Page 3 of Brutal Enforcer

I couldn’t say that anymore. Not when he was looking at me like he wanted to possess me, body and soul.

My eyes slipped closed as he leaned in.Just get through it, I told myself.It’s just a kiss; if a sixteen-year-old can handle it, so can you. I felt his breath brush my face, felt his heat coming closer…and then the world exploded around us.

The door of the ballroom burst open, and the room filled with the sound of gunfire and screams. “Get down!” my younger brother, Matteo, yelled out, and the members of the Rojas family dropped, covering our heads like we’d been taught all of our lives.

I tugged Felix down with me. He let out anoofas he hit the ground. “Stay down,” I hissed at him and pointed toward the exit that was away from the bulk of the noise. “Head that way.”

Felix gave me an affronted look for a second before he began to crawl as directed.I’m never going to hear the end of this, I thought as I followed, keeping my head low. Something — somebody—crashed into a table above us, and the table collapsed under the sudden weight. I yelped, jerking back in order not to get hit, and when I tried to find Felix again, he was gone.

Crawling as close to the fallen table as I could, I used it as cover so I could look around. I expected to see an attack, men against men, but instead, there was only one man. My body went cold. Omar Castillo.La Bestia!

He had a gun in each hand, and he was shooting into the crowd of people, completely ignoring my cousins and distant relatives attacking him with chairs and knives from the tables.Apá is going to be mad that Felix convinced him the men couldn’t be armed today, I thought almost numbly as I watched Omar downing my relatives left and right, leaving them to choke on their own blood.

I had to get out of here. Matteo had gotten Apá out, just as he was supposed to as the family’s enforcer, but without Felix, I was on my own unless I got the attention of the men who were currently fighting for their lives.I can do this, I told myself. Just like I’d been taught:Keep out of sight and keep moving.

My knees ached as I pulled myself along, cursing as I slipped on my dress again and again. I only made it a few feet when I heard a soft, pitiful whimper from beneath the table I was ducking behind.

I should keep going. I needed to get to an exit and find my family and Felix. The sounds of the dying men behind me and the gunfire made my ears ring…but I couldn’t ignore that whimper. I lifted the tablecloth, and the two boys huddled beneath shrieked, holding each other all the tighter. “Ernesto,” I cooed, “Gabriel, are you okay?” The twins were the youngest of us, only seven years old, and while their father was already trying to make “men” out of them, they were the sweetest boys I’d ever met. I crawled under the table, letting the heavy swing of the tablecloth fall down behind me.

The boys threw themselves into my lap, shivering and whining. I shushed them and petted their gel-slicked hair. “It’s okay,mis amores,” I whispered against their heads.

“Mama said to get down,” Ernesto sobbed gently. “She hasn’t come back.”

She had better be dead, I thought savagely. My cousin Yessica wasn’t Mother of the Year material, but I thought she was better than leaving her children to fend for themselves like this. “When it gets quiet,” I told them, “we’ll find her, okay? We just have to wait.”

“We’re going to die,” Gabriel cried, clutching me all the tighter.

“We’re not,” I insisted. Even the Castillo Beast knew better than to attack a woman and two children. He might mow down every man in the ballroom, but unless we were caught by a stray bullet, he wouldn’t touch us. “There’s rules about these things,” I said. “You know that.”

Gabriel shook his head. “He’s crazy,” he said and more tears fell from his eyes. “He shot papá.”

I tightened my grip on them and rocked them, uttering soft, nonsensical comfort words, but fear was taking root in my stomach. We needed to get out of here. Even if he wouldn’t actually hurt us, there was only so much a child could see before they were harmed irreparably.

CHAPTER3

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.

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