Untamed Hearts 1: The Viper (3 page)

“No shit?”

“No shit. Heat’s been shaking down Sebastian since I started. He finally got sick of it. I was lucky I kept the job that long.”

“Come down to the warehouse and hang.” The hope was heavy in Luis’s voice. “It’ll be a party. Old school. Just like back in the day.”

Marcos hesitated, because it was tempting to touch those wild, free days of his youth again. It was that long-ago dream that always got him into trouble, because the memories weren’t all bad. There was a time when being part of
Los Corredores
meant everything to him. It made him invincible. Untouchable. Dangerous. The days before the darkness. When the gang stood for respect and unity instead of revenge and money.

The days before Marcos’s mother and Juan died.

Before Chuito left.

And Angel took over.

“You know he’d take you back,” Luis cut into Marcos’s private thoughts. “He owes you. We all do.
Big-time
. He’ll literally pay you twenty times what you were making at Sebastian’s. They’re tagging you anyway. Might as well benefit off it.”

“Yeah, might as well,” he agreed in Spanish, feeling a little apprehensive talking about this over the phone.

He wasn’t real sure what the Spanish was going to hide; most of Miami spoke Spanish—cops included.

“And no one can do what you do,” Luis went on. “You’re a fucking artist.”

That was true, and it was nice to hear someone recognizing it again. He gave up the respect of being a lead member in Los Corredores to spare himself looking over his shoulder every five seconds, but what the hell, he was being hounded anyway.

“I got to go back home first. Take a shower.”

“I’ll tell Angel you’re coming. You staying the night?”

“Probably.” Marcos honked his horn again when someone cut him off. “
Carajo
, I need to get the fuck out of the 305. These pendejos can’t drive.”

“That didn’t work out so good the last time you tried it. I can’t believe that cop let you off a DUI. I think Chuito paid him off.”

“Some puta got in my lane that night and then took off without stopping. I blew under the limit. Way under,” Marcos said defensively. He did not like talking about that night. “I got off because that accident was
not
my fault. Chu is still giving me shit about it. I don’t need to hear it from you.”

Luis chuckled in disbelief. “That’s why you strip the cars instead of boost them.”

“We’re on the phone.” Marcos held up his hand. “Are you blitzed right now or what?”

“A little.”

Marcos grunted in annoyance, still wound tight and desperate to change the subject. It must have been more than obvious.

“Sounds like you need a party. A few bottles, a few blunts, you’ll feel better. Come hang with your bros and remember where you came from.” Luis sounded sincere. “Make some real cash for once. Get out of the shitholes you’re always staying in.”

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 assholes 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 fucking 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?

Katie had even taken to posting on craigslist, short messages sent out to Miami with the vain hope of Marcos seeing them and contacting her. All the effort got her was an inbox full of messages from weirdos, but she still posted at least once a week. At the moment, it was the
only
way she had to reach out to him.

She didn’t like that Chuito.

Not at all.

The two of them had been glaring at each other every time they crossed paths over the past several months. His contempt for her was every bit as potent as hers for him, with all his secrets and dark looks. She was strangely fearless of the light-heavyweight UFC champion. She knew he recognized Marcos’s jacket that she wore whenever it was cold. Which had been
always
since January. She didn’t care. Let him think what he wanted.

Chuito wouldn’t even give her a damn cell phone number. Jules certainly didn’t have Marcos’s contact information, and had largely discouraged Katie from seeking him out.

“Turn that one loose,” Jules said when Katie sat in the chair behind Jules’s desk and complained about Chuito’s silence on the subject. “He’s probably doing you a favor. We wouldn’t have sponsored him at the Cellar even if he hadn’t taken you out two hours after New Years. Checkered past is an understatement.” Jules glanced at a file on her desk and mumbled to herself. “Dunno why Chuito recommended him in the first place.”

Katie snorted in disbelief. Jules’s own husband had been in prison. Everyone knew it, and she would have called the pretty lawyer on it if the phone hadn’t rung. Jules held up her hand and answered it, which led to a long conversation about taxes and accounting that made Katie’s eyes glaze over. Numbers reminded her of her ex-husband. She quietly excused herself and left.

But she was due back at Jules’s desk, to glare a little at Chuito, who was always underfoot there considering he lived in an apartment above Jules’s law office, and argue some more with Jules. The last time she was there, she’d noticed Chuito had the same snake tattoo on the inside of his forearm that Marcos had. That was very curious. They had to be close friends. She was going to ask him about it the next time she saw him.

This accident had made history geek Katie Foster downright bold, and she liked the change in herself. Life had taught her nothing if not that time was fleeting and a wasted chance was nothing but a potential regret. Screw that. She had enough regrets for a lifetime.

The AP students crowded around her desk to discuss their end-of-the-year projects.

She answered their questions as she pulled on Marcos’s jacket and retrieved her purse from her bottom drawer. She’d already told Principal Jenkins she was leaving early once school let out. Jules Wellings owed her a conversation that she had been avoiding with impressive skill for almost four months. Now it was time to hit her when she least expected it.

The last of the students cleared out. Katie gathered her papers to grade, taking the time to neatly organize them in the soft-sided leather briefcase her mother had bought her the day she had gotten the job at the high school. Her mother died three months later of a rapidly spreading cancer.

Katie took very good care of her briefcase.

Which was why she didn’t appreciate it when she slammed into Grayson before she even had the chance to close the classroom door. Katie’s ex-husband frowned down at her. “Heard you’re blowing off the staff meeting.”

“Physical therapy appointment,” she lied as she dropped down to pick up the briefcase he had knocked out of her hand, and then spent the time to reorganize the papers. Fuming.

He had the good grace to bend down and help her pick up the papers from her earlier classes, but she noticed he didn’t apologize about the briefcase as she sat there brushing it off. She rubbed at a scuffmark on the corner, trying to decide if it had been there or if Grayson had caused it.

“This boy is hopeless,” Grayson mumbled, reading one of the papers in his hand. “Look at that grammar. You’d think after failing algebra three times he’d at least know how to spell.”

She jerked the paper out of his hand. “That’s mine.”

“Dumb jocks. Why the hell did we decide to stay in Garnet to teach?” He shook his head, obviously expecting understanding. “They still plague us, Katie girl.”

“Don’t call me that.” She put the paper back into her briefcase along with the rest. “I like Jason Clover. He tries hard, and Ned said he does amazing things in auto body. We can’t all rule the world through calculus.”

“Oh, a math jab.” He grinned rather than rise to the bait. “You’ve been spunky since the accident. I like it.”

“Gross.” Katie shuddered as she stood, unable to fathom that once upon a time she’d thought the sun and the moon rose over this man’s shoulders. He’d been so different from the other boys in their town. Grayson understood her love of academics, even if their interests were vastly different, and she’d gotten married without a second thought as a sophomore in college. How utterly stupid. “I have to go now.”

She’d take a jock any day over a math geek. Grayson had burned her for her own breed—likely forever.

She walked out of the room without looking back.

Ashley, the cheerleading coach, who was in the hallway instead of on the field, bumped into her before the door had even clicked closed, but this time Katie had a firm grip on the handle of her briefcase out of anger.

“Excuse you,” Ashley huffed indignantly.

Katie didn’t like Ashley when she was the head cheerleader of their graduating class. She liked her even less now. The only difference was, Katie wasn’t intimidated anymore. She just looked the striking blonde in the eyes like Marcos had told her to do and arched an eyebrow.

She might have made a snarky comment, but making fun of jocks was something she had struck off her list. It was called being an adult. Not all cheerleaders turned into washed-up, broke twentysomethings who spent their weekends at the bar hoping the bottom of her beer bottle would somehow help her reclaim the glory of eighteen.