The Slayer (Untamed Hearts #2)(55)

“You screwed our receptionist?” Wyatt barked at him. “Tino—”

“It was one time.” Tino held up his hand. “That doesn’t count.”

Wyatt opened his mouth, looking back through the glass doors, and then shook his head. “Do y’all want to tell me what’s going on?”

“He said I act like I’m from Jersey.” Tino gestured to Chuito accusingly. “That’s like me saying I can’t tell the difference between him and that Mexican you signed on. Eat any tacos lately, esse?”

Chuito decked him, hard.

So hard, in fact, that Tino ended up on the pavement.

He actually fell down in the face of Chuito’s repressed fury.

“Oh hey!” Wyatt pushed Chuito back, clearly on the defense. “We’re not on the mat!”

Okay, correction, Tino fell sometimes but recovered quickly. He reached around Wyatt and grabbed Chuito’s foot, jerking violently and knocking him off his feet. It had been a long time since Chuito had been in a street fight. He’d forgotten just how unforgiving cement was, but he recovered quickly too.

He ignored the white-hot burn in his forearm and kicked Tino in the ribs, and then he kicked Wyatt too, because the pendejo was in the way. Scrambling his way around Wyatt and fighting off Tino’s blows wasn’t easy, because one of them used to be a hit man, the other was a sheriff, and both of them had spent a lot of years training to be professional fighters.

But Chuito was the only one of the three with several title belts.

When Tino swung at him, Chuito grabbed Tino’s wrist and jerked hard enough to hear a pop. There was white noise all around him, Tino swearing in Italian, Wyatt cursing in English. Chuito might have felt victorious if Wyatt hadn’t got him in a choke hold, tightening his forearm hard enough that Chuito couldn’t breathe.

Tino, dirty fighter that he was, caught Chuito in the eye with a punch that nearly blinded him with the pain.

“Fuck me, Tino!” Wyatt screamed. “Clay, hold him!”

Chuito kicked back, catching Wyatt’s knee, but not hard enough to break free. Tino clocked him again. This time his world spun, and he thought for one moment that he was either going to black out or puke right there in the front walkway of the Cellar.

Chuito was off his game.

The drinking wasn’t helping, and he knew it.

He blinked, seeing that Clay now had Tino in a similar choke hold, but Tino was still fighting like Chuito was, kicking back, trying to hurt Clay bad enough to loosen his hold. Clay was the world’s greatest ground-and-pound fighter. No one broke out of his hold once he got them locked in.

Good.

Maybe the bastard would black out.

“Chuito,” Wyatt growled in his ear. “Am I gonna have to arrest you?”

“Fucking arrest me.” Chuito’s voice was a whisper rather than the growl he felt inside. “I dare you.”

“Oh my God, really?” Wyatt snapped. “’Cause he called you Mexican? That shit’s racist.”

“He is a Mexican,” Tino grunted.

“Jersey much? Keep him away from an open flame,” Chuito rasped back. “He’s got enough product in his hair to be flammable.”

“I’m starting to get a little offended, esse.”

Chuito fought to lift his head and glared at the Mexican who was leaning against the wall, bare-chested and sweaty, showing off all his tattoos without shame, as if he weren’t insulting Chuito just by sharing the same air with him.

“Fuck off, Blood,” Chuito said in Spanish. “You should be dead right now.”

“Yeah, you’ll do a good job with that.” The Mexican snorted in disbelief and then, just to add insult to injury, flashed the Latin Blood gang sign at him. He was obviously confident their conversation was private in Spanish and went on, “You got out, and now you think you’re better than me? Where do you think I come from, motherf*cker? What do you think I’ve been doing while you were earning your fancy title belts? You can’t handle someone from the streets anymore. You’ve been living with the gringos too long.”

And all of a sudden, the Mexican became someone else.

Not more than twenty-one, with that hard, angry look Chuito had known so well because it glared back at him every time he looked in the mirror. He didn’t want to, but he saw himself, and that sucked all the anger right out of him.

It wasn’t this guy’s fault Latin Bloods had killed Chuito’s brother and aunt.

He’d been a kid when it happened.

Chuito stopped fighting and went back to just trying to breathe past the tight hold Wyatt had on him.

“What’d y’all say?” Wyatt asked, obviously knowing he wasn’t holding Chuito back anymore.

“Nothing,” Chuito whispered; then he met the younger fighter’s gaze that was narrowed in defensiveness. Chuito knew he was waiting to be sold out for the criminal he was, when he’d probably come here to escape gang life. “I won’t say anything,” he said in Spanish. “It’s not you. It’s me. I had some issue with Latin Bloods in Miami.” Then he went on in English, “I’m sorry. I’m having a bad day.”

“No shit, you’re having a bad day.” Wyatt still sounded completely incredulous. “I might have to actually arrest you for this, Chuito. You got into this fight in broad daylight, outside the cage with everyone looking.”