Well, that explained where the music was coming from, I supposed. But I had no idea who this particular “she” was or how she’d wrecked Victor this bad if he was the one who let her go.
“I better get in there before Phantom makes good on his promise,” Han said. He pushed open the door for me. “Go in and wait. I’ll bring back your bag later.”
Phantom. So that was the ogre’s name. And that must make him the third Silent Triad Dragon Han had mentioned a few times. So he wasn’t just an ogre. He was an Ogre King.
Han disappeared down the hallway before I could respond to his instructions. And unlike Phantom, he closed the door behind him.
Leaving me to feel like Diane Keaton’s Kate getting shut out by one of Michael Corleone’s men at the end of The Godfather. How had I ended up in the middle of this mafia film?
I walked into a bedroom that turned out to be more like a whole apartment, complete with dark furniture and a view of the Rhode Island coastal beach beyond its paned floor-to-ceiling windows. Chen had told me the truth. This beach was nothing like Hawaii’s. The ocean was grey as opposed to crystal blue. There were huge rocks situated on the narrow strip of sand and these kind of scratchy-looking green bushes. They whipped sideways under a brusque wind that didn’t appear tropical in the least.
A low-key panic settled in my chest, and once again, I wondered why Han had brought me with him on this trip. Because one thing made itself evident as I looked around the too nice room…
I didn’t belong here.
HAN
Jasmine didn’t belong here, and bringing her with him had been a mistake.
Han had that figured out by the time he left his brother dozing in his room. Phantom hadn’t exaggerated when he called Han and said he needed to return to Rhode Island and take over Victor’s duties.
Their lead Dragon, usually so stalwart and reserved, had unraveled into a human-shaped mess. Barely capable of getting through the day, much less traveling to Delaware to handle the advance work on that deal.
Uneasy emotions crunched inside of Han’s chest after seeing his brother like that.
Up until he called off his engagement with the 24K Dragon’s daughter, Victor had been the most reliable of their group. Sure, he’d reserved one day a year to visit the woman he’d decided to imprison as a punishment for what her father did to his. But other than that, he remained the dependable, future planner who had founded their ultra-modern triad from the ashes of his father’s Red Diamond gang.
The brother he knew was nowhere to be found today, though. Since Victor had let his former prisoner go at her insistence and agreed never to see her again, he’d become a husk of his former self, tortured, drunken, and unable to function.
He’d also reeked. After finding the hidden Apple TV remote and wrenching a bottle of baijiu from his white-knuckled fist, Han and Phantom had been forced to strip him down and push him into the glass box shower. Then after toweling him off and redressing him like a baby, Han shoved a couple of sleeping pills down his brother’s throat while Phantom held his arms.
“No! No! I don’t want to sleep!” Victor had signed to them after they made him swallow the pills. “I’ll only have bad dreams, and then I’ll wake up to an even worse nightmare.”
Phantom and Han exchanged looks over his head.
This.
This was what letting yourself fall for a woman could do to you.
And Han realized his mistake in bringing Jasmine here as they waited for Victor to succumb to the pills.
Love was a destroyer. And Han didn’t want to lose himself like Victor had, like his trafficked mother, who’d been naive enough to fall for her richest client, had. Ever.
What seemed like years later, Han made the trip down the hallway to tell Jasmine not to bother with unpacking. He was sending her back to Hawaii. And he would set dozens of men on her as a protection detail. She would be safe. He would damn well ensure that.
But she wasn’t in the main part of the suite when he walked into his bedroom. Maybe she’d gone to the bathroom?
“Jasmine?” he called out.
“Oh great, Han, you’re back,” a voice answered from the direction of his walk-in closet. “In here! I need your help.”
He rushed over, worried that she’d fallen or otherwise hurt herself.
But the reason for her calling out to him turned out to be even more bizarre than that.
He found her sitting on the floor of the closet with her legs crisscrossed, struggling with a lacy bra. She appeared to be trying to rip it apart with her bare hands.
“Do you know where some scissors are?” she asked. “This woman named Yolanda showed up out of nowhere like a fairy godmother. She took one look at me, and like, less than an hour later, all these clothes showed up—which, okay, not nearly as comfortable as my t-shirts. But I figured I should try to wear something other than my bikini tops while I’m here. But these bras are something else. You can’t take out the cups easily, and they have these strips of metal underneath….”
