The Slayer (Untamed Hearts #2) (27 page)

“That’s not fair!” she shouted as tears streamed down her face. “There’s nothing that’s fair about that! Why does it have to be one or the other?”

“Do you believe, in this perfect gringa world of yours”—he gestured around the apartment—“that everyone gets a happy ending? That everyone gets out?”

“Yes!” She wiped at her cheek. “That’s what I believe. Everyone deserves to be happy. Anyone can change, and everyone deserves a second chance.”

“Then you need to stay here,” he said as he stood up. “Stay here, mami. Live the lie in Garnet. Grow old and die here without knowing some people never get out. One of us should.”

Chuito walked around the bed and picked up his jeans. He stepped into them, suddenly not able to look at Alaine sitting there in the middle of his bed, with the marks of sex all over her body.

He turned to walk out the door, and Alaine let him.

* * * *

Chuito walked all the way to Jules and Romeo’s house, barefoot and shirtless, freezing his fucking ass off as the sun kept trying to rise and expose him.

If the sex hadn’t cleared his head, the cold certainly did.

With every step he realized one thing—he was in a whole world of shit.

In a moment of weakness, in some crazy bid to save Alaine from the insanity of the connection they shared, he had fucked himself.

Now he stood outside the door to Tino’s apartment above the garage, looking at the screen door, trying to decide if he should knock on it. With Marcos he wouldn’t have hesitated, but he was frozen there when it came to relying on Tino.

They didn’t have a lifetime of watching each other’s backs.

It’d only been two and half years.

That was a big fucking difference.

Trusting someone wasn’t easy for any gangster. It took years to work up to. He wasn’t certain if he and Tino were quite there yet, and making the wrong decision wouldn’t just mean putting himself in danger.

It would mean putting Alaine in danger.

In the end, Tino made the decision for him by jerking the door open and looking at him through the screen door. His hair stood up at odd angles, and he had that heavy-lidded look of someone who had just woken up.

“What the fuck?” Tino stared at him pointedly, taking in that Chuito stood there in nothing but a pair of jeans. “You’ve been out here for five minutes.”

“How’d you know I was here?”

“I heard you come up the stairs.”

“But I don’t even have shoes on.”

“Motherfucker.” Tino raised his eyebrows. “When someone comes up my stairs at five in the morning,
I hear it
.”

Chuito took a deep breath and finally admitted, “I think I fucked up.”

“Fucked up how?” Tino opened the screen and shivered. “Madonn’, it’s cold.”

“I told Alaine.”

“Told her what?” He looked past Chuito to the driveway. “Did you walk here?”

“I told her everything.”

Tino’s head snapped back, and he glared at Chuito. “What do you mean, everything?”

“I mean,
everything
.” Chuito winced as he said it. “She wanted to know what the ink meant.”

Tino gaped at him for one long moment and then asked, “She doesn’t know about the Omertá ink? You didn’t—”

“I fucked her first. She saw the Omertá ink. That’s what started it.”

“Chicks see my Omertá ink all the time. I don’t tell them what it means.” Tino’s voice was hushed with frantic disbelief. “Motherfuckers die for shit like that. No one can arrest you for a tattoo, but they can sure as fuck arrest you for admitting shit. Why didn’t you tell her about your Los Corredores ink instead? Expose your own fucking family if you felt like confessing shit.”

“I did tell her about my Los Corredores ink,” Chuito said slowly. “I explained
all
of it.”

Tino looked truly stunned. “You told her what you did to get it?”

“I did,” Chuito admitted.

“Are you insane? She’s gonna tell Wyatt.” Tino’s voice was still low in horror as he leaned in and said, “We’re not talking ten years, motherfucker. We are talking life
without
parole.”

“Maybe,” Chuito agreed and then turned to go back down the stairs. “Look, I’m gonna leave. I was loco to come. You don’t need my shit dragging you down.”

He was halfway down the stairs before Tino growled, “Fuuuuuck.”

Chuito frowned up at him.

“Come back.” Tino waved him back with a sharp, hard motion. “Come in, and we’ll figure something out.”

“Tino—”

“
Come back
.” Tino’s teeth were clenched in anger. “Do it now before I fucking change my mind.”

“If you tell Nova—”

“He will kill your ass,” Tino finished for him. “He will kill you and make it look like an accident. You made yourself a liability, you dumb asshole.
For pussy
. Do you know how easy pussy is to find? Simple pussy. Pussy that doesn’t ask questions. She never needed to know this shit. Mafia wives live out their whole lives and don’t ask what their husbands do to take care of business.” He gestured to the main house where Romeo and Jules lived. “My brother doesn’t even know the shit I’ve done. Goodfellas keep their shit private. What the fuck is wrong with you that you can’t? You told her the first time you fucked her. You are
not
this stupid. I know you’re not.”

Chuito hesitated, part of him wondering if maybe Tino was going to save Nova the effort and try to kill Chuito himself. What would happen then? The last person Chuito wanted to be in a fight to the death with was Tino. Aside from Marcos, Tino was the best friend he had.

Chuito didn’t have anything else to lose, so he asked, “How do I know you’re not just planning to do the dirty work? That could be a real unfortunate set of circumstances, ’cause I wouldn’t go down easily.”

Tino arched an eyebrow at that. “I guess you’re gonna have to come up here, and we’ll find out.”

The two of them stood there in a stalemate, each of them summing the other up, trying to decide if the risk was worth it. Something in Tino’s statement was ominous, as if he wasn’t sure either. He’d said it himself; his brother would kill Chuito for exposing his association with the mafia to someone like Alaine, a lawyer. A good girl. Someone as far away from the underworld as one pretty gringa in Garnet could be.

A dead liability was better than a living loose end.

Chuito had just stuck Tino in a situation where he had to choose between the two, and everything Chuito knew about the Moretti brothers indicated that they relied on each other completely. Blindly. Without question. Nova was the brain, Tino was the muscle, and together they were scarier than anyone in Garnet realized.

Nova suffered with Tino gone. Chuito saw the wear on him that he didn’t have anyone to trust in New York now that he had gotten Tino out.

Nova would be the first to admit the sacrifice was worth it, just like Chuito felt his sacrifices for Marcos were worth it, but losing his brother as backup made Nova more paranoid than ever.

And a paranoid mafia underboss wasn’t someone to be a liability to.

Why did Chuito come here? Why did he think Tino could help? It was an instinct—when he was down, he tried to band together with others in his crew, but were they really in the same crew?

The past two years loomed between them, leaving one giant question.

Was it enough?

Chapter Twenty-Six

Garnet County

February 2012

“So, there’s gotta be like an underground scene here, right? Every town has an underground.”

Chuito sat next to Tino Moretti in the sweetest Ferrari he ever had the pleasure of riding in. Even hot, it’d be worth well over two hundred g’s, and it was very hard not to notice that as he admired the interior.

Jules’s new conquest, Romeo Wellings, had arrived in Garnet this afternoon, driving this car like it was nothing. Chuito and Romeo had passed each other over the years as fellow UFC fighters, but Romeo’s camp didn’t exactly get along with the Cellar, and they had mostly avoided each other due to the rivalry. Someone had clearly forgotten to tell Jules that, and because Chuito figured he owed Jules, he was babysitting Romeo’s brother so she and Romeo could go off and do whatever the hell they were doing.

Of course, Jules didn’t know Chuito saw through her and Romeo. She made some excuse about showing Romeo the house he was renting.

Whatever.

“Did you hear me?” Tino asked him.

Chuito nodded as he eyed the sound system. “I heard you.”

“And?”

“Look, man, give me five minutes to admire the car.” He ran his hands over the leather on either side of his ass. If he was going to babysit so Jules could get laid, he deserved a moment with this Ferrari. “I want to drive it.” His eyes rolled back of their own accord. “
Please
tell me I can drive it.”

Tino shifted gears on the wide-open roads of Garnet and pushed it to seventy, obviously to tease Chuito. “Car thief.”

Chuito took a deep breath, just soaking in the smell of it. “God. One Ferrari. That’s it. I had to chop it. I almost cried when my cousin took the engine out.”

“Do I have to worry about this vehicle?” Tino asked him in concern. “’Cause my brother
did
say he’d bury me if anything happened to it.”

“It’s fine. I’m a retired car thief,” Chuito admitted, and he couldn’t help but feel sad about it. “Unfortunately.”

“Man, I never got into stealing cars,” Tino said with a laugh. “I have other specialties.”

“Yeah, I bet.” Chuito looked over at Tino, seeing himself so clearly in him and having nothing but remorse for Tino as he said it. He picked up the energy drink Tino had in the cup holder and looked at it for a long moment before he decided to ask, “Did you deal?”

“Hasn’t everyone?” Tino laughed. “But no, not since I was a kid.”

Chuito scowled at that, hearing the catch in his voice he knew so well. This wasn’t an ordinary gangster he was sitting next to. This motherfucker was mafia. Everyone knew Romeo Wellings was connected, and his connection was sitting right next to Chuito.

Jules was fucking crazy to be shopping for a good time inside this family. Chuito tried to tell her that too, in his own way, but she wasn’t listening, and it wasn’t like it was in him to rat them out.

She
was
a cop.

At the end of the day, no matter how much he cared about her, Chuito couldn’t sell out his own. If she wanted to fuck Romeo Wellings, Chuito supposed she would just have to figure it out.

“Is Romeo involved?”

“No,” Tino assured him, as if understanding the real question. “We keep him pretty far out of the loop. He’s our half brother, not the connected half. The only thing he’s guilty of is being related to me and Nova.”

“Your other brother?”

Tino nodded, looking miserable all of a sudden. “We had to leave him in New York. Someone’s gotta take care of business.”

“There’s no blow. There is an underground scene here, but it’s more heroin and crank. Coke is a city drug,” Chuito whispered, feeling genuinely bad to tell him. He knew there was crack if Tino really looked, but he didn’t feel like revealing it to him. “How much did you bring?”

Tino gave him a harsh look. “What makes you think I do blow?”

“Give me a fucking break,” Chuito snorted in disbelief as he held up the energy drink. “I used to use this trick with my mamá. Your brother thinks you’re riding off the caffeine. He doesn’t know?”

“Fuck off,” Tino said rather than admit it.

“I’m not fucking judging you. Do the blow. Go home and do enough for both of us,” Chuito told him with a pained laugh. “I mean, you’re mafia. You fuckers never go down. If I was mafia, I’d still be living hard.”

“We go down.” Tino sighed. “We go down all the fucking time. One way or the other.”

“You want out?” Chuito asked him curiously, because he had a hard time imagining that. The mafia was the elite of the elite. Their people owned the underworld; being in meant you were untouchable. “How deep are you?”

Tino gave him another sidelong glance before he admitted, “I’m made.”

“Holy shit.” Chuito looked around the car again, admiring what being a made man got you without having to fight for it. “What are you? Twenty-one?”

“Twenty-two.”

“How the hell did you manage that?”

“My father fucked my mother, that’s how,” Tino said bitterly. “Then she died, and he decided to give a fuck by making me deal for him when I was twelve. Lucky me.”

Chuito considered that, hearing the pain in Tino’s voice. Chuito had chosen to be a gangster, but Tino was born into it. That was clearly a very different set of circumstances.

“How long you been using?”

“’Bout that long.”

“Ay Dios mio, Tino. Go home,” Chuito told him with a wince of sympathy. “You do not want to crash here. Especially when you’re already pissed off at the world. Get off it slowly.”

Tino shook his head at that. “I can’t get off it at home.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“’Cause I have to do shit at home that makes me want to keep using it,” Tino snapped at him. “If I’m not dealing and I’m not an accountant, what the fuck do you think I do for the administration?” He pulled off the side of the road and turned off the car. Then he dropped his head to the steering wheel. “Just forget everything I just said.”

“No, it’s cool.” Chuito forgot about the car for a moment and admitted, “We got the same specialty. Don’t worry about it.”

“I thought you were a car thief?”

“I stole cars ’cause it got my dick hard,” Chuito said with a laugh. “I killed motherfuckers because I was
really
good at revenge.”

“I promised Nova I’d stay. At least for a little while,” Tino whispered, accepting his explanation without flinching, as if murder and revenge was the same as talking about the weather. “I hate leaving him. They don’t have his back like I do.”

“My cousin’s in deep in Miami. We grew up together. It sucks,” Chuito agreed. “He won’t move here.”

“How bad’s the crash gonna be?”

“Since you were twelve?”

“Took me a while to get up to cocaine,” Tino mumbled, his head still against the steering wheel. “But then it just got easier to do it.”

“I get it.” Chuito sighed as he looked at him. “How often?”