Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Shell shock. A few of the Tejanos Pintados guys had flinched for weeks after a particularly violent firefight, some dropping to the ground when Orlando Lopez’s forty-year-old Cadillac had farted out a backfire anywhere in the barrio.
As Greer lay soft and warm and spent in Alex’s arm, his chest felt like someone had just blown holes in it.
When he’d asked her what she wanted, all she’d said was you.
Him. Jesus. If she knew exactly why Javi had died, she wouldn’t even be able to look at Alex’s face, much less with that kind of trust and desire in her eyes.
But if he was building a new life, did she really have to know? His mamá and Nicolás were far from here, doing fine.
He would’ve never imagined creating a place for himself somewhere like Prophecy. But it was like being almost-home. And if he planned to stay at Wild Card—at least for now—he could afford to give her part of the story.
He threaded his fingers in her hair, tugged back her head.
Her eyes were closed and her lips were lifted with the kind of dreamy smile some women got when they ate a big piece of tres leches.
Her tongue darted out to skim across her bottom lip as though she were tasting their lovemaking all over again.
Their limbs and bodies were still sweaty and tangled. The scent on the air was a combination of man, woman, and unshared secrets.
She sighed, nestled her head in his palm. “Alex, that was…”
World-changing. At least his.
“…appetite-inspiring.”
That surprised a laugh from him. He was still inside her, and she was already thinking of food.
But food would give him the perfect excuse to take a step back, regain his footing, and ditch the damn condom that would soon become a problem if he didn’t do something about it. “How about I feed you then?”
Her eyes opened then, but her expression was still too dreamy, too soft. He needed Greer to be tough and practical. A starry-eyed woman couldn’t handle some of the things she should know about him.
He pressed one last kiss to her swollen mouth before lifting her off his lap. The sound she made was a huffing groan.
“What’s the use of a rubber,” he said, “if I don’t get rid of it?”
She pushed her curls away from her face and smiled at him. “You’ve got a point.”
“Grab your clothes and I’ll make you something to eat.”
That got her on her feet in a flash. “Chile rellenos?”
Alex dealt with the condom and looked around for a place to toss it. Somehow, flipping it into the pasture seemed wrong. Yeah, no one told you about this part of the doing-it-al-fresco thing.
“Give it to me,” she said.
No way in hell. He scooped up his clothes in one arm and nodded toward the barn. “Inside.”
Walking through calf-high grass barefoot and bare-assed wasn’t the most comfortable thing Alex had ever done, but they made it back to the barn with no snakebites. Greer headed for the bathroom while he did a toss and wash at the kitchen sink.
He stuck his head in his fridge. He had no poblanos, so chile rellenos weren’t on the menu.
But chilaquiles he could manage. He stacked corn tortillas, leftover verde sauce, an onion, and a couple of serranos on the counter.
By the time Greer emerged from the bathroom, he was dropping strips of tortillas into a skillet full of oil.
Over the pop and sizzle on the stove, a rumble-grumble came from Greer’s direction.
“Was that your stomach?” he said.
One side of her mouth quirked up. “In case you didn’t notice, we burned a lot of energy out there.”
Oh, he’d noticed. His skin still felt as though static energy was buzzing beneath it. But his stomach was tight with the knowledge that she deserved more background than he’d given her to this point. But first, he would feed her.
Thirty minutes later, Greer was staring down at her empty plate with the kind of blissed-out expression she’d worn in his arms. Either his cooking was damn amazing or he needed to work on his sex skills. Alex took the last bite of his chilaquiles, topped with cotija cheese.
Nah, he was safe on the sex thing, because his food was pretty damn delicious. He grabbed their plates and busied himself stacking everything in his small sink. Now that the sex and snack were over, he wasn’t sure how to move forward.
While his hands were under running water, Greer came up behind him, looped her arms around his bare waist. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to ask me to stay.”
Without bothering to cut off the faucet, Alex turned to face her. The way her cheek rested against his chest just about broke him. “I want you to.”
She reached beyond him to shut off the water, then slowly dried his hands with a kitchen towel. As though he were an overstimulated child, she reached out and led him to the bed, switching off the overhead light along the way.
By the rustling sounds in the dark, it was clear she was pulling off her clothes.
No barriers. No emotional armor.
Only the dark.
Alex did the same, dropping his jeans beside the bed.
He lifted the quilt and climbed in after her.
He curved behind her body, her back warm and pliant against his chest. He wrapped an arm around her, cupped her breast as though they snuggled into bed like this every night.
Her curvy butt was cozy with his crotch, and although his dick was plenty interested in investigating that situation further, Alex told it to fuck off.
He buried his face in the hair at her nape, breathed in the scent of his soap on her skin, and pressed a kiss to the bump of her spine.
Greer covered his hand with hers. Could she feel the steady beat of her own heart the way he could? She squeezed his knuckles in a reassuring way, as if she knew he had something important to tell her. Something he couldn’t admit in the light, to her face.
“When…” he started, paused to swallow. “When I was a kid growing up in San Antonio, my mamá tried the best she could after my papá died. She was one of the lucky ones in our neighborhood, an educated Latina. But that meant she not only had to teach but take private tutoring on the side. Lot of nights she wasn’t home until ten or later. ”
Greer remained silent but rubbed her thumb along his knuckles in silent support.
“People think babies and toddlers need a lot of supervision. What they don’t realize is that a teenage boy is way more likely to do stupid shit that will get him into trouble.”
Another stroke from Greer.
“How much do you know about gangs?” he asked.
This time, her response was a rapid clutch and release. “Not much. I mean, I’m sure we’ve had gang members in Prophecy, but gang activity? Not that I know of.”
“It’s pretty common where I come from.” Alex laughed, with disgust rather than humor. “You make it to the age of thirteen without being recruited and you’re considered a puto.”
“Which you’re most definitely not.”
Now that made him laugh for real, but it still hurt his chest. “Thanks. But sometimes I think learning to walk away would’ve been a whole hell of a lot smarter.”
“It’s in the past,” she said, her voice low and soothing in the shadowed nest of sheets. “Did…did you ever…”
“Kill someone?”
She nodded, her hair sliding along his chin.
“No. I was able to work a pretty sweet deal to stay off the streets and out of the day-to-day gang shit. Even that young, I was already a pretty talented tattoo artist. Learned after school from an old guy who used to run with one of the cartel gangs. With me around, Tejanos Pintados didn’t have to go to a shop, didn’t have to get their tats done by some half-assed stick-and-poke guy with dirty tools. ”
“So you did gang tattoos.”
Jesus, so damn many cryptic symbols they swirled in his nightmares. Sideways Texas outline. Upside down numbers. Barbed wire and dots and initials. “Yeah.”
She traced her fingertips along his forearm as though following the line of the serpent winding its way up his flesh. “And yours?”
“I often hid the gang symbols in other images for the cholos. They just assumed mine were the same.”
“You would’ve been pretty important to them.”
So damn valuable that when he’d wanted out, they took one of the three people Alex loved most in the world. “I tried to leave.”
Her breath caught and she strangled his wrist.
“Tejanos Pintados isn’t one of the big boys, never messed with the cartels out of Mexico and South America. But that also meant they lost guys to the other gangs.”
“And they thought you wanted into another gang?”
“Loyalty is currency. So they decided if I wanted out, then they’d replace me with someone just as—if not more—talented.”
“Oh, God. Alex—”
“All the protection I’d bought my family was gone before I ever tried to make my way out. They picked up Javi, told him that if his hermano was a puto, then they’d take the next best thing.”
“Why didn’t you—”
“Do something? I did. Told El águila, the head of the gang, to let Javi go. That I would stay. The Tejanos Pintados had all they needed from the Villanueva family. But I’d already blown their trust by that point.
And Javi, he didn’t get the same immunity deal I did.
He designed and inked the tats, but he was also a soldier, one of the guys out on the streets.
” For the first time in forever, Alex felt the pressure building behind his eyes.
A pressure that if he ever gave in to would prove he was exactly the puto El águila had accused him of being.
“You…you don’t have to tell me.” Her voice was shaky, tentative. Nothing like her normal take-charge tone.
“You said you wanted me, Greer. Did you mean only the clean and pretty parts? Because there aren’t a hell of a lot of them. What you’re hearing now, that’s the real Alex Villanueva.”
Seconds ticked by before Greer blew out a breath. “Go on.”
“I was at an ese’s house inking a new soldier, sinking my needle into his virgin skin when I heard.
Javi had been gunned down by a rival gang.
Wasn’t even over drugs. Supposedly some bullshit honor thing over a chola Javi was messing with.
That girl wasn’t private property. She was a puta—would do any cholo who’d score her a little something to drink, snort, or shoot. ”
“Your brother was with her?”
“No, he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The wrong place because I was such a selfish cabrón. If I’d just kept my mouth shut, kept my head down, it would’ve been okay.
Ruben, one of my vatos, was El águila’s younger brother.
It was an unspoken understanding that they’d leave Javi alone and then Nicolás when he was older. ”
“That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have been approached by another gang, right?”
Alex lay there in the dark, her words smothering his brain. That thought hadn’t ever crossed his mind. But it was fucking moot. “His death is on my head.” Weighed so damn heavy on his heart every day of his life.
“So what happened next?”
“I packed up my mamá and little brother, sent them to stay with a relative in Georgia. I stuck around San Antonio, hid for a few days, long enough to make sure they were settled and safe. That no one else knew where they were.” And to steal twenty grand from the gang’s coffers.
Javi’s blood money. Enough to keep his family above water until Alex could start sending them cash. “Then I disappeared too.”
She clutched his arms, her body vibrating against his. “What would they do if they knew you were this close to San Antonio?”
Probably put a bullet between his eyes. Then again, he’d kept an ear to the ground and found out gang leadership had changed hands. His old friend Ruben was El águila’s successor. “You can see why I want to keep a low profile in this competition thing.”
“I’ll cancel any media coverage.”
“No, you can’t afford that. I just need you to keep them away from me.”
“What if you win?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”
Riding in the backseat of his mamá’s third-hand minivan, Nic felt like a four-year-old who’d been kicked out of preschool for biting the other kids. All he needed was the friggin’ car seat and a handful of cheese crackers.
But when he was given his obligatory phone call after the police picked up him and José, dialing his mamá’s number had been his only choice. Jesus only knew what José’s papá would’ve done if Nic had called him. He wasn’t known on the streets of San Antonio for being a bighearted humanitarian.
Nic’s mamá cast a quick glance at José, who was riding shotgun, then caught Nic’s eye in the rearview. “Nicolás, what is going on here? You know the last place I want to find you is in a police station.”
“A mistake, that’s all. The police made a mistake.”
“They said something about vandalism. That you two were painting graffiti on public property. Is this true?”
“Mrs. Villanueva—”
Nic cut off José’s inevitable confession. “It was my fault. My idea, Mamá.”
Her mouth went tight, making all the hardships she’d shouldered in her life visible in the lines around her lips. “You promised me,” she said, her voice hoarse and hurt. “You promised me if we moved back home that you would stay out of trouble. That you would be a good boy.”
At fifteen, he didn’t exactly consider himself a boy anymore. Hadn’t considered himself a boy since his brother walked out of his life eight years ago. “They let us go, didn’t they?”
“I talked with the officer who picked you up. It didn’t sound like a mistake. Maybe I should drive by the library and you can show me the walls. The ones you didn’t paint.”
Yeah, that wasn’t gonna happen. Because even if Nic was innocent, José was guilty as hell. “Just drive home.”
“Your father, your brothers, they would be ashamed, mijo.”
What bullshit. Nic had barely known his papá, and his brothers had done way worse from the stories Nic had heard from his eses. “It’s over,” he said, closing his eyes and slumping down in the threadbare seat. “So just leave it alone.”
“Do not tell me what is over and what to leave alone. If you get into trouble again, we will pack this car and move straight back to Georgia.”
He didn’t bother to open his eyes. It didn’t matter what his mamá said, because there was no way he would go away and leave José alone and unprotected.