Page 38 of Brutal Enforcer

I heard splashing behind me and nearly let out a whoop of joy: help had arrived. I reached Omar first, and despite the tide threatening to suck me out into endless oblivion, I took hold of him and turned him so that his face wasn’t below the surface of the water.

Even in the water, Omar was solid and heavy, and with the tide, it was hard to hold onto him. Luckily, I only had seconds before Efrain was beside me, helping me. Together, we took him to shore and laid him in the sand.

Pascal was there with a flashlight, and we all swore when he saw how gray he’d become. Omar looked like he’d taken a beating. “This can’t all be from the crash,” I said and looked toward the wreckage. “Pascal, can you get near that thing? See if anyone else was on board?”

I expected pushback, to be honest. If I ever orderedanyof my father’s men to do such a thing, I would find myself in my room for at least a week and covered in bruises. But instead, the man nodded, handed the light to Efrain, and took off running. It was almost…bizarre for a man to respond in such a way.

I knelt beside Omar and unbuttoned his shirt with shaking hands. I didn’t see any major wounds. Mostly, he had bumps and bruises. But his forearm had an alarming bruise that was going purple and blue. I glanced at Efrain, whose eyebrows were cinched together in concern. “Do you think he—” I held up my hand as if to protect myself. “Like someone was trying to hit him with something?”

Efrain nodded. “That seems right.” He looked toward where Pascal had run; the man was picking his way across the broken pier as carefully as he could. “Someone snuck aboard and attacked him mid-trip. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Why?”

Efrain looked at me. “If he’d been attacked in Miami, Omar would have had the whole of the Castillo family to back him up. Even if he were blitzed, one text would have brought the horde.”

My father had a handful of loyal men like that—the kind of men who would come running when called—but that number seemed to dwindle year by year. He didn’t inspire the kind of…awe that the Castillo men did.Apá is fickle, I thought. It didn’t motivate men to keep following him.

My fingers, in their gentle search, found a spot of wetness on the back of Omar’s head, and when I pulled back, bright red blood shone in the light. “Mierda,” Efrain swore. “I’ll carry him up to the house. He needs that to be cleaned out…and probably some stitches.”

Efrain did his best to pick up Omar, and I threw my arms around his middle and did what I could to help as well, but the man was deadweight between us, and it was slow going. “Don’t you dare die,” I murmured to him. “You promised I’d see you at sunrise. I’m holding you to that.”

Omar groaned slightly, but he didn’t open his eyes. “Talk to him,” Efrain said. “See if he’ll come around for you.”

I tightened my grip on Omar. “My father did this to you,” I said. “I’m sure of it…but we’re going to get him back, all right? You’re going to open your eyes, and I’ll help you plot against him. You just need to open your eyes, dammit!”

CHAPTER21

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 throatytrust mehad been thrown at me in a very different context only the day before…and it had been on my mind all day.Hehad 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.”

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