The Slayer (Untamed Hearts #2) (29 page)

Tino wasn’t moving, and Chuito punched him once in the arm, hard enough to make Tino suck in a sharp breath and sit up. He blinked at him in shock. “Wha—”

Chuito held out the phone. “It’s your brother.”

Tino rubbed his face and asked, “Which one?”

“Nova.”

Tino groaned and fell back into bed. “Tell him I’ll call him back.”

Chuito just stared at him wondering why Nova was the brother he decided was worth dismissing. That was certainly not how Chuito would have played it. Romeo was a big motherfucker, but at the end of the day he was only a fighter like Chuito. This Nova asshole had just told him he wasn’t only vindictive, but creative about it.

Chuito put the phone back to his ear and started, “He said—”

“Put him on the phone now,” Nova said slowly in Spanish. “Tell him he’s got two seconds before I call Romeo.”

“He says he’s going to call Romeo.”

“
Vai a morire ammazzato!
” Tino shouted in Italian before he added in English, “Leave me alone, Casanova!”

“Did you hear that?”

“When he told me to go and die murdered, I heard it,” Nova assured him. “Put that shit on speaker.”

Chuito put it on speaker.

“Valentino—”

“
Cazzo! Vai via, stronzo
.” Tino moaned and then put the pillow over his head.

“I’m trying to help you,” Nova said in English. “You are in a stranger’s house for this shit.”

“He’s a friend of mine,” Tino said and then lifted his pillow and glared at Chuito. “Or I thought he was.”

“Are you joking?” Chuito told him with a laugh. “He threatened to get creative. We’re not
that
good of friends.”

“The accountant.” Tino pointed at his phone and snorted. “The paper pusher. He’s not the creative one, motherfucker. Wake me up again, and I’m gonna get creative.“

Nova let loose in Italian before Chuito could respond.

Chuito caught very small fragments of what he was saying because some of their words were close to Spanish, but for the most part it was lost on him. He only understood the agitation and hurt in Nova’s voice.

Tino responded by yanking his phone out of Chuito’s hand and tossing it across the room.

Then he rolled over, showing Chuito his bare back, dismissing both of them. Chuito stared at him for a few seconds, realizing that he had fallen asleep that quickly.

Chuito walked around and picked up the phone. Seeing that it was still on, he said in Spanish, “He’s asleep.”

“Fuck.” Nova groaned. “Do I need to come down there? I will if I have to. It doesn’t matter how deep the shit here is. I only got two brothers.”

“No. Let him sleep it off. If he can sleep without nightmares, you should let him. I wish I could’ve done that.”

“I guess.” Nova sounded tired and exasperated. “I knew this was why he went with Romeo to Garnet, but I didn’t realize how bad it was going to be. He must have been lying to me about how many girls he’s been dating.”

“The breakup makes him confrontational,” Chuito said, hoping to ease his feelings a little bit. “It’s not personal.”

“I know.” Nova sighed. “Look, Garcia, give me your bank account information.”

“Why?” Chuito asked him curiously.

“To compensate you.”

“For what?”

“For taking care of my brother,” Nova said as if it was obvious. “He says you’re a friend of his, so I guess I’m good with that. Tino doesn’t say that often.”

Chuito got the impression that even crashing his ass off, Tino had somehow communicated that he was in a safe place. Still, Chuito didn’t feel the need to be compensated for it. “You don’t—”

“I don’t like being indebted to someone,” Nova cut him off. “Give it to me.”

Chuito didn’t know his bank account numbers off the top of his head, but he sat down and grabbed his laptop and looked them up. He gave all the information to Nova but then added, “That’s really not why I did this. I do okay, Moretti. I make quite a bit of money fighting.”

“I’m not just an accountant, despite what my brother has to say about it,” Nova said cryptically. “I can’t afford to owe people favors. Push Refresh on your account.”

Chuito did it and stared at the screen for several heartbeats as he looked at the pending transaction. He leaned in closer, because he honestly thought his eyes were playing tricks on him.

“Are we good?” Nova asked.

Chuito was fairly certain not accepting would be perceived as an insult. “Sure, we’re good.”

“This whole situation doesn’t go any further than us.
Ever
. There are only two people in this world who aren’t expendable to me. Right now you’re protecting one of them. Do you understand what I’m paying for?”

“I understand. The secret is safe,” Chuito whispered as he stared at his bank account in shock. “Your brother’s safe too.”

“Okay, give me your number. I’m going to call back every few hours and check in. Even at night.”

“I don’t sleep much. Call as much as you want.” He gave Nova his number and then asked, “Did you live in Puerto Rico?”

“No.” Nova sounded amused, as if he had been waiting for it.

“But you don’t have an accent. You sound Boricua,” Chuito said, because that more than anything was freaking him the fuck out. “How?”

“’Cause I’m boss, cabrón,” Nova said with a laugh.

It was casual, but as Chuito looked at his bank account once more, he understood what Nova was really telling him.

“Yeah, I guess you are,” he agreed.

Nova wasn’t just boss.

He was
the
boss.

And Chuito had his brother crashed on his bed and a quarter of a million dollars in mafia money in his bank account for his silence.

It turned out the blow was his downfall after all.

It put him in bed with the Italians.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Garnet County

May 2012

Getting off the blow had mellowed Chuito a lot.

He’d been short-tempered and wired when he was in Miami. Always looking for the next fight. The next car to steal. The next dangerous thing to help him forget that his sins left his brother and aunt in early graves and his cousin with a criminal record.

Then he spent three years in his Garnet prison, and his life was basically training, eating, working out, and spending time with Alaine. That was the extent of his existence. Sometimes he’d show up in Vegas or some other big city, win a fight, party for a few days, and then he went back to his Garnet prison.

He’d done three publicity tours.

Those were all right. He liked seeing different places. He liked talking to the fans, especially other Latinos.

But for the most part life had gone from high-speed to crazy slow.

Being friends with Tino taught Chuito that drugs really did affect people differently and getting clean did too, because there was nothing chill about Tino Moretti.

He was full throttle from morning to night after it took him exactly one week to crash from a powerful blow addiction. He slept through the whole fucking thing. His depression was minimal, and nothing about him seemed altered or worse for the wear when he simply upped his caffeine consumption and started to train to be a fighter as effortlessly as he did everything else.

As much as Chuito loved being Boricua, he decided if he could have chosen, he would’ve been born Italian.

If one was inclined to be a gangster, Italian was definitely the way to go. They had generations to hone that shit. They picked their women to make better mafiosi offspring. They actually bred to be as pure and hard-core as possible. Chuito knew that Tino’s mother had been his father’s mistress rather than his wife, but he also knew she’d been a pure Sicilian, Italian-speaking daughter of immigrants from the Old Country, and his father knocked her up not once, but twice. It was almost as if he had planned on making an heir and a spare in Nova and Tino.

That was highly fucked-up.

Especially knowing how well he’d succeeded at it.

Though Chuito did have to wonder if Tino was this amped up naturally, what he’d been like on blow—probably scary as fuck—not that anyone here would notice.

Everyone liked Tino. He was a fun, easy guy to be around and was one of those people who could say whatever the hell he wanted and people thought it was part of his charm. Women flocked to him like they did to Marcos, as if they were completely oblivious to the undercurrent of danger that surrounded them.

Even Romeo seemed to largely dismiss anything hard about Tino, and he was his brother. Though Chuito had noticed Romeo was also a sort of father figure, which was the reason Tino had been willing to tell off Nova when he was crashing, but answered the phone in a fucking heartbeat if Romeo was calling.

It was the strangest shit Chuito had ever seen in his life.

No one saw the gangster in Tino.

No one.

Not even Jules, and she saw everything.

Chuito was alone in knowing one of the scariest motherfuckers out of New York had landed in Garnet.

“The fucking Russians, man,” Tino was ranting as he bench-pressed after hours at the Cellar because he was a night owl too. He looked up at Chuito, who was spotting him. “I know that’s why Nova is tense every time I talk to him. Before I left, he was up to his ass in comrades. I don’t know why the old man keeps getting in bed with them over and over again. Their rules are jacked.”

“Are you supposed to be telling me your shit?” Chuito asked him. “Nova said—”

“Nova hates the Russian mafia more than I do,” Tino went on as if he hadn’t heard Chuito. “Did you know they aren’t supposed to get married? What I can’t figure out is if they aren’t getting married, where the fuck do they keep coming from?”

“They don’t have kids?” Chuito asked in surprise.

Most of the gangsters he knew had kids, and the Italians were worse than Latinos. Never underestimate a predominantly Catholic group of people’s abilities to reproduce more of the same.

“Half those fuckers are ex-KGB. Nothing scares them,” Tino assured him. “That’s why they don’t let them have kids. They make sure their associates got nothing to lose, but you would think the basic law of survival would make them bend to intimidation tactics. It doesn’t. We had this comrade in deep with the old man. A quarter of a million in arms that he didn’t deliver on. Madonn’, I tried everything, and I’m
very
good at my job. Ended up having to sink him. He didn’t even cry on the way down. Now here we are, back in bed with more Russians. Oobatz.”

“Tino,” Chuito warned. “This sounds very internal.”

“If the old man had seen that shit, he wouldn’t be so quick to sign the dotted line for all these arms deals.” Tino wasn’t listening, just kept talking instead of counting as he lifted. “That’s why accountants shouldn’t be running things. I mean, at least Nova gets his hands dirty sometimes outta some sort of brotherly guilt because I always end up with the hard jobs. That ex-KGB fucker not crying freaked his shit out too. He hates dealing with the Russians. That has to be why he sounds so stressed.”

“You really need to shut up,” Chuito growled at him and pulled the barbell out of his hands and put it back. “I’m serious, Tino. I don’t want to hear this shit.”

Tino rubbed the sweat off his forehead and laughed. “What? Who are you gonna tell? The Feds? I got shit on you too, motherfucker. We’ll go down together if you sell me out.”

Tino knew Chuito’s stance on law enforcement and was clearly using it as leverage because he needed someone to talk to now that the only form of communication he had with Nova was the phone, but Chuito still couldn’t help but point out, “Nova will
sink me
if he knows you keep telling me this shit.”

“You’re a friend of mine,” Tino said as if that alone made it okay. “Nova wouldn’t sink you. Besides, look at where we are.” He held out his hands to the empty gym, because the two of them were working out alone after hours. “Not even the Feds are gonna show up here. I have swept this gym for bugs six times. Nothing. I’ve never been in a place that I didn’t find a bug. It’s like the wastelands for washed-up gangsters.”

“What does sinking mean?” Chuito asked curiously, though he knew he shouldn’t.

“You sink them.” Tino pointed to the ground. “In the water. Concrete.”

“You fuckers actually do that?” Chuito was shocked. “I thought that was a myth.”

“You wanna stroke out my brother, give him a bloody body to hide. Everything’s gotta be neat with him. Who’s gonna find them at the bottom of the friggin’ ocean?”

“Do you kill them first?”

“Why would we do that? Then you gotta clean it up. I don’t want their DNA all over the place,” Tino said as if it was obvious. “What did you do with the bodies?”

Chuito shrugged. “I just left them there.”

“You didn’t worry about going down for it? You didn’t use chemicals? Nothing? Chemicals will eat a body faster than the ocean will, and you motherfuckers have the Everglades in Miami. All those fucking gators. A lotta dead liabilities have been buried in the Everglades.”

“The cops don’t give a shit about another dead gangbanger,” Chuito said with a bitter laugh. “Sell some blow to a few gringos, and you’ll go down for ten years, but they could give a fuck if we’re taking each other out.”

“Huh?” Tino said as he looked ahead. “What about their crew finding them?”

“Fuck them. Let them come find me.” Chuito snorted. “I wanted them to come find me. It’d give me something to do.”

“Did they find you?”

“At first.”

Tino smirked. “And then what happened?”

“They stopped finding me.” Chuito looked around the empty gym. It really was a wasteland for washed-up gangsters. “Now here I am.”

“You sent a message,” Tino said as if it explained everything. “
Old-school
. Messages work. They keep motherfuckers in line. My people learned that a long time ago. How’d you kill them?”

Chuito shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

“I sorta want to know,” Tino argued. “It had to be a pretty strong message if they stopped retaliating.”

“Mostly with my bare hands. I wanted to feel them die,” Chuito admitted as he stared past Tino’s shoulder and remembered it. “They killed my brother, man. He was thirteen. My Tía Camila was the nicest woman you ever met in your life. I lived with her since the day I was born. She was like a second mother to me. I stretched that shit out as long as possible, and then I made sure they weren’t recognizable anymore. That’s how I wanted their crew to find them, with their teeth all over the fucking pavement.”