The Viper (Untamed Hearts #1)(59)

They used to be Marcos’s family too. A lot of them still were.

When Chuito bought the extra plots, Marcos asked him why so many. There weren’t that many of them left to bury. Chuito said he was planning ahead, like he always did, and in his mind they would be married and have children before they died.

Marcos had laughed in his face.

What sort of lie was he living in that little country town that let him believe they were going to end their days old and married with kids? Back then he thought the funeral director had just seen a famous fighter with a lot of money and screwed him.

Now Marcos understood a little more. He sorta liked the dream of being old and married with grandkids running around. He wondered what sort of kids he and Katie could make together. He smiled, thinking of little girls with their mother’s kind heart.

It was a nice dream, but still just a dream.

And he still thought the funeral director screwed his cousin.

At least on his side.

Maybe Chuito would marry his neighbor and have a bunch of country kids with funny accents.

Marcos pulled his sunglasses off from where they rested on the brim of his hat and put them on his face, deciding he wanted to be buried in shades like a baller. Maybe his Miami Heat hat too. None of this suit business. He hated that people always ended up looking cleaned up and saintly in death. Plus, the faces of the dead weren’t nice to look at. Somehow, the pain was still there no matter how much some mortician tried to fix it. Marcos had seen it on every friend he’d buried. He’d seen it on his mother and Juan too.

He needed to write this stuff down, because he sure as shit didn’t want people standing over him seeing the look he had on his face when he died. Shades and a hat were a necessity.

Jesus, he was depressing the f*ck out of himself.

He’d take the bullet. So what?

He would be remembered as hot and sexy and young instead of old and gray. There were worse fates. He tried to tell himself that, but he pulled his hat and glasses off and set them on the grass behind him, before he rolled on his side and propped his head in his hand.

“I met a girl,” he confessed to his mother in Spanish. “She’s smart. A teacher. She’s a gringa, but I think you’d like her.”

He sat there for a long time talking to his mother, telling her about Katie. About Chuito. About the Cuban, Fernán, Aunt Sofia was seeing. He basically caught her up on all the gossip because it had been too long since he’d been there, but his mother’s and Juan’s graves were well kept.

Aunt Sofia had obviously been out here recently.

His mother had probably already heard all about Fernán.

He touched her grave when he was done and then walked around the back of the two headstones, so lonely there in the row, and sat next to Juan. He wrapped an arm around the cold gray marble and closed his eyes, trying for one moment to imagine his cousin’s slim shoulders, still wiry with adolescence.

“Don’t worry,” he promised him. “I got this. I catch Chu’s back, you catch mine. That’s the deal. Put in a good word for me. As long as you make sure I end up in the right place, I can do this.”

He closed his eyes, because that marble felt nothing like the warm, enthusiastic energy that had always surrounded Juan. He was starting to feel a little insane to be asking a stone for a favor, but then the sun hit Marcos’s face just right. It glowed bright red behind his eyelids, and the breeze ruffled his hair like it had the day they’d buried both of them, making him believe, for just one crazy moment that wherever they were, his mother and Juan were just fine.

It couldn’t be such a bad thing, getting out of this hard world that hurt more than it soothed. Marcos had a f*ckload of sins on his soul, but maybe if he did the right thing, Juan could get him in.

“And watch over my chica for me,” he added as the leaves above him rustled. “Take care of it until I get there.”

He bumped his knuckles against the headstone and got up. He picked up his hat and glasses, and walked away without looking back. He was stronger now. It helped in a way the tequila hadn’t.

There was no traffic when he drove to the warehouse, which was a f*cking miracle. He felt Juan with him the whole way, and when he turned off his truck, he left his gun in the glove compartment.

Chuito would call him soft for it.

But Chuito wasn’t trying to get in good with God on the slim hope he’d be hanging out with Juan and his mother instead of all the thugs he’d killed avenging them.

Marcos used to like the smell of the warehouse. The stench of burned metal mixing with stale beer and bud. This time when it slapped him in the face, Marcos thought of Katie, of what she would think of the sparks flying and the billow of marijuana from the couches in the corners.

The laughing teenagers too young to be smoking, let alone packing heat.

Angel really was a bastard for recruiting them. They seemed so young to Marcos now. They didn’t have records or a reason to fight. What if one of their houses was the next one to be targeted? What if one of them had a Juan at home like Marcos and Chuito had?

They all surely had mothers who didn’t want them there.

Marcos couldn’t change the system. He was too ingrained and bitter to even begin to attempt that, but he could make a stand. The sparks stopped flying when he put his glasses up on the brim of his hat and walked over to Angel sitting on a couch in the corner.