Savage Mafia Kings

Chapter 21 Lyse

Lyse

“You’ll help me, mi amor,” Helena said as Omar was carried to his room.

I nodded. I’d done enough patch-up first aid for my father and brother over the years. It was something of a second nature…though I only knew the basics. If his head injury was worse than a simple suture would fix, I would be next to useless.

I had a feeling Helena was in the same boat, but she was pretending to be a lot calmer than I could manage.

“Fetch the first aid kit?” she asked. “There should be a large one in the pantry.”

I nodded and rushed to get her what she needed, and it only hit me when I came back through his door that I’d never been in his room before.

Omar had been incredibly private about it.

I couldn’t really see why. It was a bit more decorated than the room that I had been using upstairs, and its lock faced inward instead of outward, but really, it didn’t have anything in it that I didn’t have upstairs.

It didn’t even look all that personal, more like a hotel room that only saw the occasional visitor.

I sat gingerly beside Omar as Helena pawed through the kit, taking out various things that we would need to tend to the wound on his head.

“The bleeding has already slowed up,” I told her, gently shifting his hair out of the way so that I could look at the gash in his skull. “That’s a good thing, right?”

She nodded, going for encouragement, I’m sure, but her face was twisted in a painful expression. “So long as he doesn’t have any brain swelling, I think he’ll be just fine.”

“Brain swelling?! How do we test for that?”

Helena’s lips nearly disappeared as she pursed them into a line. “We don’t test for it,” she said. “We just wait.”

“For what?”

“Death, conejita.”

Omar’s ragged voice startled me as he groaned, and I caught his fluttering gaze, relief surging through me. I wanted to kiss every inch of his bruised and bloodied face. “You’re not dying today,” I told him and swept some of his hair off his forehead, as tenderly as I could.

“I’ve survived much worse,” he assured me, searching blindly for my hand. “Trust me.”

I fought off a shiver. That throaty trust me had been thrown at me in a very different context only the day before…and it had been on my mind all day. He had been on my mind all day. I stroked my thumb across his knuckles, and he cracked a soft smile. “Missed you,” he said.

I wanted to roll my eyes and play coy — that had been the plan after he’d left me alone for so long — but I couldn’t find it in myself to tease him. “I missed you too.”

Omar couldn’t have been any more surprised if I had actually struck him with something. “I didn’t expect to hear that from you,” he admitted.

“I hadn’t planned on saying it.” I shrugged. “I watched you fly off a boat after you hit the dock going full speed. My priorities changed a bit.”

That awed expression didn’t leave his face. “I’m a priority?”

Of course not. I demanded that my lips move to say the words, but they refused to cooperate. “You said I belonged to you.”

Hurt as he was, a dark look passed through his eyes, and he brought my hand up to his lips. “You do.”

Helena cleared her throat. “Can you sit up?” she asked Omar.

“I need a better look at your head, and it’s hard when you’re lying down like that.

” Omar struggled to push himself up. He was too big for me to support from the side.

I scrambled behind him so he could lean against me and remain upright. “Hold onto him,” Helena commanded.

“I won’t let him go,” I promised.

“Sweet talk later, mi amor,” she chastised, and I fell quiet.

It was the first time she’d genuinely admonished me.

Helena hummed and tutted as she fussed over the wound, which from my angle, didn’t look nearly as bad as I thought.

The bleeding had nearly stopped, and he was talking and acting like himself.

“Steri-Strips will hold this together,” she declared, “and he’ll need to be monitored for the next forty-eight hours or so for a concussion. ”

“I can handle both,” I said. “Why don’t you go get some sleep, Helena? I’ll take over from here.”

She eyed me. “You’re sure you can do it?”

“I’ve used Steri-Strips a time or two before,” I said and tried very hard not to sound condescending. Helena might work for a cartel family, but I was born into one. Our lives were nowhere near the same in terms of experience. “I’ve got it covered.”

Helena frowned but handed me the kit so that I wouldn’t have to get up just yet. “No funny business, the pair of you,” she said. “He has to heal before any kind of strenuous activity.”

She left, and we burst into laughter, though it was cut short by his groan of pain.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been lectured about sex before,” I giggled.

“My parents were under the impression that if they didn’t talk about it, beyond the threat to never look at boys that my parents didn’t approve of, that I wouldn’t ever have it until I was married to Felix. ”

Omar tensed up at the mention of Felix, but as I dug out what I’d need to close the gash, along with some antibacterial cleanser that would most definitely sting but would hopefully keep him from getting an infection, I did my best to ignore his awkwardness.

“I’ve been given that exact speech, actually,” he said after a minute, seemingly satisfied at my silence.

“How often do you get hurt?” I opened the cleanser and squirted it onto a gauze pad.

“Puta madre,” Omar swore when I touched it to his head. “That hurts!”

“I need to clean the wound. It’s full of sand and whatever godforsaken bacteria is in that water.”

“It’s fine.” He squirmed against me as I dabbed at the wound again. “Lyse, cut it out.”

I flicked his ear with a satisfying thwack, and he hissed, cupping the side of his head. It was one of the quickest ways to get Matteo’s attention. It was good to know that it worked on more than just my younger brother. “If you hold still, it’ll be over in a second. Quit being a big baby.”

He grumbled, but he let me clean the wound of sand and grit. Then I applied the Steri-Strips to hold the edges together. To be extra thorough, I wrapped his head in gauze tape so that it was covered. “You’ve done first aid before.”

I wriggled out from behind him and helped him to lie down.

“Who hasn’t in our families?” I settled in beside him, and I was surprised when he dragged me down so that I was lying in his arms. We hadn’t really…

cuddled after having sex. Instead, we’d passed out side by side in my bed, and I remembered rolling against him at some point.

But actively cuddling like this? It was another new experience that I shared with Omar Castillo.

A thick silence settled between us, and I did my best not to fill it with chatter.

It was easy not to talk to him when I hated him, but now that we were whatever we were, I wanted to talk and never stop.

Maybe it was Stockholm Syndrome, maybe I was falling in love, but I wanted to soak up every bit of his presence.

Especially since he’d gone to Miami to negotiate my release.

I didn’t even want to consider what returning to Felix would be like.

There was fear that he would look at me and know what Omar and I had done…

but there was also a layer of disgust that had always been there, which was much more prominent now.

I couldn’t go back to being that na?ve girl that I was, and I couldn’t pretend to like Felix’s touch.

Not after I’d gotten to touch and be touched by someone that I wanted so badly it made my body ache.

There would never be that kind of fire between Felix and me, and the idea of spending my life pretending made my stomach twist into knots.

“How’s Angel?” I asked when I could no longer stand the quiet.

“Alive,” Omar said, and I thought that would be it. But then: “He doesn’t have any permanent brain damage as far as we could tell. He’ll need time to rest and recover, but I won’t have to step up as the man in charge anytime soon.”

It was an odd way of putting it. “Are you…upset by that?”

Omar let out a big belly laugh and immediately regretted it, hissing at the pain. I rubbed my hands up and down his chest, soothing him. He covered my hand with his own and pressed down, stopping my movements. “Don’t get me excited.”

I glanced up at him, incredulous. “That would have gotten you excited? That wouldn’t have done a thing for me, and I’m brand new at this.”

He gave me a look that was downright sinful. “I would like to remind you how much you begged and cried when I played with your nipples, conejita.” I gasped and tried to smack him, but he held onto my hand, grinning now. “Stop being cute. That’s what is exciting.”

I dropped my head against his chest hard enough that he let out a little oof. “So, you’re happy that your brother is going to make a full recovery.”

“Of course,” Omar said. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to my brother, conejita.”

I hummed softly. “I’m close to Matteo too. I understand.”

He snorted. “You’re close to that moron?”

“Hey!” I did smack him this time. “Matteo is young, and he’s doing everything he can to impress my father…Besides, my brother has a photographic memory. He doesn’t even need to get a good look at something to have it committed to memory. He’s been really useful to Apá.”

“That doesn’t make him smart.”

Anger was beginning to bubble in my belly. “Like you and Angel didn’t grow up in your Padre’s shadow?” I asked. “Waiting for him to give you a kind word? Isn’t that the fate of men like you and my brother?”

I felt him deflate, and he ran his hands up and down the length of my spine. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t want to fight. Please.” He sighed. “I need to tell you something about the meeting I had with your father and Felix.”

He sounded nervous, and it immediately stoked the fires of my own anxiety. Please don’t send me home, I begged the universe. Not now.