Untamed Hearts 1: The Viper (26 page)

He sucked in a startled breath, but before his lungs could recognize it, he got hit.
Hard
. The pain above his left eye was crazy. Marcos had gone down on cement in street fights, and it didn’t hurt like that.

It mixed the sensors in his brain.

All of a sudden this wasn’t about the payout and feeding Neto’s kids. In Marcos’s mind, this fucker was trying to kill him, and he acted appropriately. When he tried to hit him a second time, Marcos jerked his head to the side on the mat and then punched blindly, because he honestly couldn’t see anything out of his left eye.

For the second time that month, he heard the crunch of bones break, and, knowing he’d broken this guy’s nose, Marcos used the fighter’s shock to reverse their positions.

Somewhere in the distance, Marcos could swear he heard Chuito shout, “¡Coño!”

But that just added to the realism of the threat. Usually when someone was trying to kill Marcos, Chuito was there cursing about it. He punched the fighter again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

Someone was hitting the mat, shouting, “You won! You fucking won! Get the fuck off him! MARC!”

Marcos looked up, seeing that Chuito had forced his way to the ring and was crawling under the ropes. He grabbed Marcos’s arm, pulling hard and making him crawl off the fighter, who was groaning and moving, but he was bleeding like crazy.

“Is he gonna die?” Marcos whispered, because he remembered, somewhere in the back of his mind, promising not to do that again.

“No, I think he’s okay.” Chuito reached into his back pocket and pulled out a money clip. He got down on his knees next to the fighter. “Hey, muchacho. You all right?” The fighter nodded and rolled over, trying to get up, but it was obvious his equilibrium was off. Chuito put the money on the mat. “Take a cab to the hospital, okay? I’ll pay the bill.”

“Tell them it was a street fight,” the emcee added. “It’s a bad area. They won’t question it.”

Chuito scowled up at the emcee and then got to his feet. The emcee didn’t seem to care about the death glare. He shouted into the microphone. “Winner! El Vibora!”

“I cannot
believe
I used to do this shit!” Chuito turned to Marcos and shouted, “Don’t touch anything! Hands at your sides! Did you touch your face?”

Marcos dropped his hands to his sides when he realized why Chuito was so shaken. He shook his head in answer, but that was a mistake. He took a step forward when the room started to swim.

“We’re out!” Chuito pushed at the center of Marcos’s back, the only part of him that didn’t have some strange fighter’s blood all over him. He leaned into him and said in his ear, “You pass out, chica, and I’ll kill you myself.”

“Hey, are you guys coming back?” the emcee asked hopefully. “I can promote next week and—”

Chuito swung around and gave the emcee a look that would freeze the Atlantic Ocean. The guy took three steps back. Obviously satisfied, Chuito shoved at Marcos again.

The crowd was going insane. Marcos saw the flash of cash exchanging hands, but everyone parted for them. The bright lights of hundreds of phones still filming was glaring, but no one touched them. The emcee wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to piss off Chuito.

The fresh air felt better; it helped to wake Marcos up a little more. Chuito was cursing worse than Marcos usually did as the two of them walked around the building until they found a hose resting in the grass.

Chuito followed it until he found where it turned on. “Take off your shorts.”

Marcos did it rather than argue, and stood there in his boxer briefs as Chuito sprayed him down. If the fresh air didn’t wake him up, the cold water certainly did.

“¡Me cago en ná!” he shouted, because Chuito wasn’t being very forgiving with that hose. “It’s cold, motherfucker!”

“Good!” Chuito growled in Spanish as he avoided Marcos’s face with the hose, but the rest of him was drenched. “You sure you didn’t touch your face?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay, let me see your hands.”

Chuito dropped the hose and pulled his phone out of his back pocket. He turned on the flashlight and shined it down on Marcos’s knuckles, the light glaring in the near darkness as it flashed on Marcos’s hands. He squinted to see, because he was still half-blinded, though his left eye didn’t feel swollen. He blinked, realizing it was the blood fucking with his vision.

He instinctively reached up to feel his eyebrow, but Chuito smacked his hand down before he could. He grabbed Marcos’s other hand, still studying with his flashlight. He flipped it palm up, the crease in his forehead intense.

“You sure you didn’t touch your face?”

“
I am sure
.” This repetitiveness was starting to get annoying. “You’re not my mother.”

“Don’t even, Marc!” Chuito growled as he straightened up and grabbed Marcos’s face. Then the pendejo shined the light right in his goddamn eye.

“¡Coño!” Marcos brought up his hand again, but Chuito knocked it down once more as he studied the injury. Marcos squinted, closing his bad eye to better see the look on Chuito’s face. It wasn’t very comforting. “How bad?”

Chuito winced. “I hope your chica likes scars. Right through the eyebrow. You need stitches.”

“Ay Dios mio.” Marcos groaned. “Are you sure?”

“What the fuck do you think I do for a living? Yes, Marc, I’m sure. Why do you think it’s bleeding like that? No gloves? No fucking Vaseline. It’s going to scar.”

“Maybe the stitches will hide it.”

“In your eyebrow? No.” Chuito pulled back and gave him a look of disbelief. “Are you worried about a scar? Really? That is the least of your problems. You don’t know that fighter! You don’t know if he’s clean.”

“I’m sure he’s clean.”

“Just like you’re sure he’s a hundred and eighty-five pounds?”

“My hands are fine.” Marcos held up his hands as evidence. “I didn’t touch my face.” Chuito gave him another harsh look. “I didn’t. I’m not new. I know this shit. I’m not soft. You’re soft. Now you’re a fancy fighter who doesn’t know how to protect himself on the street. A little blood and you freak. I’m fine.”

“Where’s your truck? Hopefully we’ll end up in the same hospital as the motherfucker you almost killed. I’ll figure it out when we get there.”

“You want me to go the hospital naked?”

“Yup.”

“No, I’m not going to the hospital.” If it was still going to scar, Marcos didn’t see why he should bother. “They’ll ask questions.”

Chuito sighed and looked heavenward, staring at the moon as if searching for patience. “You’re sure you didn’t touch your face?”

“I am sure, motherfucker.”

Chuito pulled out his phone and flashed it at Marcos, running the light up and down his body.

“What’d you want? A date?”

“No cuts anywhere?”

“No.” Marcos gestured to his naked body in nothing but his underwear. “Still sexy as ever.”

“Except for the eyebrow.”

“Mierda.” Marcos groaned as he turned to walk back around to find his truck in the packed parking lot. “We need to find Neto. He’s got my phone.”

Marcos heard Chuito grab his shorts, the rattle of keys giving it away.

“Forget your phone.”

“Fuck you. He’s got my gun too. I
need
my gun.”

“Forget the gun.”

Marcos turned back to him in disbelief. “You really
are
soft. Angel’ll kill both of us.”

Chuito lifted his shirt, showing off the gun tucked into front of his jeans. Marcos just stared at it, because he knew it’d been a very long time since Chuito had walked around strapped.

“You carry a Beretta?”

“What’s wrong with a Beretta?”

“That’s a very Italian weapon.” Marcos lifted his gaze to Chuito’s face and studied him. His cousin was really back in Miami, and this time it wasn’t just to visit. He was packing. The icy cold shock of realization made the world swim. “Ay Dios mio,” he whispered, and when Chuito looked away, Marcos felt actual tears sting his eyes. “What did you do?”

Chuito shook his head. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Oh my God,” he repeated in English. He went to put a hand to his eyes and then stopped at the last minute. He lowered his head instead and choked out, “Did you smoke him? There’s kids in that warehouse.”

“No. I didn’t smoke anyone.”

“Chu—”

“I didn’t. Angel’s alive and well. I promise.”

Marcos forced air back into his lungs, hating that he was still half-blind and the world was wavy and he was starting to notice little things. Like the fact that he hadn’t been eating much since he’d left Katie, and he had been living on pure adrenaline for a week.

The facts weren’t adding up in his hazed mind. If Chuito was back and strapped, someone, somewhere was supposed to be dead. Garnet didn’t change him that much. Once Chuito took over a problem, motherfuckers started dying.

“I promised Juan,” he whispered.

“Juan’s dead,” Chuito snapped in the cold, harsh voice from Marcos’s youth.

He flinched at the sound of it. He was going to stand there in the parking lot of an underground fight club and actually cry.
Really cry.

Like Katie cried.

Like that chica Grayson cried.

“Come on.” Chuito wrapped his arm around Marcos’s waist, obviously deciding he wasn’t toxic anymore. “I’ll drive.”

Marcos let him, because if he was going to cry, he sort of wanted to do it at home. He sat in the passenger seat of his truck, with his head tilted back, the blood from his eyebrow still running down his face and onto his chest.

He was mostly naked.

Very wet.

And cold.

Chuito stopped at a twenty-four-hour drugstore. Marcos looked out the window fighting the tears as he waited. He didn’t know what Chuito did, but it was something he knew would undo five years of Garnet programming.

He missed him, but Marcos liked his cousin happy and in Garnet. Playing whatever game he played with his neighbor and being everything Marcos wasn’t. Successful. Rich. Famous.

Even if it meant they weren’t a team anymore.

He’d always wanted it for Chuito.

Always.

He should’ve pulled the trigger at the warehouse.

Chuito came back with two bags of supplies and threw it between them. When he started the truck, Marcos turned to him and asked, “What if Angel had smoked me?”

Chuito put the car into gear and said, “I’d be in jail. I wouldn’t even have finesse about that shit. I’d have killed him in broad daylight.”

People said that kind of thing all the time, but with his cousin, Marcos more than anyone understood how true it was.

“I’m not worth it, Chu.” Marcos whispered. “Why?”

“’Cause I love you, dumbass.” Chuito snorted in disbelief. “I like this world better with you in it.”

Chapter Nineteen

The world was swimming because Marcos had his first concussion. At least that was what Doctor Chuito claimed. Marcos wouldn’t know. He’d never had one before.

When he told his cousin that, Chuito sounded surprised as he sat on the closed toilet seat in the bathroom, waiting for Marcos to finish showering because he didn’t trust him not to face-plant on the shower tile.

“Really?” Chuito asked for the second time, as if it were completely unbelievable.

“Yeah, if you hadn’t shown up, I wouldn’t have one now. You distracted me.” Marcos put his face under the shower spray and then cursed when the water hit his cut. “¡Ay carajo!”

“Wow, I’ve lost track of how many I’ve had,” Chuito mused thoughtfully. “Tino gave me one last month.”

“Remind me to never fight Tino, then.”

“Jesus, with all the fighting you’ve done? All the underground shit? All the street fights? All the times you hit pavement? You’ve never had a concussion?” Chuito sounded like he was talking to hear himself speak as he mumbled in Spanish. “You are the luckiest bastard I’ve ever met in my life. The reason you do all this crazy shit is because you know you’re lucky. Why the hell didn’t any of those bullets get you that night? I have asked myself that question a thousand times. Why didn’t I lose you too?”

Marcos pulled back, feeling something strange and cold roll down his back. The water was hot, but the memories, the ideas, were icy and horrible.

“She was dead before you were out the door. She was watching you.” Chuito’s voice was haunted. “She has to watch over you, Marc. I mean, shit, you got into a car accident and met the love of your life. That can only happen to you.”

Marcos didn’t like that idea. He didn’t like the thought that his mother had somehow saved him and let Juan die. She had loved Juan and Chuito like they were her own; she would’ve never chosen one of them above the other.

“Shut up,” Marcos choked. “Just shut up, Chu.”

“You should get back together with Katie,” Chuito surprised him by saying. “If your mother saved you, if she’s
been
saving you, you should do what Juan was supposed to do. You should make the world better.”

“You could make the world better,” Marcos reminded him.

“No, I can’t.” Chuito sounded like he believed it too. “You’re the lover. I’m just the fighter.”

“Chu—”

“No, I’m right about this,” Chuito argued. “I got you out, Marc. Do something with it. Please.”

“What did you do?”

“It doesn’t matter what I did. You’re out. Angel’s not your problem anymore. You can hang with the same pendejos, and no one is going to give you shit about it. You could walk into the warehouse tomorrow, and Angel wouldn’t do anything but kiss your ass. In fact, I should have you do it while I’m still here just to watch.”

Marcos heard the same dark sound in Chuito’s voice that he had in the parking lot, that horrible turn that told him he was somehow seeking revenge.

He turned off the water and then pushed back the curtain. He grabbed the towel off the rack without bothering to dry himself. He wrapped it around himself, and then he reached over and grabbed the back of Chuito’s shirt, fisting it tightly.

“¡Coño!” Chuito knocked at his hand, but Marcos wasn’t letting go. “Are you blitzed?”

“WHERE IS IT?” Marcos screamed loud enough to wake the neighbors. He pulled at Chuito’s shirt, hearing the fabric rip. “TAKE IT OFF!”