The Viper (Untamed Hearts #1)(6)
Marcos winced. That was hitting way below the belt. He didn’t like being broke, and it hadn’t been easy, especially since more cash was always there if he wanted it. The past few months hadn’t been the first time he’d tried honest work since he’d gotten out of prison; it’d just been the longest he’d managed to hang in there before he was forced to start stripping cars to pay the bills.
“Stick to what you know,” Luis went on. “We can’t all be UFC champions, right?”
“No, I guess not,” Marcos agreed, because he’d certainly tried for that ticket out of the hood.
He’d been fighting at his cousin Chuito’s side all the way back to grade school. They’d competed in the same underground matches since they were young teens. He’d just had the misfortune of being in prison the night World Heavyweight Champion Clay Powers showed up at an underground fight and pulled Chuito out of the dark recesses of gang life and into the spotlight, effectively saving him from the destiny they all shared. Thug life usually ended in a coffin or jail. Marcos wasn’t as deluded as the rest. He knew it would end badly for all of them eventually. Serving eighteen months did nothing if not provide a little perspective on things.
He’d been trying to save himself from the agony, peacefully distancing himself from *s like Angel, and more so, from friends like Luis. He couldn’t bear to bury another one after doing it so many times already. He wanted an escape like Chuito—a way to forget the connection long enough that maybe it wouldn’t hurt so bad when the next bullet found a friend.
He’d tried to get out, but the fighting spot at the Cellar was a long shot for an ex-con, and that had been before he’d smashed into Katie Foster on New Years.
He felt so much older than he should.
Before Marcos could come to his senses and start figuring out a way to find legit work, someone else cut him off in traffic. He was wound so tight, stressed about money, about telling his aunt he’d lost another job, about the cops that hounded him no matter where he went because of his connection to Los Corredores. Not selling out his friends had earned him a lifetime target on his back from law enforcement. If he wasn’t with the cops, he was against them, and the heat reminded him of it every chance they got.
Marcos rolled down his window and shouted in Spanish, but it did nothing to dispel the anxiety.
Luis laughed again at Marcos’s road-rage issues. “Six o’clock. We’ll party.”
The right thing to do was to hang up and spend the night searching online for a job, but instead Marcos agreed, “Six o’clock.”
Right then it looked like he was screwed. He couldn’t keep a legit job even if he managed to talk some fool into hiring him. He’d tried off and on for over four f*cking years now. He might as well just accept that life didn’t want him to be law-abiding.
So he’d live hard instead.
The next funeral could just as easily be his, and maybe it was better that way.
There were no miracles for Marcos Rivera.
Chapter Three
Garnet County
Shock was a handy thing.
It created an oddly hazed, almost romantic memory of a horrible car accident. A handsome fighter silhouetted by moonlight and snow. Courage. Kindness. Kinship. Marcos Rivera was burned in her brain—a tanned angel with strange light eyes and dangerous tattoos. The man himself was as much a mishmash of darkness and beauty as the memory.
If only the rest of the journey had been so pretty. Two surgeries. Hours of agonizing physical therapy. The panic attacks. Being forced to take the medicine just to function past the pain those first many weeks. Being forced to get off the medicine in order to crawl out from the covers, get back to work, and start living again. Reality waited for no woman.
Now spring had arrived.
Her arm was scarred but healing. There were still a few dull aches, but if she got a rare stab of pain it was cured by a few ibuprofen.
The break would be here before she knew it, and Katie ended the last class of the day in a very good mood.
“Don’t forget your final projects on ancient Egypt are due Friday. I’m excited to see how they all turn out.”
Most classes would groan, but this was an eleventh grade AP History class. These were the type of students who shuddered over the destruction of the Ancient Library of Alexandria whenever they studied it in class. All that history lost. Katie understood their pain. She still spent nights looking at her ceiling, wondering what knowledge that long-ago fire destroyed.
She was a geek.
Which was why she shouldn’t be in mourning over the memory of a fighter, long gone—a smoky mist in Garnet’s history like the lost Library of Alexandria. So much about him Katie would never know. He was gone by the time she got out of the hospital. She knew because she’d looked for him. Dazed with pain, eyes glassy from the pills, she had her sister-in-law Lily drive her to Chuito’s place above Jules’s office, remembering Marcos’s mention of the famous fighter that night. Chuito had informed Katie that Marcos had gone back to Miami. That was all she had ever been able to get out of him. Chuito had been annoyingly tight-lipped about contact information.
That was strange.
Katie knew for a fact Marcos didn’t get a DUI. She had a copy of the police report. He’d been below the legal limit. The phone number was disconnected by the time she called. The address on the police report was no good. All her letters got returned. Why run off and disappear like that? And why all the secrets?