Page 140 of The Slayer
“Maldito sea. You are freaking her out,” Chuito snapped at him. “Stop with the rats. There are no rats. You two came here. You followed me. Now we have to fucking deal with it. I’ll figure something out in the morning. We’ll put Alaine on a plane and—”
Alaine forgot about the rats for a moment and stepped closer to Chuito, who was digging through the drawers in the kitchen. “You can’t send me away. You can’t just—”
“Are you joking?” Chuito turned around and shone his phone at her. “There’s about to be world war three between the Italians, the Russians, and the Puerto Ricans. You can’t stay here, mami. You can’t even handle rats. He should’ve never brought you!”
“I didn’t know about the Russians,” Tino interjected. “And I had to bring her. How could I know she wasn’t going to sell you out to Wyatt? If I didn’t kidnap her—”
“You kidnapped her!” Chuito shouted at him, and then he turned to Alaine with a wild gaze. “Did he kidnap you?”
“She was sort of willing,” Tino argued and turned to Alaine too. “Almost completely willing, right?”
“Almost completely willing,” Chuito repeated in disbelief. He jumped at Tino so fast Tino couldn’t defend himself when Chuito threw him against a wall. “I really am gonna kill you.Ahora si que te voy a matar, cabrón.”
“Not like that!” Tino shouted at him. “I didn’t touch her! Tell him, Alaine! He has an issue with this. A big fucking issue.”
“I didn’t sleep with him.” Alaine rolled her eyes at the two of them, because this alpha-male, macho crap was so old. “And he didn’t kidnap me. I went willingly, and I’m going to stay in this rat house until we can figure out what to do about the Russians or the T-shirt fella or whatever. I still don’t know where we’re gonna pee. What happens when one of us has to pee?”
“Do you have to pee right now, Alaine?” Chuito asked as he let Tino go. “Is this an immediate issue?”
“Inevitably, it’s going to be,” Alaine couldn’t help but point out. “We have no food. No water.”
“Look, there’s water. It’s cold, but it works.” Chuito walked over to the kitchen sink and turned on the faucet, which worked. “I’ll go out tomorrow and get food. There’s lots of things we can eat that don’t require refrigeration.”
“I get the impression this isn’t the first house you’ve squatted in,” Tino observed.
“I’ve been in a gang war before.” Chuito sighed. “I used to squat in houses with my cousin. I know what I’m doing. We can survive here for a day or two, but we got to stop yelling ’cause—”
Chuito stopped talking when a knock echoed through the dark house.
An icy-cold rush of fear washed through Alaine, and for a moment, she couldn’t breathe. Both Tino and Chuito pulled their guns out from the backs of their jeans at the same time.
“What do we do?” Alaine asked in a voice that was barely a whisper as she looked toward the direction of the knock.
Then someone knocked again, this time louder.
“Stay here,” Tino said as he put the phone into his pocket.
Chuito turned his off too, plunging them into darkness. Chuito stepped up to her, pulling her into his arms. She could feel his heart beating hard, but the two of them just stood deadly still, with only the sound of Tino’s quiet footsteps echoing through the house.
She jumped when there was another knock on the door.
“Are we going to jail?” she whispered.
Chuito leaned down and pressed a kiss against her ear. “I won’t let you go to jail, mami.”
“Is it the police?” she choked, never having this heart-stopping fear of law enforcement before and hating it more than anything.
Chuito just tightened his arm around her waist rather than answer. His gun was still out, and Alaine’s mind was bombarded with images of a violent police shoot-out over this rat house.
What a horrible reason to die.
“Open the door,” a voice called from the outside. “Now.”
“Cazzo,” Tino groaned from somewhere in the front of the house. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Apri questa porta del cazzo, Valentino.”
Alaine turned to Chuito. “Is that Italian?”
