The Slayer (Untamed Hearts #2) (23 page)

He’d had a lot of sleepovers with Alaine over the years.

But tonight was the first night the notion genuinely terrified him. His past ensured he wouldn’t touch a naive virgin, even one he wanted with every fiber of his being.

The game had changed last night.

Now Chuito was scared to death.

He couldn’t tell her why, just like he couldn’t tell her so many other things, because he was terrified she would finally see the devil in him that she had been readily ignoring for five years.

A part of him wanted to be the man she saw him as.

Even if it was a blatant lie…to both of them.

They managed to make it all the way back to the office without either of them saying anything, but as Alaine turned off the car in the back parking lot, he turned to her.

“Alaine,” he started as he tried to sort out the million things going through his mind.

She glanced over, arching an eyebrow expectantly, as if there was only one response that was acceptable.

“I’m sorry, okay,” he mumbled, thinking he’d said that more in one day than he had in the past year. “Wyatt didn’t charge me.”

“
That’s
what you’re sorry about?” she asked incredulously.

He groaned and put a hand over his face, but then was saved from admitting that last night was hurting him a lot more than it could ever hurt her when his phone rang.

He looked at the screen, seeing Marcos’s face and answered it with an apologetic look to Alaine. “
¿Hola?
”

“Hey.” The stress was blatant in that one word as Marcos asked in Spanish, “Can you talk?”

“Sí, hold on.” He turned to Alaine. “I need to take this.”

“Of course you do.” She rolled her eyes as she got out of the car. “I’ll make dinner.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Chuito called out. “I can cook.”

“Give me a break. Go talk to Miami.”

She slammed the door so hard Marcos asked, “Trouble in paradise?”

“I’ve had a shitty day.” Chuito leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. “I got arrested.”

“What?” his cousin barked. “Why?”

“Fighting with Tino.” He sighed, seeing now how absolutely stupid it was.

“What’d that Italian motherfucker do?” Marcos’s voice was positively shaking, making it obvious jail mixed with the Italians was enough to have his cousin wanting to come up there and smoke someone. “I told you—”

“It wasn’t Tino’s fault. Look, just forget it,” Chuito cut him off. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“No, you tell me what’s wrong,” Marcos argued. “Getting arrested trumps the issues here. Did they charge you?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“What the hell is going on with you?” Marcos sounded extremely concerned.

Chuito considered that for a long time, before he shrugged. “I think my life’s going to hell here. I should probably move back. It’s not fair to have you dealing with all this Los Corredores bullshit. The whole idea was to get you out. This issue with Angel just won’t
go away
.”

“I haven’t been to the warehouse since everything with me and Angel went down,” Marcos promised him. “But some of the kids have been talking. You know Chu Jr., the kid Katie’s been tutoring at the house—”

“I wish you wouldn’t call him that,” Chuito complained. “Giving that kid a legacy like that is like putting an omen over his head.”

“He reminds me of you. Big, mean, angry…smart. Crazy loyal,” Marcos explained as if that alone was worth cursing the poor kid. “Anyway, he told me Angel’s been recruiting hard. Like he’s expecting something to go down. He’s grabbing them younger and younger. He said they just jumped in a kid who was thirteen.”

“I hate that motherfucker,” Chuito whispered darkly, wondering how he had ever considered Angel his friend. “I never recruited kids that young.”

“You never recruited,” Marcos reminded him. “You just sort of took over for Victor after we buried him.”

“Mmm,” Chuito agreed, realizing for the first time that it was actually true. “I guess I didn’t.”

“Lucky for you Victor did a fuckload of recruiting before the police bullet got him.”

“Don’t say shit about Victor,” Chuito complained, because Victor had been the closest thing he had to a father figure. “He did that to protect us. He did the best he could.”

“Yeah, that’s the same shit Angel’s selling,” Marcos said bitterly. “How protected were we, Chu? Safety in numbers. Boricuas need to stick together. Like hell. It brought the devil to our door. It didn’t save us from shit. It made us a target.”

“Ay Dios mio.” Chuito groaned in misery. “I’m already slitting my wrists this week. Spare me, please.”

“I’m going to smoke this motherfucker myself, I promise you,” Marcos went on as if he didn’t hear Chuito’s pleas, because his cousin wasn’t one to be contained over a little guilt. “I think he’s planning on starting a war with the Italians.
Your Italians
.”

“He’s going to lose that war,” Chuito reminded him. “They’re a lot more connected than Angel.”

“And what happens to these kids?” Marcos asked him sharply. “
My kids
. He pulled one of them right out of my shop. Omar is fourteen. Angel already had his brother. That meant Omar should’ve been in the clear.”

“Brothers jump in together all the time,” Chuito reminded him, even if it was a common street rule that only one male member of the family needed to be in to have protection. “You jumped in.”

“He was one of mine,” Marcos snapped. “Angel’s stealing them from me on purpose. He’s fucking with me.”

“You should’ve put ink on him,” Chuito suggested, and he was only half-joking.

“Are you serious?” Marcos sounded completely incredulous, which showed just how much being with Katie had changed his perceptions. “I’m trying to keep ink
off
them. I’m trying to give them a life. A real life.”

“Okay.” Chuito took a deep breath and tried to clear his head, because Marcos was passionate, and he did have a good point. “Look, you better make sure Angel doesn’t know these kids are talking to you about his shit. If Angel still sees you as that big a threat—”

“I am a threat,” Marcos growled. “I’m going to kill him with my bare hands.”

“Don’t do anything stupid. I’ll figure it out.”

“How are you going to figure it out?”

“I have no idea,” Chuito admitted out loud to himself as well as to Marcos. “Give me a week. I have to deal with my agent. He’s driving me crazy about the pending UFC contract.”

“What if we don’t have a week?” Marcos asked him. “What if he steals more of my kids?”

“How many kids do you have?”

“I got nine at the shop. Most of mine have ink. Omar and Carlos were the only ones who didn’t, but Katie’s got three tutoring groups a week and most of them aren’t affiliated.”

“How many does Katie have?”

“Maybe fourteen or fifteen.”

“Mierda,” he whispered in disbelief, because that was a lot of teenagers. “On top of your nine?”

“Two are crossovers. They’re still in school, so they work with Katie when they aren’t helping me at the shop. And Omar was coming over to the house on Tuesdays, but now he’s fucking gone. I told Chu Jr. tonight to give him some herbal tea. Help ease the pain a little. He said Omar was bad off. You know Angel doesn’t fucking think of that shit. He doesn’t care about them.”

Chuito rubbed a hand over his face, because that was Victor’s version of first aid. Herbal tea was their internal code for bud. A little bud cured just about anything, according to Victor, and it was the only thing Chuito knew for a long time. Apparently it was the only thing Marcos knew too. He had never seen the other side like Chuito had, but they
did
have drugstores in Miami that sold things like Tylenol and Motrin in them. It might not get the job done like bud did, but it wasn’t a gateway drug either.

Chuito was 1,000 percent certain Katie hadn’t heard Marcos suggest marijuana to a fourteen-year-old.

“You
are
starting a gang,” Chuito observed, deciding like Marcos probably had that if the worst a kid who jumped into a gang did was smoke a little bud, then it’d be a miracle. “You’re acting just like Victor. He used to call us his kids too.”

“Motherfucker,” Marcos started in warning. “That’s not funny.”

“I’m serious,” Chuito pointed out. “You got a bunch of teenagers working for you. Loyal to you. Spying for you. This is sounding suspiciously like a gang.”

“I didn’t ask them to spy.” Marcos sounded slightly abashed. “Not really. They talk. I listen.”

“Now listen to me,” Chuito said slowly. “I don’t know how you and Katie are finding that many Boricua teenagers. There cannot be that many potential gang members in Katie’s classes at the high school.”

“They aren’t all Boricuas.”

“Coño.” Chuito groaned, because that meant Marcos was pissing off other gangs too. If he was rescuing Cubans, forget about it. The playing field in Miami was endless. “Are you stealing from the Bloods? Please tell me you aren’t doing that.”

“Anyone who wants to work can learn. I don’t care if they’re Latin Bloods. I’m over that. It’s not their fault Juan died. They were babies when it happened,” Marcos explained simply. “If they need Katie’s help, she gives it too. We’re trying to help them do something real with their lives. If they want to go to college, I want them to do that. Juan didn’t get it. I want them to have it.”

“Any kids with ink can’t come back to the shop,” Chuito said in the hard, firm voice of a crew leader. “They can’t come to the house either.”

“Suck my dick!” Marcos cursed, and then added, “Suck it hard, cabrón. I’m not abandoning them. Not for you.
Not for anyone
.”

“Marcos!” Chuito shouted back. “The ones with ink are spoken for. You
can’t
have them. Let them go. They shouldn’t have jumped in if they couldn’t handle it.”

It was harsh, but in their world, teenagers weren’t like the teenagers in Garnet. They were born with the weight of the world on their shoulders. Chuito didn’t make the system; he just learned how to survive in it.

“No,” Marcos said firmly, sounding unrelenting. “If these kids want out, I’m giving them an out. Angel or the Bloods or whoever wants them, they’ll have to kill me first. Good luck with that. I’ve taken care of plenty of Bloods in my time.”

“What about Katie?” Chuito asked him. “You don’t think Angel would come after her to hurt you?”

“She cares about these kids too,” Marcos said, before he added, “Besides, she promised me she’d go back to Garnet if something started to go down, and she’ll take tía with her.”

Chuito stared out the window to the trees behind the office. The few leaves left were withered and brown. It happened every year, but Chuito never got over the novelty of it. Every year, the leaves changed in Garnet right on schedule. They did the same thing until, for some cruel reason, life took them out. It was what nature programmed them to do.

Just like Marcos.

Even if his leaves changed, he was still a fucking gangster. He needed a war to fight. Something bigger than himself to bleed for.

Marcos got out, but he was still in.

He was in more than ever.

Now Marcos had a fucking
cause.

God help them all.

“These are rules, Marc,” Chuito tried to say as evenly as possible, because how the hell was he supposed to compete with a cause like that? “These are rules that have been around a lot longer than you have. If they’ve got ink, you can’t touch them.”

Marcos’s response was quick and predictable. “Fuck the rules.”

And that, right there, summed up Marcos’s life.

Chuito called him Hurricane Marcos for a reason. Most of the time Chuito even loved him more for it, because one didn’t come across someone as flat-out ballsy as Marcos every day.

Even Tino didn’t have anything on Marcos.

Marcos was so fearless it was awe-inspiring.

But that didn’t fix
this
problem.

Tino’s brother Nova, who was easily the smartest gangster Chuito had ever met in his life, would often say,
“There’s always a solution.”

It might not be moral, it was more than likely illegal, but an answer was out there somewhere. One of the small benefits to being a born criminal. Their playing field was wide-open.

Chuito wasn’t real sure what the solution was yet, but he liked Nova’s theory that one was out there, so he decided to go with it. “Give me a day to think.”

“Chu—”

“I’m hungover. I’ve got a concussion. I’ve got shit going on here,” Chuito confessed, for one moment letting himself sound as tired as he felt. “I need a day.”

“I’m not giving up on these kids,” Marcos warned him.

“I’ll factor that in,” Chuito promised him, surprised to find that he meant it. “If they’re your kids, I guess they’re my kids too. I’ll think of something.”

Chuito felt like he had just gotten jumped into another gang without his permission. He already had his old crew to worry about. Half the money he made went into ensuring his old crew was taken care of. He owned houses in Miami that he rented for a buck a month to any Los Corredores OG who had earned the right to get out of gang life and was trying to stay straight while still caring for their families, which wasn’t easy. When a new one decided to get out, Chuito bought another house, telling himself at least it was a fucking investment, and he told them that too, hoping to ease the guilt. Some fighters put their cash in money-market accounts; Chuito put his in houses he rented to retired gangsters. He had loaned just about all of them money he never expected to get paid back for. He footed the bill for their kids’ dentist and bought a crazy amount of new school clothes every August. He had an attorney on retainer for when, inevitably, one of them fucked up and ended up in jail.

Technically, they were Angel’s crew, and they were getting arrested for Angel’s crimes, but like Marcos said, Angel didn’t care about that shit.

This day officially sucked balls.

“Look, I know you got your own shit,” Marcos started, sounding guilty. “I don’t mean to dump on you, but maybe the Italians can pull Angel back. They already got their hands in his business; why not rein him in on recruiting?”