Page 69 of The Slayer
Asshole still didn’t fall.
“Where was I when you decided to have a party?” Tino sounded genuinely hurt. “Bros who fight together drink together.”
“I drink without you all the fucking time,” Chuito assured him.
“Drinking alone is never a good sign.”
Chuito flipped him off, letting him know what he thought of his signs. Tino might have ended up as his best friend somewhere over the past two years since he’d arrived in Garnet, but that didn’t mean Tino’s high-energy, ballsy Italian attitude didn’t grate on a hangover.
Tino laughed and followed after him. “You think you’re pissed off now, wait until you meet the Mexican.”
Chuito stopped at the front doors to the Cuthouse Cellar and turned back to Tino as he growled, “What about him?”
Tino laughed harder. “I’m not gonna tell you.”
“Gracias for that,” Chuito said sarcastically as he opened the door. “I’ll remember that, motherfucker.”
“I’ve hung around for the past three hours just to see this shit,” Tino went on as if he was immune to any threat from Chuito.
Which he sorta was.
Even if Chuito hadn’t sold his soul to Tino’s brother Nova, he was still immune, because Tino might have the rednecks hosed, but Chuito knew what he really was.
Tino had a past darker than Chuito.
Not too many motherfuckers could claim that.
It was the reason they became friends in the first place. One washed-up gangster in this backward, redneck town was weird. Two was downright bizarre. An Italian mafia hit man and a Puerto Rican gangbanger weren’t supposed to be friends.
Unless they both landed in Garnet.
Chuito could thank Jules for that. She seemed to have a real knack for picking up reformed criminals. Her husband, Romeo, had a record, but he’d never been a gangster. The same couldn’t be said for his brothers. Romeo came with baggage, and part of the baggage was following after Chuito with a spring in his step as he walked to the MMA training cage in the Cellar.
Chuito stopped as he looked into the octagon.
Even through the cage, he could see the tattoos on the guy training with Clay.
Chuito could see them because he had spent a lot of years in Miami looking for tattoos like that. Sometimes out of paranoia, other times out of a wild, rabid need for revenge.
This was not happening.
He could not have Los Corredores shit in Miami going on.
Alaine.
And a Latin Bloods gang member training in his gym, with his crew and bleeding on the mats he had helped lay down.
Tino snorted behind him. “Why have two washed-up gangsters in Garnet when they can have three instead? Can you fucking believe that shit? They signed on a Latin Blood. I don’t even think they know it. Not even Romeo recognized the ink.”
No, hecould notfucking believe it.
His cousin lost the fighter spot to that motherfucker.
God officially had a vendetta against Chuito.
“No cobweb, so they fucking sign him,” Chuito mumbled, thinking of the cobweb tattoo on his cousin’s elbow that signified how much prison time he’d served. “Someone needs to tell Wyatt the good gangsters don’t get caught.”
“Right?” Tino snorted. “Let’s draw straws to see who wins that honor.”
