“Boss! You’re here!” he said, lowering the phone.
“Where is Jasmine?” he asked again.
“She’s inside the camp,” Chen answered. “I was just texting to see what was taking her so long to come out.”
Fear squeezed Han’s heart along with the memory of his brother’s unexpected appearance in Lam Yibo’s place. Kuang Jr. had stood silently by as Han facilitated the deal with the brother he hadn’t seen since they were boys.
But despite his presence, Han soon found out that Delun wouldn’t force the issue or recutting the 24K in on the deal. When the exchange happened, his brother, only by blood, handed the cases of money over to Han’s men.
“You’ve done very well for yourself, sai lou,” Delun congratulated Han in Cantonese, which Kukui couldn’t understand. “The Silent Triad has gained quite a name for itself, and my associate Lam Yibo convinced our dragon to refuse to deal with anyone but you. After K Diamond told me how you had so cleverly cut him out of the deal I arranged for him, I had to come see for myself how such a thing could happen. He was right about you. You have grown into quite the fox. Like your mother.”
At his words, a memory whispered across Han’s mind.
“It is good that you’re a fox beauty like your mother,” their father once told Han. “It often brings her trouble. But you don’t have the good fortune of your older brother, so you’ll need her clever and her good looks to get by in life.”
Han had been called overly good-looking all his life, and as he regarded his brother, he realized he owed that attractiveness entirely to his mother. His brother looked exactly like their father—as Han would have himself if there had been no beauty to soften his too sharp features.
And with his compliment, Delun was letting his sai lou—which could be translated as both “little brother” and “penis” in Cantonese, know that his older brother had been watching him from afar…and that he’d accumulated enough power within his own triad to step in for another snakehead at the last minute.
And bringing K Diamond along had been an insulting flex—one Han couldn’t properly address without upsetting the Golden Circle Dragon and possibly losing all the goodwill and confidence he’d built up with Kukui.
An old, helpless rage churned inside of Han. Suddenly, he was a little boy again, being compared by his father to a son with whom he couldn’t compete.
Delun had better grades, better comportment—more respect from the community because his mother wasn’t a prostitute. Past comparisons played havoc inside Han’s mind. Then and now.
But Han didn’t let that show on his face.
Taking a note from their father’s page, he bowed and said, “Let your dragon know that The Silent Triad is happy to do business with him despite his representative’s late arrival.”
That hit. Delun flinched at the reminder that while he was a mere snakehead, the lowly illegitimate brother who’d been raised to expect nothing in life was a founding Dragon of his own triad, on par with his boss.
“I will do that,” Delun offered, nonetheless, with a polite smile. It came nowhere near his eyes. “K Diamond tells me you have a girlfriend now. A surfing instructor who works at a summer camp. How…interesting.”
In the background, Kuang Jr. snickered as if Delun had told the funniest joke in the world. Then he led the way back to the needlessly flashy car they’d brought along to a top-secret deal.
Again, Han kept his face neutral, but a sickening fear rolled his stomach. Delun knew about Jasmine? Down to where she worked?
It wasn’t an explicit threat, but Han was barely able to wait until their car pulled off before instructing his guys to handle the rest of the deal.
Then he jumped into the Kia he’d driven to the dock.
Unfortunately, the Honolulu Harbor was about an hour away from the north shore, where the camp was located in holiday traffic.
Still, he raced into the parking lot to find….
Chen on his phone.
“I’m sure she’ll text back any minute now,” Chen assured him. “And the camp’s right there. If anything had happened, I would have known.”
Chen was probably right. She’s fine. She’s probably fine, he’d told himself.
But still, he had to ascertain that with his own eyes. So he stalked to the beach camp, following the light from the bonfire. He didn’t care that the sand was getting inside the docksiders he’d switch to after discovering that the island turned his East Coast wingtips into uncomfortable heat boxes.
He approached the first grown-ups he saw, a woman with long blonde hair flirting with an equally blond man—probably counselors. They both wore the same Pacific Oahu Surf Camp rash guards as Jasmine.
And their conversation stopped mid-sentence when they looked up to see him standing there.
“Where’s Jasmine?” he demanded.
“Um…who are you?” the male counselor asked, eyeing Han’s tats.
