“Because Idon’tknow exactly what happened. Although, I can take a pretty good guess. You know, you’re pretty odd. Whothe hell decides to sleep in a junkyard when they’ve got a bed at home?”
“What?” My heart skipped a beat. “You’ve been stalking me? You fucking pervert.”
“Cálmate tus nalgas. The school doesn’t have security cameras in the locker rooms. I tracked you to that gas station, and then watched you wander around the drugstore. I felt kind of bad when they kicked you out. You looked like you needed some pharmaceuticals. Uh…then you were in that junkyard and spent time at the shopping center. And then you went to school today,” he concluded with a nonchalant shrug.
Fuck, how did I not realize I was being followed? Please, God, don’t let Carlos think Seb or Nox and his family are involved. Let them stay safe.
“Honestly, really fucking boring. What seventeen-year-old doesn’t have at least one social media account?”
“Wait, what?”
Adrian eyed me with confusion. “What do you mean ‘what’? Youdohave one?”
“No,” I shook my head. “I don’t. But how the hell do you know that?”
“It’s kind of my job,” he stated plainly.
“Your job? You’re a professional stalker?”
Adrian chuckled and shook his head. “Well…I mean, sort of? I’m a sabueso.”
“You’re a cop?” I asked warily.
“No,” he shook his head. “I do the dirty cyber work for Los Siete. Kinda like a private investigator, but I don’t usually have to do anything in person. Just digitally. Hacking when I need to, finding information or planting information, that kind of thing. Well, except today when Carlos told me to bring you to the house.”
I crackled my knuckles nervously as I watched the houses thin and give way to dark, empty farmland. Fuck, I was right. No fucking wonder Javier never let me get a phone.
“So, you weren’t actually there watching me?”
“Nah. All from the comfort of my home office,” he said with a cheeky smile.
Great. I’m never going to fucking escape this hellhole. They’ll be able to find me anywhere.
“It was pretty funny watching that guy at the gas station freak out when you showed up covered in blood. How the hell did you manage to get so fucking…messy? What’d you do, take a bath in blood? It’s not like you stabbed him in the aorta.”
“Te quie—”
The gunshot rang in my ears, and I focused on the clock on the dashboard. Seventy-two hours. Nearly seventy-two hours without him. My chest ached, and it wasn’t from my injuries.
“Aren’t you a sabueso?” I muttered bitterly. “Investigate and maybe you’ll find out.”
We turned down a road with spotlights coming from a fence that bordered one side of the street, and I tried to shake off the growing pit of nausea swirling in my gut. Adrian pulled to a stop at a large, regal gate where a security guard with a gun strapped to his chest motioned for him to roll down his windows.
“He’s expecting us,” Adrian said with a head nod, like he was familiar with the guard.
The man’s gaze lingered on me before nodding and leaning back to speak into his shoulder. The gates groaned as they opened, and we continued down a paved road lit by small lamp posts on either side of the long tree-lined driveway. We pulled into a circular drive in front of a lavish ranch house, that even in the dark had my mouth open in awe.
The ranch house, or mansion, was a far cry from what I had imagined a street gang leader or a small city mayor in south Texas to be living in.
It seemed ludicrous that a man with this much money would be slumming it as a mayor, who despite the title didn’t actually make much money. But then again, greedy people wanted more than just money, they wanted power too.
“Is he going to kill me?” I asked quickly before Adrian exited the car.
He paused, turning to face me for a brief moment. “No. If he wanted you dead, Shiloh, he’d have killed you when he killed your brother.”
I tried to release some of the tension in my body, but it was fruitless. I was still freaking-the-fuck-out over what Carlos wanted with me, if it wasn’t to kill me.
I followed Adrian out of the car. The front door was opened for us by yet another man dressed in all black, although this one was wearing the signature Los Siete look: a crisp suit. I was beginning to realize that Los Siete was nothing like the typical street gang I had pictured in my head.
