The Viper (Untamed Hearts #1)(68)

He sucked in a startled breath, but before his lungs could recognize it, he got hit. Hard. The pain above his left eye was crazy. Marcos had gone down on cement in street fights, and it didn’t hurt like that.

It mixed the sensors in his brain.

All of a sudden this wasn’t about the payout and feeding Neto’s kids. In Marcos’s mind, this f*cker was trying to kill him, and he acted appropriately. When he tried to hit him a second time, Marcos jerked his head to the side on the mat and then punched blindly, because he honestly couldn’t see anything out of his left eye.

For the second time that month, he heard the crunch of bones break, and, knowing he’d broken this guy’s nose, Marcos used the fighter’s shock to reverse their positions.

Somewhere in the distance, Marcos could swear he heard Chuito shout, “?Co?o!”

But that just added to the realism of the threat. Usually when someone was trying to kill Marcos, Chuito was there cursing about it. He punched the fighter again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

Someone was hitting the mat, shouting, “You won! You f*cking won! Get the f*ck off him! MARC!”

Marcos looked up, seeing that Chuito had forced his way to the ring and was crawling under the ropes. He grabbed Marcos’s arm, pulling hard and making him crawl off the fighter, who was groaning and moving, but he was bleeding like crazy.

“Is he gonna die?” Marcos whispered, because he remembered, somewhere in the back of his mind, promising not to do that again.

“No, I think he’s okay.” Chuito reached into his back pocket and pulled out a money clip. He got down on his knees next to the fighter. “Hey, muchacho. You all right?” The fighter nodded and rolled over, trying to get up, but it was obvious his equilibrium was off. Chuito put the money on the mat. “Take a cab to the hospital, okay? I’ll pay the bill.”

“Tell them it was a street fight,” the emcee added. “It’s a bad area. They won’t question it.”

Chuito scowled up at the emcee and then got to his feet. The emcee didn’t seem to care about the death glare. He shouted into the microphone. “Winner! El Vibora!”

“I cannot believe I used to do this shit!” Chuito turned to Marcos and shouted, “Don’t touch anything! Hands at your sides! Did you touch your face?”

Marcos dropped his hands to his sides when he realized why Chuito was so shaken. He shook his head in answer, but that was a mistake. He took a step forward when the room started to swim.

“We’re out!” Chuito pushed at the center of Marcos’s back, the only part of him that didn’t have some strange fighter’s blood all over him. He leaned into him and said in his ear, “You pass out, chica, and I’ll kill you myself.”

“Hey, are you guys coming back?” the emcee asked hopefully. “I can promote next week and—”

Chuito swung around and gave the emcee a look that would freeze the Atlantic Ocean. The guy took three steps back. Obviously satisfied, Chuito shoved at Marcos again.

The crowd was going insane. Marcos saw the flash of cash exchanging hands, but everyone parted for them. The bright lights of hundreds of phones still filming was glaring, but no one touched them. The emcee wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to piss off Chuito.

The fresh air felt better; it helped to wake Marcos up a little more. Chuito was cursing worse than Marcos usually did as the two of them walked around the building until they found a hose resting in the grass.

Chuito followed it until he found where it turned on. “Take off your shorts.”

Marcos did it rather than argue, and stood there in his boxer briefs as Chuito sprayed him down. If the fresh air didn’t wake him up, the cold water certainly did.

“?Me cago en ná!” he shouted, because Chuito wasn’t being very forgiving with that hose. “It’s cold, motherf*cker!”

“Good!” Chuito growled in Spanish as he avoided Marcos’s face with the hose, but the rest of him was drenched. “You sure you didn’t touch your face?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay, let me see your hands.”

Chuito dropped the hose and pulled his phone out of his back pocket. He turned on the flashlight and shined it down on Marcos’s knuckles, the light glaring in the near darkness as it flashed on Marcos’s hands. He squinted to see, because he was still half-blinded, though his left eye didn’t feel swollen. He blinked, realizing it was the blood f*cking with his vision.

He instinctively reached up to feel his eyebrow, but Chuito smacked his hand down before he could. He grabbed Marcos’s other hand, still studying with his flashlight. He flipped it palm up, the crease in his forehead intense.

“You sure you didn’t touch your face?”

“I am sure.” This repetitiveness was starting to get annoying. “You’re not my mother.”

“Don’t even, Marc!” Chuito growled as he straightened up and grabbed Marcos’s face. Then the pendejo shined the light right in his goddamn eye.

“?Co?o!” Marcos brought up his hand again, but Chuito knocked it down once more as he studied the injury. Marcos squinted, closing his bad eye to better see the look on Chuito’s face. It wasn’t very comforting. “How bad?”

Chuito winced. “I hope your chica likes scars. Right through the eyebrow. You need stitches.”