Page 4 of Bought By Sin

Don’t panic.

I swallowed hard, forcing it with how dry my mouth was. My tongue stuck to the top of my mouth. My throat was closing up, too tight and parched.

Whatever you do, do. Not. Panic.

Facing this Garcia Cartel member scowling at me, I refused to back down. I resisted the urge to fight back, too. Still and as stone-faced and rigid as I could be, I kept my hands raised and didn’t budge.

I wasn’t giving him any more incentive to blow my brains out. So far, he hadn’t. Despite this routine handoff going to hell in an instant, with the other Hernandez runners taking off behind me and escaping when the Garcia Cartel men realized the bags supposedly holding money were empty, this guy hesitated to pull the trigger.

In all the years I’d been bought and kept as a slave among the Cartels and gangs between the States and Mexico, I’d never found myself in such a scrape like this. Stuck as a captured runner with the end of a gun barrel an inch from my forehead. Abandoned in the middle of the desert as the gangsters who’d come with me had run off.

And in all those same said years as a slave, contracted to these lawless men, I’d never experienced such a sharp urgency to get out and get away.

“I don’t know where they went,” Tomas shouted at the Garcia, who was aiming his pistol at my head. The man wasn’t pleased that the other Hernandez crew who’d come with us had taken off after handing over the bags without money in them.

I bet if I turned to see the man who often acted like my supervisor, he’d be shrugging his shoulders, indifferent and lackadaisical about the fact that the Hernandez group’s slave was literally caught in the middle of this fiasco.

No. Not a fiasco. This was a setup, an attempt to manipulate the Garcia Cartel. Emilio Hernandez thought he could screw over a rival Cartel by having us runners show up with a decoy of the money they owed.

The other three had fled, leaving me with Tomas, a gun at my head, Tomas pointing his at the Garcia who snarled at me. And a couple of men off to the side who had just arrived.

Do. Not. Panic.

Panicking never did me any good. It was an illusion, a stupid waste of my imagination getting the best of me, a defense mechanism hardwired into my brain that wouldn’t assist me or save me out of any shitty situation.

Like the one I was stuck in the middle of now.

Like this terrible predicament of being the expendable person in this standoff.

I wasn’t sweating the fact that I had a gun at my head. It was the heat. The sun. The rising, scorching temperatures.

I’m not panicking.

I couldn’t.

This wasn’t any different from any other lousy odds I’d had to face. Since the fateful day that my “parents” had sold me to the Cartel, that damning afternoon when Christy and Jayden Beckett wanted to sell their only daughter off for whatever couple of hundred dollars they could get to afford their next hit.

This was my life, one crappy scenario after another because my biological parents decided to sign a piece of paper to make me a contracted slave. To label me forever as a piece of property and nothing more.

The Garcia yelled at Tomas again, pressing the gun to my forehead. I didn’t flinch, but the push jarred me out of my thoughts.

Don’t panic.

Don’t… give up.

This was supposed to be the last one. The final run that I’d be dragged along on and expected to run fastest and hide best. Escape was on my mind, and it seemed like time was ticking out for that to happen. Scars littered my body. I bore multiple marks of the punishments I’d “earned” for trying to escape this life of servitude before. Although I didn’t want anyone to ever have an excuse to punish me again, I had to scheme and plan to run away.

Not like the others who rode to this handoff site with me.

Not because I wanted to avoid the confrontation of trying to screw over another Cartel.

But because I needed a chance to be free.

Don’t give up.

Something had to change. A shift in the tide was due. I couldn’t be sure what was going on, but something bad was going on in the Hernandez outfit. Leaders were fighting and trying to overthrow Emilio. In the Cartel I’d been owned by before Emilio had someone buy me, those men were prone to infighting. It seemed like all these lawless groups were on borrowed time, acting more like marionettes of a bigger power.

A power I intended to have nothing to do with.