud, but there was no doubt in my mind that I was right on this. “I know, but I still don’t understand. What does he have on you?”
But she shook her head, her voice muffled by her shoulder. “Not me…”
Not her? But she was the one being blackmailed, extorted, raped… Who else could he have something— My mind froze, and I was done with these evasive games. I grabbed Kalea by her shoulders and spun in her around to face me. “Me?” I demanded harshly. “He was blackmailing you with something on me?”
Tears streamed down her cheeks like a mountain runoff, but she wouldn’t look at me. “And Aloiki.”
Pualani’s calming influence vanished in a flash, and suddenly it all fell into place.
Kalea hadn’t done anything wrong, but she was paying—both monetary and with her body—for Aloiki’s and my sins.
Sins we also paid Kayl to help cover up.
Sins we’d kept from Kalea because we didn’t want the darkness we lived in to touch her world.
It was why I never brought my work home with me. She knew I sold antique weapons, not ran arms for organized crime, private corporations, collectors, and anyone willing to pay my fees. She didn’t know about Aloiki’s involvement with Kahoku or the fact that we both had blood on our hands.
At least, we didn’t think she’d known. We’d wanted to protect her, keep her away from the violence and the dirt that touched us.
“What did he tell you?” I asked, my voice hard and unyielding. “No more lies, Kalea. I’ll get the truth out of you or out of him.”
Her face paled. “You can’t! You can’t! He has…
He has records. Pictures, recordings. If anything happens to him, it gets sent to his bosses!
” Her hands came up to grip my wrists. “Please, Tangaloa. That’s why I didn’t tell you!
If half of what he says is true about the things you and Aloiki have done, I don’t doubt what you’re capable of.
But I can’t have you hurt because of me! I’m not worth it!”
Her words were like a slap across my face and a kick to my balls at the same time. The fuck did she just say to me? “Not worth it? Not worth it? Fucking hell, Kalea! You were worth everything to me! I would have died for you! I would have burned the world down for you!”
She shook her head. “Don’t… Don’t say things like that. You’ll get hurt! End up in jail or worse! I couldn’t let you live a life behind bars, Tangaloa.”
“So instead you let yourself be repeatedly raped while I continued to trust a man, a brother, who was actually stabbing me in the back?!” Pualani let out a sound, bringing my attention back to her presence.
Fuck, I didn’t want to scare her. Pulling Kalea out of the room, I closed Pua’s door before heading across the hall to Kalea’s bedroom.
I closed that door too. “Forget your inane insistence that you’re not ‘worth it’, because that’s an entirely different therapy bill, but did it even occur to you to tell me that one of my best friends was betraying me?
My business? My livelihood? Not to mention Aloiki’s? ”
“That’s why I didn’t! I couldn’t have my brother being hurt either. He had a file! He showed me pictures, said there was more! And that if I told either of you, if he even thought one of you suspected, then he would give the information to his bosses.”
I paced away from her, the room feeling hot and stuffy.
My hands were shaking with rage, my bare feet falling heavy on the soft carpet.
I didn’t know if Kayl’s threat about having pictures and recordings of our illegal deeds was true.
He certainly had been around enough of it that it could be, but then his dealings would also been revealed.
The only way he wouldn’t be affected by that would be if he was already dead, and it was a final “fuck you” message to Aloiki and me.
I didn’t understand what happened. What had changed to make Kayl turn on us like this? Had we done something? Made him think we had stabbed him first? I didn’t think so. I couldn’t think of a single thing or reason why.
Had his goal been to break Kalea and I up?
Why? It wasn’t like he’d pursued her afterwards or bothered to hide his identity when he’d raped her.
What was his endgame? He was still getting money out of her, but she’d said he’d stopped the rape after I’d moved out.
Was it no longer “fun” for him to fuck her once I’d divorced her?
Bile churned high in my stomach.
In spite of her confession and what I knew in my gut to be true, I couldn’t reconcile the friend I’d known for nearly thirty years with someone who could do something so vile.
We all had our darkness, but for him to…
It burned, and it was only my anger that kept me from weeping. But I would mourn later.
No, today I would burn. I would avenge the wrong done against Kalea. Tomorrow… I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. But I knew there would be one less rapist in the world when the sun finally rose.
I did not call Neo or Bacon or anyone else.
Kayl’s house was not too far from my warehouse in Kalihi Kai, though upon breaking in, I realized I hadn’t been back since the day we helped him move in over a year ago.
Maybe I wasn’t as good of a friend as I thought I was.
But that did not give Kayl the right to blackmail and rape my wife, now ex-wife.
I still only wore the formal pareo Lu had picked out for me for the wedding.
By the time Kayl walked through his door later that night, the ceremony and reception would have been long over.
I did not hide in the dark like villains in movies did, waiting for my presence to be revealed when Kayl turned on the lights.
No, I left the lights on and was eating a leftover casserole I had found in his fridge straight from the glass pan on his L-shaped kitchen counter when he walked in.
The meager evidence I had found in his wall safe was spread out on the table in front of me.
I didn’t know if he had any more, but it certainly would have been enough to scare Kalea into believing him.
Kayl was not prepared to deal with the can of worms he’d opened when he went after Kalea.
“You used the wrong noodles,” I informed him without looking up. My eyes were still on the pictures I found of a very blood splattered Aloiki laughing as he held someone’s amputated fingers in front of his mouth like walrus tusks. He was younger, maybe early twenties. “Egg noodles are better.”
His hand inched towards his holstered gun still on his hip. He was dressed in casual American attire, slacks and a button up shirt. “I’ll be sure to tell my māmā next time she says she’s going to make me one.”
Did he think mentioning his makuahine was going to save his life?
I lifted my eyes to meet his. I didn’t say something so cliché as “there won’t be a next time”, but there was no doubt my face said it for me.
Kayl’s expression turned into a hateful sneer. “So the bitch finally told you. I was planning on reminding her of our deal at the wedding, but then she ran off like a scared pussy.” His hand did not move away from his gun.
“She didn’t tell me,” I informed him around my bite of casserole. “I figured it out.”
The smirk on his face was nothing less than arrogant. “Didn’t think you were smart enough for that. Do you have any idea how much fun it’s been, fucking with your heads all these years?”
I stabbed the fork down into the casserole. “Is that what all this has been about? Fun?”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t about friendship.
Or have you forgotten? It was always Aloiki and Tangaloa, and where’s the runt?
He’s probably hiding in their shadow somewhere.
” Venom dripped from his voice with every syllable.
“All brawn and not a single brain cell between the two of you. Neither of you knew that I was behind everything. Every fucked up thing that has happened in your lives was because of me.”
Shock paused the fork partway to my mouth. This wasn’t just about Kalea then. She was just one string in the web of lies and hatred Kayl had been spinning for years. What else had he fucked with?
The laugh that came out of him was nothing short of maniacal. “Didn’t know that part, did you? Then again, I never told the bitch either.”
My hand tightened around the handle of the fork. “Don’t call her that.”
Kayl mock pouted at me, and I had no idea how I could have ever been so blind. Or was he just that good of an actor? Was this the real Kayl that I was meeting for the first time after decades of friendship?
“Really? Of all the things I did to her, that’s what gets to you?” He laughed, and I saw him shift his weight more solidly onto his back foot. “How many times did you try to get her pregnant, and it only took me one fuck.”
I knew what he was trying to do, and yet I could not stop the shake of my hands, the stiffening of my spine.