The Slayer (Untamed Hearts #2)(27)

“He’s eleven.” Chuito shoved him again. “Stop f*cking swearing in front of him.”

“Wow.” Marcos gave Chuito a look of disbelief and then turned back to Juan. “Get me paper. I’m drawing Chu a diagram.”

“Of what?” Juan asked in English.

Marcos put a hand over his face and mumbled against his fingers, “Just get the paper.”

Juan turned to leave, and Chuito started searching for his shirt again, because he didn’t want his brother to see the star tattoos on his shoulders that branded him a thief. “Where the f*ck is it?”

“Just let him see the ink. Who cares? My mother already tanned both our asses for it. Which I still think is bullshit, ’cause she doesn’t mind spending the f*cking money we make, but we paid for the crime anyway,” Marcos grumbled. “And Juan knows we steal cars. I’m tired of wearing my shirt all the time. I work out to show this shit off.”

“I care,” Chuito argued as he found his shirt under the bench. “I don’t want him to think being a gangster is okay.”

“But speaking English all the time is okay?”

“Look, we live here now. He needs to know how to speak English. Let him speak it. It’s not like he’s going to forget the Spanish,” Chuito argued as he pulled his shirt over his head. “Doctors and shit need to know how to speak English really well.”

“That really pisses me off,” Marcos whispered. “It should piss you off too. No one has more Boricua pride than you.”

“I have f*cking pride because he’s smarter than the rest of these pendejos. Let him be him. Let him be better than us,” Chuito said as he sat back down next to his cousin. “Why do you think I steal all the cars and got the f*cking stars so we can sell them to Victor without hearing shit from the other Los Corredores? It’s so Juan doesn’t have to know what it’s like to starve and worry about money.”

Marcos snorted. “Yeah, it’s not ’cause it gets your dick hard.”

“That too,” Chuito agreed with a laugh. “Better than dealing for them, right?”

Marcos shrugged, clearly ambivalent about it. “A motherf*cker can go down for either one. What does it matter now?”

“I’m not going to let you deal,” Chuito promised him, because Marcos was a reluctant criminal at best. “You’re not going down like your father.”

His cousin just gave him a look, but then Juan appeared with paper and pen before he could argue.

Marcos took them from him. “Gracias.”

“Get lost,” Chuito said to his brother. “Go do your homework.”

“Is this about the cars?” Juan asked as he looked at the paper, because he knew the two of them weren’t going to be drawing diagrams for school. “’Cause Tía Camila said—”

“It’s not about the cars,” Marcos said as he put the paper between him and Chuito on the bench and started drawing. “It’s to make your brother chulo. You want to stay and get chulo too?”

“It’s about chicas?” Juan raised his eyebrows curiously. “I want to see,” he said in Spanish, obviously to get on Marcos’s good side.

“What the hell do you know about chicas?” Chuito barked at him. “Get out.”

“You want to be a doctor. Stay. Doctors need to know this.” Marcos laughed as he worked on his crude drawing. “It’ll be educational.”

“Get out, Juan!” Chuito shouted at him. “Now!”

Marcos lifted his head and grinned at Juan. “I’ll show you later.”

Chuito shoved his cousin. “No.”

“Go.” Marcos waved Juan off, but Chuito could have sworn he saw him wink at Juan. “Do your homework. Go be smart.”

Sure enough, Juan left with a smile.

Chuito shoved Marcos again. “You better not f*cking show him.”

Marcos rolled his eyes but went back to working on his drawing. “What the f*ck do you think you’re protecting him from? He lives in the hood. He hears a lot worse than this every day. Besides, I was making out with chicas when I was eleven.”

“You’re a pervert.”

“True,” Marcos agreed. “But all muchachos are perverts. Except for you. Look at this picture, motherf*cker. I’m going to teach you how to make any chica love you if you want them to or not.”



“Chuito.”

He jerked when the hand touched his shoulder, and blinked into the semidarkness, expecting to be back in his old garage. Instead of his cousin’s light eyes, he found Alaine’s staring down at him.

Her soft hand was on his bare shoulder. Her unusual shade of light red hair, so pale it almost glinted pink in the moonlight, fell around him like a veil, and he stared at her as he fought his way back from his dream.

Chuito’s mind was still far away, making him feel fourteen again, insecure in his own skin, already too big, too mean for love, and haunted by the sins of a man he’d never met.

It was an odd memory to find its way into his dreams, except it wasn’t. It had been a long time since he’d fought the demons Alaine was churning up. These particular ones were the most terrifying, and Chuito had fought a lot of scary-ass demons in his time.