Page 159 of The Slayer
“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 wasverybelievable.
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!”
