Chapter 3
Omar
Icouldn’t see through the red haze. I couldn’t hear through the pounding in my ears. I was bleeding, of that I was certain, but I couldn’t tell from where. It didn’t matter; nothing hurt right now. That would come later, after all of the Rojas were dead.
A hand, weak and frail, wrapped around my ankle, as if the man could stop me.
I looked down. His chest was awash in red.
It was leaking from his mouth and his nose.
Internal bleeding, I thought, and a lot of it.
I smiled and knew it was nothing more than an ugly slash across my face.
Lili had told me it was the most terrifying smile she’d ever seen…
and that was saying a lot, considering who our Padre was.
My muscles froze for a moment at the thought of Padre, the former head of the Castillo family, but then that hand squeezed around my ankle and brought me raging back into the present.
I met the man’s eyes, not wanting to waste a bullet on a dying man, and brought my boot down on his face.
Blood and thicker viscera spattered outward, drenching my boots.
I stepped over the corpse and kept going. It was quieter now. Most people had fled or were in some part of the dying process across the ballroom floor. Get moving, cabrón, I told myself. Someone will have called 911 by now.
Of course, the Rojas would throw their fancy engagement party at the Biltmore Hotel.
They couldn’t have kept it to their own territory.
Neutral ground meant more witnesses and more chances for the police to get involved.
The Castillos’ deal with the Miami PD only extended so far.
They couldn’t look the other way after this.
I needed to get this done and be gone before they got here.
I swept through the ballroom, reloading my gun and putting bullets in the few men on the ground who were still breathing. A dozen of Luis Rojas’s men were dead, but it wasn’t enough to satiate the bloodlust rushing through me. The man himself and his bastard of a son were missing.
My gut burned with the need to eradicate every last Rojas scum.
Nothing but ripping them off the face of the earth would make up for what happened to Angel, who was back in surgery and fighting for his life.
He had been shot four times; the bullets had ripped through his torso, perforating his stomach, liver, and spleen.
He’d spent hours in surgery, the surgeons plugging up holes where the bullets had torn through him, only for his heart to stop in the ICU.
Lili called me after I left the hospital. She’d had to ask the hospital staff to sedate our sister-in-law before Emma hurt herself or the baby. Watching them forcefully inject the hysterical woman had torn my sister up, and she worried she hadn’t done the right thing.
I tried to reassure my sister, but as far as I was concerned, there was only one right thing to do, and I was doing it now.
A noise beneath a table to my right drew my attention. I kicked it over and beneath it, a young woman clutched two boys to her. Rojas boys.
I aimed the gun in my hand, and the woman stood, raising her arms to make herself as large as possible. “They’re innocent,” she said, voice steady and controlled, despite the fear that was so clear in her dark brown eyes.
She was a beauty, that was for sure, even cloaked in fear and horror.
Her hair, as dark as her eyes, tumbled down over her shoulders, having come loose from an elaborate plaited updo.
I knew who she was immediately: Lyse Rojas.
She was the eldest child, but she wouldn’t inherit the keys to her father’s kingdom; those would go to her younger brother, Matteo.
Lyse was destined to become the wife of Felix Suarez, a politician steadily climbing the ladder to bigger and better things.
“No Rojas is innocent,” I spat at her.
Her dark eyes went hard, anger overtaking her fear. I could pull the trigger and be done with this. It was much easier to imagine with her face twisted with rage: she looked more like her father that way. “They’re children,” she hissed. “What kind of man aims a gun at a child?”
“Like your father has never gone after a kid before,” I said, thinking of Manny, who had managed to get away from a drive-by shooting with a graze on his arm, which had left a knotted scar.
Her lip curled. If she was surprised I knew who she was, she didn’t show it. “They are not my father,” she said. “Why should they pay for his crimes?”
I found her fire, her willingness to put herself between the children and my gun, intriguing. Attractive. But the rage burning through me was louder than that. “Why shouldn’t they?” I countered savagely. “Why shouldn’t I visit as much pain on Luis Rojas as he has on my family?”
The fierceness in Lyse’s eyes wavered and grew wet. “They don’t know anything about that,” she said. “They’re seven years old; they aren’t involved with family business.”
“Not yet,” I growled, “but they will be. It’s inevitable.”
Her arms shook slightly from the way she was holding them out. “It’s part of the life we live,” she said, “but it doesn’t mean they are at fault now.”
I didn’t have time to argue semantics with her. Why was I still standing here? Put a bullet in all of them and move on. But when I raised my arm to aim again, the sounds of distant sirens reached my ears and a thought occurred to me: take her with me. “Let’s go,” I said.
Lyse looked at me like I’d grown a second head. “Go where?”
I pointed the gun at her. “Would you rather I put a bullet between your fucking eyes?”
Lyse stared at me for a second; her expression went strangely…blank. Then, she swallowed hard and glanced behind her at the boys. “If I go with you, will you leave them alone?”
Letting out an annoyed growl, I wrapped a hand around her arm and yanked, dragging her closer.
Lyse tried to pull away, but I clamped down on her arm even more.
I could feel the bones in her wrist yielding to the pressure.
She made a helpless, pained noise. It shouldn’t have been an exciting sound…
and it pissed me off that it shivered down my spine.
“I’m not negotiating,” I spat. “You’ll come with me, or you’ll die here with the rest of your vermin family. ”
“Please,” she begged, bottom lip quivering.
“I won’t scream. I won’t fight. Just leave them alone.
” The sirens were closer now. Fuck this.
I didn’t have time to stand here and argue.
Keeping my grip firm, I dragged her through the ballroom.
I heard her breath stutter. “Ernesto,” she called over her shoulder, “take your brother and go. Don’t look back. ”
I heard the Rojas boys scuttling through the carnage. I should have turned around and ended them then and there, but I kept moving, forcing Lyse to step over the bodies of her family as we headed to the side exit that would dump us outside.
She tripped and nearly wrenched her shoulder out of its socket. “What the fuck are you doing?” I spat, looking down at where she was nearly sprawled on the floor.
“My shoes,” she said. “They’re —”
I glanced at the spikes she had been balancing on. “Ridiculous,” I muttered. “Take them off.” She kicked the shoes off…and lost nearly five inches. I towered over her now. “Mierda.”
Reaching down, I grabbed her around the waist and heaved her over my shoulder. She let out a little oof as my shoulder dug into her stomach. She weighed next to nothing. Good, I thought. It made running easier.
I carried her out the side exit to the waiting SUV I’d left by the hotel’s dumpster.
I considered throwing her into the cargo area, but then I couldn’t keep an eye on her, so instead, I opened the driver-side door and deposited her onto the seat.
“Crawl across the console to the passenger seat,” I growled.
“If you try to open the other door, you’ll be dead before you get your feet on the pavement. ”
She scuttled across the seats, and I climbed in beside her, slamming the door behind me.
Lyse had crushed herself against the passenger door as much as she could, but she didn’t try to get away.
Smart girl, I mused and started the engine.
I cut the lights to make the SUV hard to spot in the growing darkness.
Even as the police cars pulled up outside of the Biltmore, the size of the hotel’s property made it easy to maneuver around them. Once we hit the road, I flipped the lights back on and kept to the speed limit. The picture of a law-abiding citizen. “You’re bleeding,” Lyse said. “A lot.”
I grunted in acknowledgment. My shirt was wet with it and sticking to me: it was going to hurt peeling it off later, but that pain could wait until I’d gotten to the safe house.
“If we get pulled over—”
“We won’t.”
Lyse scoffed and tried to hide it, as if she couldn’t help the sound that escaped her throat. “Are the Castillos so untouchable?” she asked.
I pictured Angel again. The breathing tube down his throat, the nurse forcing his heart to beat.
The stampeding sound of their footsteps as the team raced down the hall to take him into surgery, again.
“No, we aren’t so untouchable,” I said. My voice was hollow, even to my ears.
“But tonight I’ll kill anyone who tries to stop me.
” My words were sincere—a promise—and Lyse fell silent.
Good, I thought. No need to make conversation; it’s a waste of time anyway. Lyse’s fate was sealed the moment I recognized her. With Angel back on the operating table, none of the Rojas were safe. Not even her.