The Slayer (Untamed Hearts #2)(109)

“I didn’t sleep with him.” Alaine rolled her eyes at the two of them, because this alpha-male, macho crap was so old. “And he didn’t kidnap me. I went willingly, and I’m going to stay in this rat house until we can figure out what to do about the Russians or the T-shirt fella or whatever. I still don’t know where we’re gonna pee. What happens when one of us has to pee?”

“Do you have to pee right now, Alaine?” Chuito asked as he let Tino go. “Is this an immediate issue?”

“Inevitably, it’s going to be,” Alaine couldn’t help but point out. “We have no food. No water.”

“Look, there’s water. It’s cold, but it works.” Chuito walked over to the kitchen sink and turned on the faucet, which worked. “I’ll go out tomorrow and get food. There’s lots of things we can eat that don’t require refrigeration.”

“I get the impression this isn’t the first house you’ve squatted in,” Tino observed.

“I’ve been in a gang war before.” Chuito sighed. “I used to squat in houses with my cousin. I know what I’m doing. We can survive here for a day or two, but we got to stop yelling ’cause—”

Chuito stopped talking when a knock echoed through the dark house.

An icy-cold rush of fear washed through Alaine, and for a moment, she couldn’t breathe. Both Tino and Chuito pulled their guns out from the backs of their jeans at the same time.

“What do we do?” Alaine asked in a voice that was barely a whisper as she looked toward the direction of the knock.

Then someone knocked again, this time louder.

“Stay here,” Tino said as he put the phone into his pocket.

Chuito turned his off too, plunging them into darkness. Chuito stepped up to her, pulling her into his arms. She could feel his heart beating hard, but the two of them just stood deadly still, with only the sound of Tino’s quiet footsteps echoing through the house.

She jumped when there was another knock on the door.

“Are we going to jail?” she whispered.

Chuito leaned down and pressed a kiss against her ear. “I won’t let you go to jail, mami.”

“Is it the police?” she choked, never having this heart-stopping fear of law enforcement before and hating it more than anything.

Chuito just tightened his arm around her waist rather than answer. His gun was still out, and Alaine’s mind was bombarded with images of a violent police shoot-out over this rat house.

What a horrible reason to die.

“Open the door,” a voice called from the outside. “Now.”

“Cazzo,” Tino groaned from somewhere in the front of the house. “Fuck, f*ck, f*ck.”

“Apri questa porta del cazzo, Valentino.”

Alaine turned to Chuito. “Is that Italian?”

“Yeah.” Chuito sighed, sounding concerned. “I think he was hoping for the heat.”

Chuito pulled his phone out of his pocket and walked to the front of the house. When he opened the door, the light from outside illuminated Tino leaning against the wall near the front door, his gun still in his hand as he looked at the ceiling.

“Hey,” Chuito said as he pushed the door open farther and looked out to the driveway. “Where’s your car?”

“I took a cab from the airport.” Nova Moretti stepped in, wearing a three-piece black suit as if he had just walked out of a high-powered business meeting.

“You caught a flight this late?” Chuito asked as he closed the door and locked it.

“I had to charter a plane.” Nova’s face lit up in the darkness when he turned on his phone. “Are there rats in this house?”

“Probably.” Tino huffed. “I wouldn’t rule it out.”

“This is really special, Valentino.” Nova let out a broken laugh. “I cannot wait to hear this. I’m just dying for it.”

“Told you we should’ve called him,” Chuito said in annoyance.

“How’d you find us?” Tino asked his brother. “My phone was off.”

“But Alaine’s wasn’t.”

“How did you figure out her password?” Tino growled, now sounding completely furious. “How do you do that?”

“That’s for me to know, and you to never find out.” Nova walked into the kitchen and shone his phone on her. “Hi, Alaine. I like the picture you sent Jules. Cute.”

“Tino took it.” Alaine shrugged. “At least she knows we’re okay.”

“I think that’s questionable,” Nova argued, shining the light on the stuffed animal and frowning at it. “Nothing about this seems okay.”

“It’s not a rat,” Alaine offered. “I found that out the hard way.”

Nova winced and then looked back to Chuito and Tino, who followed him into the kitchen. “Why are we here?”

Tino, Chuito, and Alaine exchanged shadowed looks under the lights of three cell phones.

“Okay.” Nova shone his phone on Tino, lighting up his face. “Should I go first? I’ll tell you what I know, and at any point one of you can jump in and correct me.”

The three of them just exchanged muted looks of misery.

“No one minds if I smoke?” Nova asked as he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his suit jacket. “’Cause I have a feeling I’m gonna need a f*cking cigarette for this shit.” He leaned down, lighting a cigarette with something shiny and silver. Then he pulled back and blew out the smoke. “So, according to my sources, yesterday Tino and Chuito got arrested for fighting with each other. Then, after they were released without being charged, they apparently decided the best way to make up was sharing, because we all know sharing is caring. So you two”—he gestured to Alaine and Chuito with his cigarette—“showed up at Tino’s place last night, for what, I can only assume, was a very interesting evening of debauchery.”