Page 78 of Fast Vengeance

Her face was set. “You rescued Brock. And I know who el Escorpion is.”

Chapter Twenty

Brock surfaced from the blackness when a nurse came into his room to hook up another bag of fluid to his IV drip. He pried his left eye open, could barely see through the slit between his lids, the right one swollen shut.

He felt like he’d been hit by a fucking truck.

The last thing he remembered was Khan working on him, then Taggart saying Oceane was in trouble. Everything after that was a blur. His entire team had raced off to help her, leaving him with paramedics. He’d faded in and out on the way to the hospital.

The nurse smiled at him, the first rays of dawn coming through the window behind her. “How is your pain?” she asked him in accented English.

“Okay.” It sucked, actually.

On a scale of one to ten, he was at a nine-point-eight. All the jostling around and examinations by the medical staff seemed to have aggravated everything. He’d still been hypothermic when they’d put him in the ambulance. Bringing up his core temp had been their first priority. They’d given him warmed IV fluids, wrapped him in layers of blankets until he’d probably resembled a mummy.

It had been hours since his team had rescued him. He hadn’t heard anything since. Had no idea whether Oceane was okay or whether the Mexicans had managed to take Nieto into custody. And of course, he’d been thinking a lot about Tori. About what she meant to him, and what he was prepared to do to be with her.

He had a lot of thinking to do about what he truly wanted going forward. Almost dying had a way of making things so clear. All he knew was, he had to find her. Had to figure out a way to make it work between them. He needed her.

He bit back a growl as he shifted on the bed. His body was a mass of bruises. His wrists were bandaged up and they’d immobilized his right shoulder after reducing the dislocation. They’d taken x-rays of his face, arms and ribs. Nothing was actually broken except his nose, but he had a lot of soft tissue damage and there were two hairline fractures on the right side of his ribcage.

But at least he was still breathing. For a while there he hadn’t been sure he would make it.

“The doctor said a plastic surgeon will be in soon to stitch your face,” the nurse told him, gently tucking the blanket around his shoulders, careful not to jostle him.

“Okay.” The Emerg doc had closed the gash with adhesive strips in the meantime.

“Do you need anything? Something to eat?”

“No. Thanks.” He just wanted to know what the hell was going on with his team and the op.

The plastic surgeon arrived a few minutes later. He injected freezing into Brock’s face and began the task of stitching up the skin that had split over his nose and beneath his eye. Brock couldn’t feel the curved needle going in and out, but he could feel the tug of the sutures as they pulled through his skin.

He closed his eye, focused on taking slow, shallow breaths to spare his ribs, and thought about what he’d just survived. That had definitely sucked way harder than SERE school, and he’d fucking hated SERE school.

A knock sounded on the door. Brock cracked his left eye open as Taggart walked in.

“Making you all pretty again, I see,” his commander said with a slight smile as he approached the bed.

“What happened?” Brock demanded. “Did you get Nieto? Is Oceane safe?”

“Can you not talk?” the surgeon asked, intent on his work. “I need you to keep your face perfectly still.”

Taggart walked around to the side of the bed opposite from the surgeon and gripped the side rails. “Nieto’s dead. And yes, she’s safe.”

Good. Bastard. “Who got him?” He barely moved his lips as he spoke, keeping his face as still as possible for the surgeon.

“His bodyguard.”

“Seriously?”

Taggart nodded. “He and the bodyguard apparently got into an argument about Oceane. Nieto wanted to take her and the bodyguard wouldn’t let him. They shot each other.”

“In front of her?”

“Yes.”

Ah, shit, the poor thing had been through hell. “She all right?”

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