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She eyed them, as if they were going to jump up and bite her somehow. “I’ll sleep?”
I let out a laugh. It was creaky and full of rust, but it was a laugh all the same. “We’ll wake you up for dinner tomorrow.” She tossed both pills into her mouth and swallowed them dry.
“¡Ay!” I couldn’t help but be impressed. I wouldn’t have been able to do that.
“I want to go to bed,” she said. “The faster they get in my system, the faster I’ll sleep.”
“Do you need help to get to your room?” I let her hold onto me as she climbed off the counter, and I kept holding onto her while she steadied her feet under her.
“No.” She glanced at Lyse, who was staring at nothing, and her hands were shaking the tiniest bit. It would get worse. “Help her. She seems worse off than me.”
“I’m fine,” Lyse argued, but her voice was small and distant.
“I’ll take good care of her. I promise.”
Helena snorted. “Considering all the work I put in so that she wouldn’t leave your stupid ass, you better.”
I kissed her cheek. It was a surprisingly soft gesture between us, and she blinked at me, owlish. “Thank you for convincing her that I wasn’t a total loss.”
Lyse huffed, indignant. “I’ll be the judge of whether or not her little pep talk worked, won’t I?”
CHAPTER27
Lyse
Icouldn’t stop shaking. My skin didn’t feel right, like it was simultaneously too big and too tight at the same time. The red stain in the sand where my cousin had been, which I could still see from the window, was obscene. How the man had escaped with that much blood loss was astounding.He’ll probably bleed out before he gets back to Miami, I thought.Good.
My face was tacky with blood, but when I reached a shaking hand up to touch it, Omar gently stopped me. “You don’t want to do that,” he advised.
“Right.” The shaking was getting worse. “Jesus tried to kill me.”
Omar nodded. He was keeping his distance. Why wasn’t he touching me? Ineededhim to touch me. None of this would be real until he did. I would just be stuck in this awful limbo. “He did, but he didn’t succeed. You’re alive.” Omar said the last part just as much for himself as he did for me.
“I’m alive.”
“Yes.” His voice was barely a whisper.
I was still trembling, and my skin was getting itchy. “You aren’t touching me.”
He clenched his hands into fists. “Do you want me to?”
I nodded, almost snapping my neck violently. “I need—”
Omar swept me up into his arms before I could finish the sentence. His mouth found mine, and we kissed, deep and searching. It tasted like blood and sand, but I didn’t care. I looped my arms around his neck and jumped. He caught me easily and wrapped an arm around my waist, keeping me pinned against him.
Without pausing in the way he was devouring my mouth, he climbed the stairs, and I never once worried that he would drop me. “I need to turn the shower on,conejita,” he said softly against my mouth.
“No.”
He smiled, and it was an ugly thing with the amount of blood on his face, but my body burned with desire. It was macabre, but I didn’t care. This wasn’t about a simple want anymore; I needed him. “We have to take a shower, Lyse.” He cupped my face, unafraid of the mess sticking to it. “I won’t leave you alone for a second,” he promised, “but we have to get clean.”
I glared at him as he set me on my feet. “You better not leave.”
He shook his head. “Never.”
True to his word, as he shuffled around the bathroom, he didn’t leave me alone. He didn’t take his hand off of me. In the cavernous space, I was never more than a few inches from him. His hand stayed on my shoulder or pressed against my lower back, or his fingers stayed threaded through mine.
When the shower was steaming, Omar stripped us both with mechanical precision. “I’ll just…burn these,” he muttered, mostly to himself, tossing our clothes into a pile on the floor. Then he moved us into the shower. I groaned under the perfectly hot water.
