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He smirked. “You’ll be killed the moment you try to take over,” he said, reminding me that this was a betrayal. “I’ll see you there.”
Before I could move my finger to the trigger, Emma grabbed my arm. “Wait, stop,” she said.
“Emma —”
“Hehasto die,” Lili choked out. Her voice sounded thick with tears, but I couldn’t take my eyes off my father.
Emma stepped around me, pushing on my arm until I lowered the gun a little. I could still use it in an instant, but she made it so that I couldn’t simply pull the trigger and blow a hole in his chest. “I’m not disagreeing with any of you,” she said, “but it can’t be like this.”
“Why not?” Omar demanded, and he sounded as on edge as Lili.
“Because your father is right,” Emma said. “If Angel kills him now, the whole family will turn against him.”
“I’ll protect him,” Omar insisted. “I’d never let anything happen to Angel.”
Emma shook her head. “You can’t promise that. If the men don’t follow him en masse, it’s going to be a slaughter, and I willnotallow that to happen.” There was an edge in her voice that I’d never heard before.
“So, what do you suggest,mi esposa?” I asked. “We can’t leave him alive.”
“Why not?” Before any of us could protest, she raised her hand. “He’s already dying.” The air was sucked out of the room; like Lara earlier, she was saying what everyone had been ignoring for months. She stepped closer to Gustavo but stayed just far away enough that I would have time to shoot him if he moved.Smart girl, I thought fondly. “Everyone can tell that you're sick,” she said, addressing Gustavo directly. “You’re shit at hiding it, especially since the whites of your eyes are turning yellow. What is it? Your liver or your pancreas?”
My father looked like he was chewing on his tongue. “Pancreas,” he finally spat.
Emma nodded, as if she expected that answer. “Stage IV?”
“Yes.” The word was a growl. He didn’t like her flaying him open like this, revealing all of the secrets that he’d been keeping for months.
Emma hummed softly, still assessing him. “You probably don’t have much time,” she observed, and her voice was almost detached. Like she was making observations about the weather. It was frightening to see her like this; my wife usually wore her expressions loudly, even when she thought she was hiding them so well. It was also one of the sexiest things I’d ever seen. “My mom’s cancer had spread to her pancreas, you know. That’s what actually killed her in the end. She was in constant agony that pain medication couldn’t touch.”
“Did you have a point?” Gustavo spat. He was turning a little gray around the edges; the still-bleeding wound on his face must be making him a little lightheaded by now.
Emma came back to my side, and I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. She was trembling; she was still damp from her run through the Everglades, and she was running on pure adrenaline right now. It was about time to wrap this all up. “My point is,” she said, but she was addressing me now, “that we let nature take its course. We let him die feeling the same agony that my mom felt. It’ll hurt more than shooting him ever will.”
If she ever turns on me, I’m absolutely fucked, I thought. Knowing that Omar wouldn’t hesitate to put my father down, I turned and kissed her, hard and deep, until we were both panting into each other’s mouths. “If it’s what you want,” I said against her lips. “I’ll do it. I would do anything for you.”
She shivered against me, but her eyes were sparkling. “I think he’s owed some suffering,” she said.
I agreed. “Yes.” She told me that she didn’t like how being with me made her feel about herself. Did I bring out the darkness that was already residing within her? Or was I corrupting her by keeping her close to me? Either way it didn’t matter. Like I told her before: I was too selfish to ever consider letting her go.
I glared at my father. “Here’s what I’m going to do,” I said. “You’re going to sign a power of attorney to me, and then I’m going to find a hospice to dump you in until you die there alone. No one will be permitted to visit or call, or they can join you in Hell.”
“What do we do with him until then?” Omar asked. “Even with money, it’s going to take a few days for everything to come together.”
I smiled at my father, and for the first time, he looked nervous. “I believe the room that he had Emma taken from is open.” I glanced at my brother. “Help me?”
Omar nodded, and together, we grabbed my father under each arm. He didn’t fight; he didn’t have it in him to fight. Although he didn’t look like he’d lost too much weight, he felt like a bag of bones held together with paper-thin skin.
We dragged him through the house to the hallway of holding cells. While David’s body had been moved and the news delivered to his family, the door to Emma’s former room was still open. We took him inside and dumped him onto her unmade bed. Gustavo landed with a grunt, but he didn’t try to run. It was like he had been deflated. “Who's going to feed him?” Omar asked as we left without even a word to our father.
I shut the door and punched in the key to the lock. Then, I went through the steps to change it so that no one besides me could get into the room. “We’ll see how long it takes to get him into a hospice,” I said. “If it’s only a few days, he can wait. There’s a sink if he’s thirsty.”
Omar clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Are you ready to tell the family?” he asked.
I wasn’t — I needed to get my wife into a shower and put my hands and mouth all over her, if she’d let me — but I supposed there was no way to put it off. “You’ll have my back?”
“Like I was always meant to,” he said. Omar reminded me constantly that he never wanted the power or the responsibility of being the firstborn. He was content to be my enforcer and stand by my side.
“Let’s do this.”
