The Slayer (Untamed Hearts #2) (46 page)

“You should be happy I’m here.” He snorted in disbelief. “You think I love this? I needed to protect my family, chica. I got four sisters.
Four
. Can you imagine what that’s like in the hood when motherfuckers like those bastards downstairs are around every corner? I thought Angel was different. That was my mistake. Now I’m gonna fucking die to save your spoiled gringa ass. You don’t want to know what my people do to traitors. Unbelievable. Scream again before they come up here.”

Alaine screamed, but her heart wasn’t into it anymore, and it made Chuito start up again downstairs. He was still speaking Spanish, and maybe that was better, but it didn’t seem to help Junior.

“You better fucking tell him the truth,” Junior warned her when she stopped. “’Cause he is
really
creative. I mean, I’ve heard things about your boy, but ay carajo.”

“I don’t want you to die,” she whispered, because he reminded her of Chuito in more ways than just the superficial. “Thank you for not hurting me. We need to go down and help them. Stop them. What if—” She choked as she considered the consequences. “He’s not okay. Chu is
not
okay right now. They could kill him.”

“If we go down there right now, we
all
die. Help is coming. Keep him alive. Keep yourself alive until help gets here. You have to get undressed.” He sighed. “Maybe, if they come up here, I can convince them I’m not done and—”

“Oh my God,” she choked, and tears rolled down her face again. “What happens when they come up here?”

“We just have to hold them off until Marcos gets here.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his phone, texting someone. “I’ve told him where we are. I’m letting him know what’s happening. He has backup.”

“How far away is he?”

“Scream again?” Junior said rather than respond.

“I don’t want to,” she argued as she looked at the door. “It’s hurting him. Can’t you hear how much it’s hurting him?”

“It’s keeping him alive. Scream your ass off, and he can smoke enough bud to forget about it after we get out. Scream, chica.”

She screamed, because there was nothing she wanted more in that moment than to somehow keep Chuito alive.

“Say stop,” Junior added. “Be as creative as your boy downstairs. I believe his shit.”

Alaine tried to be creative, reminding herself again that it was keeping Chuito alive, even if it was ripping her soul out. She begged Junior to stop, and it wasn’t a hard stretch, because she wanted everything about this situation to stop.

When she was done, she looked at the door, for the first time not hearing Chuito downstairs, and it scared her. Her throat was raw. Her heart was still pounding, and her stomach was churning so hard she thought she might throw up.

“They’re still ten minutes out.” Junior sounded concerned. “A lot of shit can happen in ten minutes. You have to get naked. I’m sorry.”

She wanted to argue, but she unzipped the hoodie instead, keeping her back to him. She slipped it off and then looked at him over her shoulder. Junior turned his head when she did, because she wasn’t wearing anything else under it.

“I hate this,” Junior whispered as Alaine unbuttoned her shorts. “This really isn’t my thing. I promise. Please believe me, because—”

“I believe you.” She stood up and kicked off her shorts, keeping her back to him. Then, rather than ask him if it was necessary, she went ahead and kicked her panties off. “Jesus, you’re barely legal. I’m corrupting you.”

He laughed. “Please, chica, I’ve been fucking since I was twelve. You don’t have anything I haven’t seen.”

“Really?” she choked out in shock. “That’s worse than Chu.”

“Where did he find you? Fantasyland?”

“Your poor mother,” Alaine whispered as she looked at the ceiling, searching for any topic that’d keep her from totally freaking out and getting them all killed.

“My mother’s dead,” Junior said as he undid the zipper to his jeans. “But I don’t think she’d give a shit about it even if she wasn’t. My father’s dead too, before you do something completely white and ask.”

“Who do you live with?”

“My sisters,” he said and then added, “But why do you care, chica? You got worse shit to worry about.”

She really wasn’t going to explain her desperate need for a distraction now that she heard his pants hit the floor. He stepped up behind Alaine and held out something to her. She tilted her head, seeing that it was a gun.

“I have two,” he said as he put it in her hand. “They come in, we’re gonna jump on the bed. You keep the gun between our bodies. Don’t shoot until I tell you. Do you know how to handle a gun, or are you gonna shoot my ass in the process?”

“I know how to handle a gun,” she whispered. “My boss loves guns. She thinks all women should know how to handle one. She made sure I knew how to use one. What about yours? Won’t they see you holding it?”

“They’re not gonna think it’s weird that I’m holding mine.”

“Right.” She nodded as she looked at the gun in her hand that was small and fit her palm well. “How did you have two guns hidden? I didn’t see them.”

“I wear a holster on my calf. I keep the other one in the back of my jeans.”

She didn’t know why she did it, but she reached out blindly with her free hand and caught his arm. She tugged him closer and looked at his forearm with her back still to him. She stared at the snake tattoo that matched Chuito’s. It wasn’t full of blood drops like Chuito’s was, but there were a lot.

Too many.

And he was only eighteen.

“You’ve killed ten people,” she whispered after she mentally counted them.

“There’s worse people to have your back, huh, chica?” he said grimly. “Scream again.”

She screamed, feeling like a part of her died as she stood there naked with an eighteen-year-old boy who had the markings of a murderer on his body. When she was done, she listened for Chuito, but still she heard nothing, and that felt like a very bad sign.

“I think we’re in trouble,” Junior said behind her. “Your boy’s not creative anymore.”

“Why?” she asked, though she didn’t want to.

“They either broke him or—”

She screamed louder before he could finish that thought, hoping to hear a response from Chuito, but there was nothing, and finally she shouted at the top of her lungs, “CHU!” desperate to hear something from downstairs. “CHU! PLEASE!” She got only silence. “CHU!” She couldn’t beg for an answer, so she just let out a sob and then screamed again with tears rolling down her face, “NO! CHU! NO! PLEASE!”

This time, Alaine knew she was
very
believable.

Chapter Forty-Two

Chuito had cried once before.

In his entire life, he had only one other memory of crying. Not the misty-eyed, sometimes-emotional bit everyone gets from time to time, but actually broken, on-the-floor weeping.

It had happened just once before.

The night his brother died in his arms, he’d sobbed uncontrollably until they took his body away. Then Chuito cried again when he had to tell his mother that his sins had killed her son.

Her real son.

He was done crying by the funerals for his tía and Juan. He had moved on to cocaine and rage, but that night, when he held his brother, Chuito’s hand pressed against the open, gushing wound in Juan’s chest until Juan stopped breathing, he let every repressed emotion he’d held back for the first seventeen years of his life go.

It should’ve been enough for a lifetime.

Gangster tears weren’t ordinary tears. The cut had to be deeper than bone, a hurt that made motherfuckers unrepentant murderers.

It ripped open souls and bled out humanity.

Life should’ve taken him out five years ago, because karma had finally found him. He wasn’t even sure what he was paying for—the murders, the crime, the arrogance. It was impossible to pinpoint, because it was all shattered as he knelt there at the base of the stairs where the fucking Russians had tackled him to the floor and beaten him so bad that if the mental pain weren’t so all-encompassing, he would likely be in a whole world of hurt.

He couldn’t get up the stairs, so he sat there at the base of them, his forehead pressed against the bottom step, and just fucking cried as he listened to Alaine scream for him.

“NO! CHU! NO! PLEASE!”

He covered his face and winced, thinking of Alaine at nineteen, so fucking sweet and trusting she was willing to let a gangster sleep in her bed just to make sure he didn’t die from the blow crash.

“Please kill her.” He sobbed, because the sound of her suffering was too much. The Russian motherfucker who started all this and Angel sat on the stairs above him, their phones out, filming his breakdown, and Chuito didn’t give a shit as he begged, “Just fucking kill her.” He tilted his head on the stairs and looked to Tino, who was standing in the corner, forgotten by the Russians. “Tell them to kill her. Tell them to kill me too. You’re so fucking good at talking them into things and telling them my shit that I trusted you with. Talk them into ending it. If you were ever my friend—”

Tino’s leg was twitchy, and he was rubbing his hand against his forehead, but he wasn’t looking at Chuito. Instead he was staring at the front door. Tino hadn’t been able to look at him since he’d finally broken down and just started crying.

“I’m your friend,” Tino assured him, his gaze still on the door. “I am your friend.” He repeated it again as if he needed to remind himself of it. “I am.”

“CHU!” Alaine screamed, and even from upstairs he could hear the tears in her voice. The horror. The pain that loving Chuito had caused her. “PLEASE, CHU!”

“Bullshit,” Chuito choked as his shoulders started shaking with the sorrow. He pressed his forehead against the stair again and said for the hundredth time, “I hate you. You brought her here. You talked them into this. You have no idea how much I hate you. I’m gonna find you in hell, Tino.”

He kept chanting it even though it was juvenile, because it was easier than acknowledging just how much he hated himself in that moment. Everything Alaine had worked so hard for, her happy ending, her innate trust in the world, he could literally
hear it
being destroyed.

“All you did is give them what they wanted. We’re gonna die anyway. They were gonna end it for her before this happened.” Chuito lifted his head and looked at the Russian and Angel, who were sitting there, shoulder to shoulder, and filming him like a sideshow. “Look at this.” He turned back and glared at Tino, with tears rolling down his cheeks. “You
owe me
to look at what you gave them.”

Tino looked, though he still didn’t meet Chuito’s gaze. He stared at the Russian and Angel on the stairs instead. They turned their phones, filming Tino’s reaction that was bored at best. He just arched an eyebrow as they filmed him.

Then Tino turned around and went back to staring at the door. His arms folded over his chest, his leg still twitchy.

“That’s what you get for messing with the Italians,” Angel announced in Spanish with a laugh as he continued filming Chuito. “They’re selfish motherfuckers. All of them. Watching it bite you in the ass is better than hearing that bitch get it. She’s
very
hot, Chu. I’ll give you that. I’m definitely hitting it after Junior’s done.”

“What’d you say?” the Russian on the stairs next to him asked.

“I said I’m hitting that next.”

“That’s hardly fair,” the Russian argued. “We’ll take turns while we wait for the other Italian to get back.” He gestured to the Russians looming behind Chuito. “Abram, go. Take Vlad with you.
Our turn
.”

“No!” Two other Russians grabbed Chuito, dragging him to the side. “Don’t do this. She doesn’t even understand what evil is. Or she didn’t—” His entire world became blurry again as he fought against their hold, but some of his fight was gone. He couldn’t beat down nine Russians and Angel, no matter how desperately he needed to. “Please don’t do this. She’s innocent.”

“I know. That’s what makes this so much fun.” The Russian laughed as his friends walked up the stairs.

Chuito screamed, because it made a horrific situation a thousand times worse.

The Russians holding him back let go, and Chuito silently sobbed as he listened to the heavy footfalls on the stairs, like the sound of hell marching up to Alaine. He couldn’t even yell at Tino anymore.

Now all he could do was blame himself, which was what he should have been doing all along. This was his fault long before Tino had done anything.

So he cried while they filmed him doing it.

The house was oddly quiet as they all listened, even Chuito, in some sort of undeniable need for self-punishment. That was why they heard the car door open and close over the sound of footsteps above.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

“That’s more than one Italian,” the Russian on the stairs said. “That’s—”

The
pop, pop, pop
of gunshots cut him off, and Chuito lifted his head, just as the Russian and Angel jumped up in unison, because the shots weren’t from outside.

They were upstairs.

In that one moment, while they all stared up the stairs in shock, Chuito caught a blur of motion out of the corner of his eye. It was so fast Chuito barely had a chance to turn and see Tino seize the Russian closest to him. He wrapped his hand around the gun the Russian held, and another gunshot echoed through the house.

The Russian hadn’t dropped to the floor before Tino yanked the gun out of his grasp like he had nothing to lose.

Then the deafening sound of war exploded without warning.

The loyalty must have been programmed, because Chuito turned and caught the leg of another Russian. If Tino had decided this was the end, Chuito was ready to go down with him.

He’d been ready for a while now.

Once Chuito downed him, he grabbed the Russian’s gun hand and used it to fire on him like Tino had. He got him in the face, but he didn’t stop to notice the carnage. He rolled over and pointed the gun in his hand at the stairs.

Neither the Russian nor Angel had time to grab their guns.

It happened that fast.

The front door burst open before Chuito could even take stock of the situation. For a moment, he thought Tino had died in the gunfire, but then Tino stepped forward, his gun leveled at the Russian and Angel.