Untamed Hearts 1: The Viper (9 page)

She picked her phone up off the floor and logged into craigslist.

Still buck naked, she went ahead and posted one more message.

* * * *

Marcos sat at the small table in Chuito’s kitchen, looking at the water bottle in his hand and trying to ignore the feeling of loss that sat heavy in the center of his chest. “I’ll just head back in the morning.”

“Hey, man, you don’t have to take off so fast.” Chuito turned from washing up the dishes they’d used for dinner. “You’re here now. Stay for a week. You’re off probation, and it’s not like you got a job to go back to.”

Marcos wanted to stay.

Chuito was the only cousin he had left, but he shook his head in denial. He couldn’t tell him that if he stayed, he’d give in to the temptation of Katie Foster and do something even Marcos would have the good graces to feel bad about. He wasn’t going to give Katie another reason to hurt. He’d done that enough already, but instead of explaining all that, he just said, “Nah, I already texted Angel after I left that diner today. He’s got lots of shit to keep me busy.”

“Marc—”

Marcos lifted his head and glared at his cousin, almost daring him to try for a lecture. They both knew Marcos got dealt the shitty hand. He’d been in prison the night Clay Powers had scouted out the underground MMA scene in Miami and decided Chuito had potential to be a professional. It could have just as easily been Marcos, but instead he’d taken the fall for all Los Corredores, including Chuito, who’d stolen most of the cars Marcos ended up serving time for.

“Don’t let Angel talk you into living there. The more you’re obligated to him, the harder it is for you to get out, and he knows that,” Chuito said after a few tense moments. “And the heat does most of their raids at night. If you’re sleeping there, then—”

“I’m keeping my place,” Marcos assured him. “He’s not going to own me.”

Chuito put a glass into the strainer by the sink and sighed. “You know I have money I can give you.”

“No, send it to Tía Sofia. She needs it more than me.”

“My mother does all right,” Chuito promised him. “I just bought her another car. I have it to spare, Marc, and I’d rather you take it than—”

“The car was pretty badass. Lexus LS430. Very nice. I forgot to tell you how much I liked it.” Marcos gave his cousin a genuine smile because he was happy for him. “You should see your mother in it. It’s nice seeing her happy. She’s proud of you.”

“I appreciate you spending so much time with her,” Chuito whispered, sounding torn and miserable. “I wish she’d moved here, but—”

Marcos laughed. “Yeah, right.”

Chuito turned off the sink. “I keep hoping that maybe—”

“We don’t even know how
you
live here. Tía Sofia. Forget about it. She’d hate it here.”

“This place is all right.” Chuito walked into the living room, pulling his shirt off as he went, and Marcos got up and followed him. “It grows on you after a few years.”

“You stick out, bro. Big-time.” Marcos flopped down on his cousin’s bed and looked at the ceiling. “I’m surprised there aren’t more car alarms and video surveillance. You’d think they’d all have them installed when your
Boricua
ass showed up.”

“Speak Spanish,” Chuito said in Spanish and then touched the wall next to his bed. “The walls are paper-thin. Jules had the apartments made after she bought the place, but it wasn’t designed that way. She can hear everything.”

Marcos looked at the wall, thinking of the pretty redhead, Alaine, who lived next door to Chuito. He knew his cousin had a thing for her. It was the only possible reason Chuito was still living over Jules Wellings’s office rather than getting a bigger place. He was a UFC champion, for fuck’s sake, but he lived like the same struggling amateur he’d been when he moved to Garnet five years ago.

“She hears
everything
?” Marcos asked in Spanish, raising his eyebrows as he grinned at his cousin. “Makes it hard to bring women over.”

“I don’t bring women over.” Chuito tossed his shirt into the hamper and then rubbed at the back of his neck. “I’m going to take a shower. Unless you want to go work out at the Cellar.”

“Fuck the Cellar,” Marcos said bitterly. “I can work out at home.”

“Maybe if you stayed, showed them what you could do, start training with me and Tino, they’d reconsider giving you the fighting spot. You know Tino is Jules’s brother-in-law. They do listen to him and—”

“No.” Marcos closed his eyes and rolled on his side on Chuito’s bed, trying to block the image of Katie’s wide-eyed look of horror when she realized Marcos had actually killed some of the assholes responsible for Juan’s and his mother’s deaths. “I need to get the fuck out of this town.”

“What happened at Hal’s today?” Chuito asked in concern.

“I gave her a reality check.”

“Probably for the best,” Chuito said rather than argue. He looked at the wall as if sensing Alaine on the other side. “Girls like them—”

“Yeah,” Marcos agreed before he could finish, and asked something that had been nagging at him for the past few years. “Are you fucking her?”

“Her?” Chuito gestured to the wall in surprise. When Marcos gave him a look, Chuito snorted. “Her dad’s the preacher at that big Baptist church on the edge of the town. Fucking Alaine is
not
an option. Trust me. I shouldn’t even talk to her.”

“But you do? Talk to her, I mean.”

“Yeah.” Chuito shrugged and sat on the bed, still looking at the wall, the longing palpable. “It’s strange. She doesn’t see the bad side of anything, even when it’s looking her in the face. She’s like, too good, you know? Sometimes, being around her, I start to forget the bullshit.”

“She makes you forget where you came from, you mean?”

Marcos wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but he was starting to understand. Sitting with Katie today, it made him want to believe in the possibility of a different life.
An impossible one.

Chuito turned back to him, considering it for a second before he nodded. “Yeah, pretty much. Then I find out Angel’s bringing half of Los Corredores to the next fight. Talk about a fucking reality check. I don’t need the Cellar anymore. I got gyms all over Miami offering to sponsor me. My mother won’t move here. You know we’re never on the same page. She has you, but to be away for so long after she already lost Aunt Camila and Juan—” Chuito’s voice cracked on his brother’s name, and he shook his head. “I know I need to move my camp back home, but I just—”

“Stay here,” Marcos told him with certainty. “Your mother wants you to stay here. I do too. One of us needs to get out and stay out. Our family fucking deserves that much, and you know if you come back—”

“I know.” Chuito looked at the wall again. “It’s just… It was easier when Alaine was nineteen and so totally fucking naive she didn’t even understand what the danger was when it came to this”—Chuito gestured back and forth between himself and the wall—“but it’s not so easy now. It’s been really fucking difficult for a while. I’m starting to think moving back home is worth it. I can’t keep doing this.”

“What’s not so easy?”

Chuito’s look was haunted when he turned back to him. Then he got up and walked to the door rather than answer. “I’m taking a shower.”

* * * *

For once, Marcos was in bed before midnight.

He lay on the couch in Chuito’s living room, trying to let sleep claim him. He’d had almost no rest since leaving Miami, and he should be dead to the world. Instead he was staring at the ceiling, listening to the rain outside, and trying to will away the storm of thoughts that were plaguing him. Some of it was typical, like the conflicting emotions being around Chuito always caused. He’d missed his cousin. They’d once been closer than brothers, best friends, but they had been through too much together. All his darkest memories had Chuito in them. They had the same blood on their hands and the same stains on their souls. He, more than anyone, understood why Chuito stayed in this backward, redneck town. To hide from it all. To pretend, if even for a moment, that all that terrible shit hadn’t happened.

Marcos wanted to hide too.

Preferably in the soft spot between Katie Foster’s lush tits.

When he thought about it, Marcos realized he had never been with a gringa before, and he found himself fantasizing about her, imagining a soft, pink pussy. He guessed that she would smell sweet, like the scent of strawberry bodywash he caught off her today. She would probably taste even sweeter. His mouth actually watered, and he had to reach down and adjust himself as he got fully hard thinking about it.

Against his better judgment, he pulled out his phone and went to craigslist, looking for Katie’s old messages and hoping Chuito was actually asleep for the night. His cousin seemed worn out too, as if he fought the same demons whenever Marcos visited.

With luck, Chuito was passed out, because those messages were better than porn at getting Marcos off, and he was having a very hard time letting go of the dream after driving all this way just to touch her. Sleep wasn’t exactly forthcoming. He might have to help things along.

He was just planning to read all the old messages he’d read a dozen times before, except they weren’t all old. There was one that was new, glaring at him from the top of the list before he even had a chance to search.

Man with unusual snake tattoo who “ran” into me on New Year’s Eve in Garnet—w4m

I’m tired of playing it safe. The slow lane has left me with nothing but regrets, and I know it’s been even harder for you as you speed through life on the other side. Maybe it was never about positive or negatives. Maybe it’s about meeting somewhere in the middle instead.

I want us to collide once more, this time on our terms, and I believe you want that too.

I’ll leave the light on.

Marcos stared at the post as his pulse thundered in his ears, and his cock strained against the waistband of his underwear to the point of pain. He couldn’t even form a coherent thought past the single offer of leaving the light on. The need throbbed through his entire body, making all his muscles tight in a raw sexual desperation he had never experienced before. Usually, he simply took what was offered, and there had been plenty.

He’d never come across forbidden fruit like Katie Foster before.

Never denied himself.

And it was made all the more difficult knowing she was willing if he could just get over that pesky little voice of a conscience that had chosen a
really
bad time to make an appearance in his life.

He looked at the time on his phone.

11:48 p.m.

And then he went back, read the message again, and noted that she’d posted it over three hours earlier. He was just wondering how late the light was actually going to stay on when a shout broke the darkened silence in the apartment. It was so full of fury and violence that Marcos sat up instinctively, reaching for the gun he usually slept with under his pillow.

This time it was still in the truck.

“That’s for Juan, you worthless piece of shit! I hope you rot in hell, you motherfucker!”

Marcos looked to the open door to Chuito’s bedroom, feeling a shudder of something cold and unpleasant roll down his spine when he realized it was more than a dream Chuito was acting out.

It was a memory.

* * * *

The guy had been dead for at least ten minutes, but that didn’t stop Chuito from kicking in the head of the prone and lifeless body of a rival gang member. One of six who’d fired the bullets into the house where Marcos and his mother had lived with Aunt Sofia, Chuito, and Juan. Maybe the dead asshole now sprawled out on the ground was the one who’d fired the bullet that killed Marcos’s mother. Or his cousin Juan, so smart and full of optimism, very different from Chuito and Marcos at that age. They’d already been cutting school and stealing cars by thirteen, but Juan got straight A’s instead. They all thought he would be the one to go to college. He wanted to be a physician, and Marcos had joked that it would be very convenient to have one in the family. A doctor wouldn’t call the cops on them for every damn injury. Now Juan was dead, and this fucker could have been the one to do it. That was the only thought Marcos had as he watched Chuito stomp on his face until it was no longer recognizable as human.

Marcos wasn’t even affected by the gore. He just stood there, keeping an eye on the end of the alley, with his finger on the trigger of his GLOCK. His gaze was completely dispassionate every time he glanced back to see teeth and blood spattered over the pavement.

“Oye, Diego!”

Marcos stiffened, stepping past the edge of the alley to look down the road to the club. He recognized the other members of Diego’s gang, now searching for their missing brother. There were four of them. Usually that would be bad odds, but Marcos was fearless, and he knew Chuito was too.

What was the worst that could happen? Death? What did it matter? Neither of them wanted to live with the guilt of knowing those bullets that had killed Juan and Marcos’s mother were meant for them instead.

“I recognize one,” Marcos told Chuito.

Just like he had recognized the guy Chuito beat to death in this alley, because Marcos had dashed out of the house that night as the bullets riddled the house. GLOCK in hand, he’d gone after the two cars on foot, running until he couldn’t see them anymore as they sped off in the distance. Marcos always had a weird memory when it came to cars. All the little details stayed with him. The faces in the windows. The license plates. Maybe it was just everything about that night in particular that was burned into his brain. Whatever the reason, it had made it very easy to hunt down the fuckers who’d destroyed his family.

Too easy.

“Guy in the red shirt.” Marcos made eye contact with his cousin, who had stepped away from the body. Seeing that Chuito was going to concede the next one to him, Marcos tucked his gun into the back of his jeans, because they’d decided to kill each of those fuckers responsible with their bare hands. “You can take out the others, but leave him for me.”