Chapter 1
Angel
Ihad the cell phone crushed against my ear so tightly there was a very real chance that it would crack. “You tell that Italian bastard that—”
“Excuse me? Mr. Castillo?” I turned, ready to tell whoever it was to fuck off, but I stopped short.
The courier girl made my mouth water. As she handed me the manila envelope clutched in her hands, her piercing eyes scanned the interior of Club Elíseo before landing back on mine. She held my gaze, and I saw incendio.
Fire licked up my spine, and my cock twitched in my jeans. I hung up the phone, cutting off Elio Vitali’s incessant prattle, eyes never leaving the courier girl’s.
If only I didn’t have a thousand things to do.
She would have made for a fun afternoon diversion.
I shook off the image of bending her over the side of the leather couch in my office, and I turned away in the middle of her speech about whatever service she worked for.
I forced my mind onto the next task: there was a shipment drop-off that I needed to go flawlessly.
I heard a faint click behind me, and then something slammed into me, sending me sprawling to the ground.
There were screams and then deafening thunder. I grabbed the body on top of mine and rolled us and looked down into the courier girl’s startled, frightened face. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I roared.
She pointed a finger towards the bar. “He tried to shoot you!”
The front door of the club slammed open, and hell rained down on us.
Gunfire exploded over our heads, shots discharging in rapid succession.
The girl screamed, blood-curdling, in my ear, and I practically threw her away from me.
I could hear my men shouting and my younger brother Omar barking orders.
Fucking Omar.
He was never going to let me live it down that a goddamn delivery girl got the jump on me.
I reached into my jacket for the gun that was holstered there and stood.
I fired at the pendejo behind my bar first: the bullet lodged itself between his eyes, and I watched with no small amount of satisfaction as the back of his head blew out in a spray of red and gore.
The bottles shelved behind him shattered as he crumpled into a puddle of expensive tequila.
I swung around, red hazing around my vision.
My gun became an extension of my arm: I raised it, aimed, and a man would fall in a spray of blood.
I did that again and again, only stopping to pop out the clip and slam in a new one.
“ETA on cops?” I shouted at Omar through the din of the firefight and screams. There was no way that someone out on Ocean Drive hadn’t called.
Luckily, we always got a heads up when they were on their way.
Omar spared a look at his smartwatch to read his text messages.
“Less than ten.” Shit. We weren’t going to have time to clear the bodies.
I mentally added another zero to the “donation” check we sent quarterly to Miami PD.
“These are Rojas’s men, yeah?” When my gun jammed, I dropped it and grabbed at the nearest man.
I threw all of my fury into the punch and felt his cheek shatter beneath my knuckles.
He screamed, and I punched him again. And again.
Until I was spattered in blood and bits of flesh.
I dropped the corpse to the floor and moved onto the next.
The smell of gunpowder and copper pennies filled the room, so did the sounds of men groaning and dying.
“Angel!” Omar snapped. “These men are Rojas’s? ”
One of the men wrapped his hands around my lieutenant Esteban’s throat, and I reached out, yanked his head back by his greasy hair, and twisted hard, snapping the man’s spine. He dropped with a heavy thud. “I think so. Find one that’s still alive.”
The shooting stopped, and Omar looked down at the carnage around him.
He swore aloud. “I’ll do my best.” He shifted through the bodies of the men who came through our door and came up with two who were still semi-conscious.
Omar and Esteban dragged them across the club and tossed them at my feet.
Omar reached into the holster at the small of his back and handed me the pistol that he kept there.
I took it with a nod of thanks and clicked off the safety.
One of the men was young, twenty at most, and he was bleeding from a nasty cut on his head.
He’d caught the butt of a gun to his face but remained stoic, giving away nothing.
“Who sent you?” I asked him. He clenched his jaw in answer, and I leveled my gun against his temple. “Tell me, and I’ll let you live.”
“If you don’t kill me,” he spat out, “I won’t live long when I go back. I’m dead either way, so I think I’ll go out loyal.”
I turned to the other man. He was significantly older and already sniveling. He smelled strongly of piss. Fucking pathetic. “And you?” I asked. “Do you feel the same way?”
The man shook his head, sucking in a shuddery breath. “The Rojas family sent us,” he mewled, confirming what I already knew.
“Traitor!” the boy hissed and spat at him.
I tucked the barrel of my gun under the older man’s chin, bringing his gaze to mine.
“Why did they send you?” Padre and Luis Rojas had fought a bloody turf war decades ago, when they were both young and building their empires, but the Castillos had held dominion for a long time.
It didn’t make sense for Luis to challenge us now.
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he all but wailed. He was shaking now. “He didn’t tell us why. Just to bring back proof that you were dead.”
“Luis Rojas wants me, specifically, dead?” I checked the number of bullets in the barrel; there was only one left. A message only needs one messenger, I thought. “Tell your boss that his plan was shit, and that he’ll be hearing from me personally.”
I aimed the gun at the kid’s head, met the fury in his eyes, and then shifted the barrel to his companion and squeezed the trigger. The back of his head blew outward, and I heard a yelp from behind him. The body slumped to the ground, and the courier girl came back into view.
Her face was spattered with blood and bits of flesh; it made her light brown hair look darker.
She shouldn’t be that pretty, given the look of horror on her face and the gore she was now covered in.
Her hand shook as she raised it to touch one of her plump lips, and my gaze was drawn there.
It was ruby red, as if she’d bitten it in fear.
Her eyes met mine, and I could see the scream before it escaped her lips. This was the woman who saved me from that first shot? Fury boiled in my gut, and I stepped over the body. She tried to scramble back, but she slammed into the bar and nearly knocked down a stool for her trouble.
She looked like a trapped animal. I watched, impassive, when her hand found a fallen gun and pulled it up to aim at me. “Let me go,” she demanded, but I could see the tremor in her hands.
“Do you even know how to use that thing?” I asked, even angrier now. This woman saved me from a bullet in the back. I would never live it down.
“Fuck you,” she spat and, surprisingly, pulled the trigger. It clicked, empty, like I knew it would, and she stared at the gun, stupefied, for a second before she tossed it and scrabbled for the destroyed front door, feet sliding on the blood-slicked floor.
I reached out and grabbed her by her hair, yanking her nearly off her feet. She tried to scream, but I wrapped my hand around her delicate throat. “I wouldn’t if I were you.”
Her eyes, a crystalline blue, were wide and full of terror. Good, I thought. She should be fucking afraid. “Please,” she choked out, barely more than whispering. “Please, don’t —”
I squeezed down. It would take so little to crush her windpipe.
“Give me a reason not to,” I said, almost crooning the words to her.
“Tell me that you weren’t a part of this little scheme.
That you didn’t back down at the last second like a goddamn coward.
” I leaned in and could smell the sweet scent of her skin beneath the blood and gore that was already becoming tacky.
Fuck, I’m hard. “It would have been better for you if he had killed me, you know.”
The girl’s eyes went sightless and rolled back into her head. I sighed as she went boneless, becoming dead weight in my arms, and contemplated dropping her.
“What are we doing with her?” Omar asked.
It would be simpler to kill her and dump the body…but she had saved me, and all my men had seen it: I owed her a life debt. God-fucking-damnit! “I need to talk with Padre.”
Omar nodded and swept the girl over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “We need to go before the police show up. Este can stay and clear it up.”
I glanced at Esteban. “I’ll take care of it, boss,” he said.
The bruises that were forming around his throat would help to convince the police this was simply an attack and an act of self-defense…
and if that didn’t work, the money that I kept in my office safe would.
Esteban knew the combination and knew what to do if the police got insistent.
I tilted my head in acknowledgment, and Omar and I headed for the back exit where I already knew a car would be waiting. “Call if there are any problems,” I tossed over my shoulder. Esteban wouldn’t call: he’d rather pull out his own incisors first.
Omar loaded the girl into the backseat and slid in beside her so that I could take the passenger seat. “Where to, boss?” the driver, a man called Tomas, asked.
“Home, but don’t go in the front entrance. We have a guest and need to be discreet.”
“Yes, jefe.”
Emma