The Viper (Untamed Hearts #1)(32)

He understood perfectly.





Chapter Nine


There were sirens wailing far in the distance, making Marcos’s heart drop on instinct. The cars were long gone, and he tossed his gun into the garbage can at the house closest to him.

Then he started running back home, barefoot and bare-chested. He hadn’t realized how far he’d chased the cars until he had to make the trek back. A part of him didn’t want to go back. He didn’t want to find out what he’d left behind when he ran out of the house into a barrage of bullets. Those motherf*ckers had been shooting at his house! Where his family lived! His gun had been on his dresser. He simply grabbed it and ran out the door and into the gunfire without thinking about anything but killing them.

He should have never made it two blocks over without even a scratch.

The door was still open the way he left it. The windows were shattered. He stepped over bullets that littered the driveway, but he didn’t really see any of it. There were people out of their homes, but the house still looked ominous and unattended to, making it obvious they were all too terrified to help, and he knew why. The anger and fury was almost pulsing off the walls, and the rage had a sound to it. Chuito’s sobbing, harsh and broken with a pleading that sounded foreign to Marcos’s ears.

Chuito begged for nothing—until now.

Marcos ran up the steps and found Chuito on the floor in the living room. He’d expected him to be the one shot, and for a moment, Marcos wasn’t sure he wasn’t.

“Help me fix him,” Chuito was begging in Spanish as he held Juan cradled in his arms. There was so much blood. It was spread out in a wide, crimson pool around the two of them. The phone Chuito was holding to his ear was coated in it. His hand was shaking. “It won’t stop. Help me make it stop. Help me save him.”

Marcos’s heart felt like it had just dropped into his stomach.

It wasn’t Chuito dying.

It was Juan.

Chuito looked up at him, tears streaming down his face. “I’m sorry, Marc.”

He was sorry. Juan was lying there dying, and Chuito was apologizing to him— Why?

Then Marcos saw her lying across the couch. Saw the blood soaking her dress. He saw the wide, set look in her dark eyes, and he knew. He knew why Chuito wasn’t doing anything to save the aunt who had been a second mother to him since the day he was born. It wasn’t callousness or preference for Juan to be the one to live.

Marcos’s mother was already dead.

He’d seen enough death in his seventeen years to know there was nothing in the world that could save her.

It was a weird survival mechanism that allowed him to abandon his dead mother like Chuito had and rush up to his cousins instead. Juan couldn’t die. He just couldn’t. There wasn’t a God in the universe that would leave the two of them completely unscathed and allow not just his mother but Juan to die too. He couldn’t look at his Aunt Sofia when she got home from work and tell her that her youngest son was gone. He yanked the phone out of Chuito’s hand, falling down in the blood and feeling it soak up into his jeans as he shouted, “Tell me what to do!”

“Help is coming,” the 911 operator responded in Spanish, making Marcos realized he was speaking it too. “He just needs to keep applying pressure and—”

Chuito screamed, and then lifted his head to look at Marcos. “He stopped breathing! He’s not breathing!”



Marcos jerked awake. His body was coated in a cold sweat, and he was gasping for air, still trapped in the hellish place where every memory was so real and bone-deep it felt like it had just happened rather than something that went down eight years ago. He looked at his arm, staring at the seven blood drops inked into the body of the snake of his Los Corredores tattoo, just to reassure himself he’d gotten revenge.

But it wasn’t helping. The dream had been too real this time.

He put a hand over his eyes when he noticed the burn. He blinked to fight it as he sat there in a bed that had a soft, feather-down blanket that could only belong to a woman. He dropped his hand, staring at the pale pink paisley design, feeling seventeen again.

Co?o, how many girls’ bedrooms did he hide in after that night? If he wasn’t fighting, he was f*cking to escape the demons. Yet, even as he fought to clear his head he knew this wasn’t just any girl’s bedroom.

He looked to Katie, who was still sleeping deeply. Eyelashes like half moons on her pale skin. Her long curly hair spread out around her. He reached out and picked up a strand of it, finding it as silky in his fingers as it had been the night before.

She looked so peaceful, and he wondered what it was like to sleep like that. The barest hint of a smile tugged at her lips, and he imagined she was having nice dreams. For some reason, that made him feel better. He caressed her cheek, and she let out a little moan, reminding him of the way she’d sounded the night before. His cock jerked, which was nothing short of miracle when he was still fighting the nightmares of his past.

She turned on her side, snuggling into her pink pillow, in her pink sheets, looking so beautiful his chest hurt from it. He wanted to slip beneath the blanket and do things to her that made that pale skin of hers as rosy as everything else in the room, but he held back. They’d done it several times too many before they finally gave in to exhaustion. Against the kitchen table. On the couch. In the shower. Everywhere except the bed. The only thing they’d done in the bedroom was sleep, and he wanted to break it in, but he knew she was likely sore. Hell, he was sore, and it hadn’t been two years since he’d done it.