Page 46 of Until You

I chuckle and the irritation lessens knowing Kaleo is just trying to take care of me when that’s something no one has ever really done for me before.

“Thank you,” I murmur to Carlo as he heads back downstairs, leaving me to glance over the railing one more time at the most incredibly sweet, irritating, demanding, loving man I have ever met.

Seeing Kaleo in his element—wheeling and dealing and trying to ensure success so that we never have to worry about anything again fills me with a kind of pride and love I’ve never known.

I’m one lucky woman.

The thought stays with me as I head to our stateroom, as I take a shower and put on something sexy, and as I doze off to the sound of music on the deck below.

Shouting wakes me up.

At least I think it does. All I know is that uneasy feeling returns, crawling over me as I scramble out of bed, knot a robe around my waist, and shuffle toward the deck.

Kaleo should have been in by now. He should have woken me up and fulfilled his promise. He should have—

A gunshot pierces the silence. I don’t even realize it’s my own yelp that follows thereafter because I’m scrambling to the only protection I can find, the solid railing that lines the perimeter of the top deck.

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.