The Viper (Untamed Hearts #1)(20)

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He took out the last of his cash and tossed it on the table. “I have to go now.”

“It’s just a stupid math analogy,” Katie said, her voice shaking as her eyes welled up like they had the night of the accident. “I hate math. I don’t even know why we’re using it. Let’s use history instead and—”

He stood up and gave her a long look. “I drove fourteen hours to tell you that you’re beautiful, chica. That’s it.”

She surged forward, grabbing his hand before he could walk off. “I don’t want you to go. I still have your jacket and—”

“Keep the jacket.” He let her hold on, because a part of him wanted her to win. “You know all those things going around in your mind. The stuff you know gangs do, but you’re telling yourself I’m different. That I never did those things. You’re wrong. I’ve done them.”

Katie shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t care if you’ve stolen a few cars.”

“We’re not talking about cars.”

“Drugs?”

“No,” he said and then shrugged. “Well, yeah, but no. Ask me what you really want to know.”

She swallowed hard, as if considering, and then looked him in the eye and actually did it. She asked, “What happened to the men who killed your mother?”

“They’re dead now.” He couldn’t even taper the pride he felt when he said it. “And I don’t feel bad about it. Not even a little.”

Katie released him, her hand dropping back to her side.

She let him go.

“I’m sorry you lost your mother,” she whispered and then looked away rather than meet his eyes. “And your cousin.”

“I’m sorry too.” He sighed, meaning it, because that horrible night had stolen something else from him. Something he wouldn’t have been able to fathom back then— wanting a pretty gringa from Garnet County to look at him as a positive instead of negative. “You have no idea how much.”

He turned to leave before she had to say anything else.





Chapter Seven


Katie ended up in the bath, as she had originally planned. Glass of wine in hand, she was reading, but it wasn’t a romance novel. She lay there with her phone, using the information she had to form a clear picture of the life Marcos had described.

One that didn’t match her vision of the man from the accident at all.

He thought she was sheltered and naive.

As she read, she realized he was probably right.

It wasn’t that hard to find the information. By typing in the description of the tattoo, Miami, and, on a whim, the fact that they were Puerto Rican, the name Los Corredores popped up almost instantly. They even had their own Wikipedia page, filled with all sorts of nasty facts like:

A particularly territorial and dangerous Miami gang. They are one of the largest and deadliest gangs in south Dade County. Known members of Los Corredores have been arrested for a wide range of criminal activities, including narcotics trafficking, shootings, homicides, assaults, and auto theft.

There was even a picture of a tattoo like the one on Marcos’s arm.

And Chuito’s.

How stupid was she to think that it was some sort of cousin-bonding thing. She had imagined that they had gotten them together.

Perhaps they had.

This picture on the Internet had only two ink drops filled in red on the back of the snake’s back, which she realized now weren’t supposed to be ink drops. They are blood. The Internet was filled with grim facts that made Los Corredores look like a very scary gang indeed.

She had a hard time equating the information with the Marcos she knew, with those beautiful, soulful light eyes that had set her on fire as he looked at her across that booth today. She just couldn’t believe the picture these articles were painting of him. She couldn’t even put Chuito in that role, and she and Chuito weren’t exactly the best of friends.

It made her realize, as a history teacher, how very different the reality was from the facts on paper, but she couldn’t stop reading, searching through the different resources, though most were police related.

One article was a study on Los Corredores’s success as an exclusively Puerto Rican gang, when Miami had a much larger Cuban population. Most of Los Corredores’s rivalry was with Cuban gangs. According to the article, they’d managed to establish a strong foothold over the past decade in Dade County through swift, deadly action whenever their territory was threatened.

Katie wondered if by threatened, the article meant shooting up a house with women and children in it. None of these articles and posts had the whole stories in them. Not even close.

She was certain of it.

And she was regretting letting Marcos go so easily, which she knew made her absolutely insane. He’d all but admitted to murder, but going after his mother’s murderers was sort of like self-defense, wasn’t it?

Katie wanted it to be. Desperately. She needed another excuse to see him and touch the magic that she felt in his presence before he left.

She closed her eyes and dropped her phone to the mat by the tub and sucked in a shaky breath, because there was no amount of denial that was going to let her believe the lie for long.

The murders he’d confessed to weren’t self-defense at all.