The Slayer (Untamed Hearts #2)(74)

“Yeah, I bet.” Chuito looked over at Tino, seeing himself so clearly in him and having nothing but remorse for Tino as he said it. He picked up the energy drink Tino had in the cup holder and looked at it for a long moment before he decided to ask, “Did you deal?”

“Hasn’t everyone?” Tino laughed. “But no, not since I was a kid.”

Chuito scowled at that, hearing the catch in his voice he knew so well. This wasn’t an ordinary gangster he was sitting next to. This motherf*cker was mafia. Everyone knew Romeo Wellings was connected, and his connection was sitting right next to Chuito.

Jules was f*cking crazy to be shopping for a good time inside this family. Chuito tried to tell her that too, in his own way, but she wasn’t listening, and it wasn’t like it was in him to rat them out.

She was a cop.

At the end of the day, no matter how much he cared about her, Chuito couldn’t sell out his own. If she wanted to f*ck Romeo Wellings, Chuito supposed she would just have to figure it out.

“Is Romeo involved?”

“No,” Tino assured him, as if understanding the real question. “We keep him pretty far out of the loop. He’s our half brother, not the connected half. The only thing he’s guilty of is being related to me and Nova.”

“Your other brother?”

Tino nodded, looking miserable all of a sudden. “We had to leave him in New York. Someone’s gotta take care of business.”

“There’s no blow. There is an underground scene here, but it’s more heroin and crank. Coke is a city drug,” Chuito whispered, feeling genuinely bad to tell him. He knew there was crack if Tino really looked, but he didn’t feel like revealing it to him. “How much did you bring?”

Tino gave him a harsh look. “What makes you think I do blow?”

“Give me a f*cking break,” Chuito snorted in disbelief as he held up the energy drink. “I used to use this trick with my mamá. Your brother thinks you’re riding off the caffeine. He doesn’t know?”

“Fuck off,” Tino said rather than admit it.

“I’m not f*cking judging you. Do the blow. Go home and do enough for both of us,” Chuito told him with a pained laugh. “I mean, you’re mafia. You f*ckers never go down. If I was mafia, I’d still be living hard.”

“We go down.” Tino sighed. “We go down all the f*cking time. One way or the other.”

“You want out?” Chuito asked him curiously, because he had a hard time imagining that. The mafia was the elite of the elite. Their people owned the underworld; being in meant you were untouchable. “How deep are you?”

Tino gave him another sidelong glance before he admitted, “I’m made.”

“Holy shit.” Chuito looked around the car again, admiring what being a made man got you without having to fight for it. “What are you? Twenty-one?”

“Twenty-two.”

“How the hell did you manage that?”

“My father f*cked my mother, that’s how,” Tino said bitterly. “Then she died, and he decided to give a f*ck by making me deal for him when I was twelve. Lucky me.”

Chuito considered that, hearing the pain in Tino’s voice. Chuito had chosen to be a gangster, but Tino was born into it. That was clearly a very different set of circumstances.

“How long you been using?”

“’Bout that long.”

“Ay Dios mio, Tino. Go home,” Chuito told him with a wince of sympathy. “You do not want to crash here. Especially when you’re already pissed off at the world. Get off it slowly.”

Tino shook his head at that. “I can’t get off it at home.”

“Why the f*ck not?”

“’Cause I have to do shit at home that makes me want to keep using it,” Tino snapped at him. “If I’m not dealing and I’m not an accountant, what the f*ck do you think I do for the administration?” He pulled off the side of the road and turned off the car. Then he dropped his head to the steering wheel. “Just forget everything I just said.”

“No, it’s cool.” Chuito forgot about the car for a moment and admitted, “We got the same specialty. Don’t worry about it.”

“I thought you were a car thief?”

“I stole cars ’cause it got my dick hard,” Chuito said with a laugh. “I killed motherf*ckers because I was really good at revenge.”

“I promised Nova I’d stay. At least for a little while,” Tino whispered, accepting his explanation without flinching, as if murder and revenge was the same as talking about the weather. “I hate leaving him. They don’t have his back like I do.”

“My cousin’s in deep in Miami. We grew up together. It sucks,” Chuito agreed. “He won’t move here.”

“How bad’s the crash gonna be?”

“Since you were twelve?”

“Took me a while to get up to cocaine,” Tino mumbled, his head still against the steering wheel. “But then it just got easier to do it.”

“I get it.” Chuito sighed as he looked at him. “How often?”

“Three or four times a day.”

“Co?o.” Chuito closed his eyes as he remembered getting blitzed that often. “Can your brother send you more?”