The Viper (Untamed Hearts #1)(23)

“What’s not so easy?”

Chuito’s look was haunted when he turned back to him. Then he got up and walked to the door rather than answer. “I’m taking a shower.”



For once, Marcos was in bed before midnight.

He lay on the couch in Chuito’s living room, trying to let sleep claim him. He’d had almost no rest since leaving Miami, and he should be dead to the world. Instead he was staring at the ceiling, listening to the rain outside, and trying to will away the storm of thoughts that were plaguing him. Some of it was typical, like the conflicting emotions being around Chuito always caused. He’d missed his cousin. They’d once been closer than brothers, best friends, but they had been through too much together. All his darkest memories had Chuito in them. They had the same blood on their hands and the same stains on their souls. He, more than anyone, understood why Chuito stayed in this backward, redneck town. To hide from it all. To pretend, if even for a moment, that all that terrible shit hadn’t happened.

Marcos wanted to hide too.

Preferably in the soft spot between Katie Foster’s lush tits.

When he thought about it, Marcos realized he had never been with a gringa before, and he found himself fantasizing about her, imagining a soft, pink *. He guessed that she would smell sweet, like the scent of strawberry bodywash he caught off her today. She would probably taste even sweeter. His mouth actually watered, and he had to reach down and adjust himself as he got fully hard thinking about it.

Against his better judgment, he pulled out his phone and went to craigslist, looking for Katie’s old messages and hoping Chuito was actually asleep for the night. His cousin seemed worn out too, as if he fought the same demons whenever Marcos visited.

With luck, Chuito was passed out, because those messages were better than porn at getting Marcos off, and he was having a very hard time letting go of the dream after driving all this way just to touch her. Sleep wasn’t exactly forthcoming. He might have to help things along.

He was just planning to read all the old messages he’d read a dozen times before, except they weren’t all old. There was one that was new, glaring at him from the top of the list before he even had a chance to search.


Man with unusual snake tattoo who “ran” into me on New Year’s Eve in Garnet—w4m


I’m tired of playing it safe. The slow lane has left me with nothing but regrets, and I know it’s been even harder for you as you speed through life on the other side. Maybe it was never about positive or negatives. Maybe it’s about meeting somewhere in the middle instead.

I want us to collide once more, this time on our terms, and I believe you want that too.

I’ll leave the light on.


Marcos stared at the post as his pulse thundered in his ears, and his cock strained against the waistband of his underwear to the point of pain. He couldn’t even form a coherent thought past the single offer of leaving the light on. The need throbbed through his entire body, making all his muscles tight in a raw sexual desperation he had never experienced before. Usually, he simply took what was offered, and there had been plenty.

He’d never come across forbidden fruit like Katie Foster before.

Never denied himself.

And it was made all the more difficult knowing she was willing if he could just get over that pesky little voice of a conscience that had chosen a really bad time to make an appearance in his life.

He looked at the time on his phone.

11:48 p.m.

And then he went back, read the message again, and noted that she’d posted it over three hours earlier. He was just wondering how late the light was actually going to stay on when a shout broke the darkened silence in the apartment. It was so full of fury and violence that Marcos sat up instinctively, reaching for the gun he usually slept with under his pillow.

This time it was still in the truck.

“That’s for Juan, you worthless piece of shit! I hope you rot in hell, you motherf*cker!”

Marcos looked to the open door to Chuito’s bedroom, feeling a shudder of something cold and unpleasant roll down his spine when he realized it was more than a dream Chuito was acting out.

It was a memory.



The guy had been dead for at least ten minutes, but that didn’t stop Chuito from kicking in the head of the prone and lifeless body of a rival gang member. One of six who’d fired the bullets into the house where Marcos and his mother had lived with Aunt Sofia, Chuito, and Juan. Maybe the dead * now sprawled out on the ground was the one who’d fired the bullet that killed Marcos’s mother. Or his cousin Juan, so smart and full of optimism, very different from Chuito and Marcos at that age. They’d already been cutting school and stealing cars by thirteen, but Juan got straight A’s instead. They all thought he would be the one to go to college. He wanted to be a physician, and Marcos had joked that it would be very convenient to have one in the family. A doctor wouldn’t call the cops on them for every damn injury. Now Juan was dead, and this f*cker could have been the one to do it. That was the only thought Marcos had as he watched Chuito stomp on his face until it was no longer recognizable as human.

Marcos wasn’t even affected by the gore. He just stood there, keeping an eye on the end of the alley, with his finger on the trigger of his GLOCK. His gaze was completely dispassionate every time he glanced back to see teeth and blood spattered over the pavement.