Chapter 6
Omar
Pascal and Efrain hauled me onto the kitchen table, and I gritted my teeth as pain exploded through my shoulder.
“I thought the house had been struck by lightning,” Pascal joked. “Next time you pass out, try to land on the couch, huh?”
“Hijo de puta.” I turned my head as Pascal tore open the sleeve of my shirt, trying to assess the wound. There was blood everywhere. Usually I’d be able to patch up minor injuries myself, but this was in an awkward spot to do single-handedly and my vision was still swaying.
“Do you need some help, jefe?” I tried to turn toward Helena’s voice, but pain, real pain, ripped through me, and I hissed, jamming my eyes closed. “Move!” she barked at Pascal and Efrain. I could hear their footsteps receding.
I hummed softly. “Check out my shoulder? I’m pretty sure it’s still bleeding.” Helena came around the counter with the first aid kit, and by her sharp intake of breath, I knew that it wasn’t pretty. “How bad?”
“Were you… shot?” she asked. “It looks like a bullet hole.”
Fucking hell. Was I? Wait, no. I tried to think, tried to make sense of the adrenaline-fueled rampage I’d gone on. Had there been other guns drawn? I couldn’t remember getting shot, but really, could I even trust my dizzying memories right now?
“What do you want me to do, jefe?”
If it was a bullet hole and I left the bullet in my shoulder, it could get infected, and while we were fully stocked with medical supplies on the island, there wasn’t a doctor onsite. It was an hour by boat to the nearest Key and even longer to a proper hospital.
Helena started pulling things out of the first aid kit — gloves and bandages and a pair of forceps — and swore. “We’re out of lidocaine. I’ll need to find you something else before we can get started.”
I shook my head. “Just get on with it.”
“Jefe—”
“Just do it,” I assured her. She turned to the liquor cabinet, got out some of the primo rum and shoved the bottle into my hand. I took a healthy swig and felt the alcohol settle like lead in my stomach. I looked back at her. “I want to go to bed sometime, Helena, por favor.”
She wasn’t comfortable performing minor surgery, and it showed in the way her hands shook as she held up the forceps.
I missed Lara, our full-time housekeeper in Miami.
She was well-versed in fixing up any number of injuries; she’d even assisted in Lili’s birth because our mother had to start pushing in the car on the way to the hospital.
“Use the light,” I panted, “and feel around for anything small and hard. If you don’t feel anything, we’ll do stitches and leave it be.”
Helena started praying to the Virgin Mary as she touched the wound with gloved fingers. “Take a breath, jefe,” she commanded, and then her fingers were pressing in.
“La concha de tu Madre!” I tried not to jerk away from her.
She explored the wound as quickly and gently as possible. “I don’t feel anything,” she said. “Maybe it was a puncture from a blade.”
A blade, yes. I saw flashes of silver in my memories.
There’d been lots of knives drawn. It was possible it was a knife wound.
My whole body was shaking; there was sweat pooling at the small of my back and dripping down my face.
Keeping myself awake while she mopped up the blood was a struggle.
It felt like a fire had been set beneath my skin and my body wanted nothing more than to fade into darkness, to protect itself from the pain.
“Will liquid stitches work?” I asked, wanting nothing more than to be in my bed.
“I don’t want to risk it. Traditional stitches will be more likely to hold after so much damage…though it would be even better if we could do medical staples.”
“I’ll add it to the list,” I said. “Angel and I will see about getting them for all of the kits.”
Angel and I. That was how it was forever; Angel and I discussing things before Angel made the final call.
That was how it should be. I didn’t want his job.
No matter how often my father offered it to me, I didn’t want it.
I especially didn’t want it if it meant Angel dying or becoming a vegetable in a hospital bed.
Despite not wanting to be caught in a spiral of dark thoughts, they helped to distract me while Helena closed the wound.
It took more than forty minutes for her to get everything sutured shut, and I was a sweaty, shaking mess, but finally, she cleaned everything and taped a bandage over it all.
“We’ll need to change the dressing every morning and evening,” she said, “and watch for signs of infection.”
I nodded, then winced when that seemed to pull at the skin she’d just sewn together. “I promise I’ll look after it.”
Helena shook her head and pointed to her own small, birdlike chest. “I’ll look after it,” she insisted. “I can’t send you home to Miami with one less arm or some other infection. Your brother would never forgive me.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her about Angel, but I kept my mouth shut and didn’t say anything.
The little skeleton crew didn’t have to know the details of why they’d been called to the island.
They just needed to do their jobs. I would tell them if and when it became pertinent for them to know.
“Gracias,” I told her. “I’m going to find a large painkiller and head to bed.”
Helena touched my arm. Her fingers were light against my skin, but she kept me from leaving all the same.
Helena, like Lara, had been around since my childhood; it was unsurprising that we all looked to these women as surrogates for our mother.
Angel had some memories of her before she killed herself, and so did I to an extent, but mostly Lili and I wondered what it would have been like to have a real mother.
“What?”
Helena looked unimpressed. “Don’t sass me, Mr. Enforcer,” she said. “I remember washing your mouth out with soap.”
If I thought too hard about those particular memories, I could practically taste the Dial bar that she had shoved into my mouth. “Please don’t mention the soap,” I said. “I’m already nauseated enough.”
“What are we doing with your guest, jefe? I put her in the room that locks from the outside, like you said, but you never said what you were planning to do with her.”
“Nothing,” I said, quick to answer. “I’m going to have her call her fiancé, the city comptroller, and have him get the police off my back.”
I waited for her to call me brilliant, but when it didn’t happen, I looked over at her. “What’s the matter with my plan?”
“What’s the matter?” I could tell that she wanted to shake me a little bit, but instead she helped me sit up on the edge of the table. “Omar, what can a city comptroller do to oppose the police?”
I shrugged, and even that hurt. “He’s trying to run for state Congress. That has to mean he’s influential, right?”
Helena shrugged. “If he wins, I would say that’s true, but wanting to be in Congress doesn’t make a politician a bigwig. How is he going to help?”
I was getting annoyed at her candor. Helena wasn’t the type to pull punches, even when I was hurt.
She was never the type that tears worked on, either; it was one of the reasons that Padre liked her.
She was the right amount of harsh…though that hardness had a limit at times like this.
I didn’t want her logic tonight. “For Lyse’s sake, he better figure it out,” I said.
If Felix Suarez let me down, I’d send him a piece of his fiancée every day for the next month.
Helena’s eyes widened. “Lyse? As in, Lyse Rojas?” Her hand slipped into her pocket, and she drew out a delicate rosary to run through her fingers. “Why would you bring that girl here, jefe? If this is some romantic getaway—”
“What could possibly be romantic about me showing up all bloody and then locking her in a room that only opens from the outside?” I demanded. “I think I have a little more game than that, thanks.”
“You’re deflecting.”
Helena was right; I was deflecting. “She’s leverage,” I said, “that’s all. If her fiancé can’t help her, I’ll throw her off the dock covered in chum.”
A look passed over Helena’s face, and I couldn’t tell if she wanted to tell me off, or if she was terrified that I so casually mentioned killing someone. Be more careful, I told myself. You can never quite tell who’s spying anymore. “She’s scared,” Helena said. “Maybe you should—”
“Scared? Why on Earth does that matter? She's a means to an end; all she has to do is stay in her room and speak into the phone when I give it to her.”
Helena ducked her head; her eyes were suddenly staring with great interest at my gore-soaked shoe. “The Rojas family is dangerous,” she said after a moment, “but I don’t think that girl is. She seems incredibly…sad.”
I snorted. I couldn’t help myself. “I killed over a dozen of her cousins. If she were happy about that, I might question her attachment to her family.”
She pressed her lips together, clearly annoyed with me, but not wanting to admit it. “Do things your way then, jefe,” she said, as if to wash her hands of me. She reached into her pocket and drew out a key; it was my responsibility to care for the prisoner since I brought her here.
I pressed a quick kiss to her forehead. “Thank you for the guilt trip and the clarity. And for sewing me up.”
Slowly, I made my way to the stairs at the front of the house. I eyed them, wary; there was a couch in the office that I could crash on, but there wasn’t a bathroom with a shower on the first level, and I was in desperate need of a shower.
Exhaustion spread through me as I forced myself to climb the stairs. My stitches pulled. I thought when I got to the landing that I might hear Lyse crying or wailing in her room, but the second floor was deadly quiet.
Suspicious, I went down the hallway to the room that I knew she was in, and I opened the door, ready to throw her back in if she tried to escape. Lyse didn’t move; instead, she was standing by the one window in the room, looking out.
“Those are bulletproof windows,” I said by way of greeting. “There’s no escaping that way.”
“We’re on an island,” she said, almost as if she were speaking to herself.
“Where the hell would I go?” Lyse turned around and forced her lips into a smile…
though it looked more like a mockery of one.
Her eyes were dry, and they weren’t swollen.
She hadn’t been crying at all. “Besides, I know what bulletproof glass looks like,” she said.
“I have a set on my windows at home. Plus, I have the bars on top of that to keep me from going anywhere that I’m not supposed to. ”
“You still have the bars on your windows?” I remembered when Lili got hers off; she exited through the window more than the front door for the next three months, just because she could.
“Those aren’t going anywhere,” she said.
I didn’t like the faraway look in her eyes.
It was as if she were compartmentalizing herself so that she could remain calm.
How much of this had been trained into her since birth?
And how much was survival strength? “My father can’t have me running away, after all. ”
The way she said it told me that she had done it before.
Or thought about it and told the wrong person.
My vision blurred, and I dug my hand into the doorjamb to keep myself upright.
I didn’t have time for this kind of chat.
“We’re going to call your father and fiancé tomorrow,” I said.
“We’ll see just how desperate they are to get you back. ”
Lyse shook her head, but she didn’t say anything.
Her indifference irritated me. I crossed the room so that I was crowding her against the window.
“I’m half-hoping they don’t want to negotiate,” I said.
I reached out and ran my fingers over the creamy, smooth skin of her bare shoulder. “We could have so much more fun.”
She shuddered, and the look of her trembling before me made my gut tighten and flare with heat.
She’s scared of you, I told myself…but why did that matter?
She should be afraid of me. I wanted her to be afraid of me.
“You don’t have to say things like that,” she muttered.
“I am already well acquainted with men like you. I know what you’re capable of. ”
I leaned down and murmured in her ear, just for her, “You’ve never met a man like me, conejita.
You have no idea what I would do to you.
” I took her earlobe between my teeth, and she gasped out a small, wounded sound that went straight to my cock.
“Pray that your fiancé has the means to get you out of here.” I stepped back, and her haunted look burned into my retinas.
Pushing down the little bubble of shame that rose in my gut, I smirked at her and winked. Then, I went for the door. I didn’t look back as I locked it behind me.