Page 6 of Bought By Sin

The arrival of these men outnumbered my “side” of this standoff, but that still wasn’t enough to make me freak out. I couldn’t.

This development was worrisome with how remote we were in this sunbaked stretch of the desert.

But it didn’t change a damn thing.

I was still a bought runner. A worker with no freedom or rights.

And I was still determined to never, ever submit.

Not in spirit, no matter who these bosses were supposed to be.

I drew in a steady breath and willed myself to be prepared to run.

As soon as I can.

3

LEV

“You’ve never heard of anyone shooting the messenger?” I asked the Hernandez runner again as I approached. Dean walked with me, his shoes adding to the crisp crunch of our shoes on the dirt and stones underfoot.

Coming in from the side like this, I kept the profile of the short woman within my line of sight. She couldn’t turn and face me or Dean. She was prohibited from angling her head toward us to track who else was joining the scene. Unless she wanted to risk this Garcia runner shooting her, she had to stay like she was.

Unflinching.

Unmoving.

Perfectly still.

I narrowed my eyes at her, unsure how she could be this calm, this cool and collected under pressure, the heat notwithstanding.

“If anyone’s gonna be shooting anyone,” the Hernandez said smugly, “it looks like it’ll be him shooting her.” The low chuckle he tacked on to his comment aggravated me. None of these Cartels were built on much loyalty. Carina had convinced us that the Garcia Cartel was trustworthy without her brother in charge anymore, but speaking in a general sense, these clubs of smugglers and criminals lacked the close sense of family that we had in the Bratva.

This asshole would just let us kill this woman? And it would mean sparing his life? Yeah, right.

“And she ain’t anyone we can’t replace.” He shrugged.

“Who is she?” I asked, studying her profile. I tried not to notice the swells of her breasts, the slender curves at her waist, the high cheekbones as she ground her molars and didn’t move or speak. I saw her for what she was. A sexy-as-fuck woman caught in a bad position, smack in the middle of this handoff that had twisted into a standoff instead.

“No one,” the Hernandez runner repeated, with a scoff this time. “She’s just a runner. A slave Emilio bought a few years ago.”

Slave?

People were trafficked day in and day out in our world. Mostly, it was for sex slaves, but it wasn’t unheard of for children or women to be sold into working for the Cartels.

For someone who was bound to work for the Cartel, she seemed sturdy enough. Trained well. Strong and not weak despite the heat under the sun, a gun aimed at her face. As I continued to eye her from a distance, I wondered how she could act this tough. Was it because she had no choice, forced to try to survive the best that she could as a bought woman? Or was it because this was how she was made, how she was shaped to behave?

Dean cleared his throat and approached me. Like me, he kept his gun out, holding it down by his side. With his free hand, he indicated for me to glance at his phone. While I looked down, he stayed on the lookout, watching the men stuck in this standoff over the fake money bag.

I skimmed the incoming texts quickly. Another runner who’d come with Dean had driven off to pursue the Hernandezes who’d fled. He’d caught them, and all three were dead. I nodded once in acknowledgment. It’d serve us no purpose to continue asking this last Hernandez runner where the others were. We’d killed them. The news of their death could crawl back to Emilio Hernandez or not. I didn’t care. It wouldn’t matter. The lives of runners were expendable and fickle like that. It went with the nature of the job out here in this dangerous land.

Dean slid his phone in his pocket and stepped back, deferring to me and how I’d like to handle this situation.

It wouldn’t take much to wrap this up. Sure, it sucked that the Hernandez Cartel were stiffing the Garcias on a payment, but that was something Jorge, the new boss of the Garcia Cartel, could manage himself. Dean and our other Bratva runner had only come as backup. A courtesy. I’d only come as further backup.

No payment would be happening today. Not out here in the desert. All that was left to do was remove the threat of this cocky Hernandez thug aiming his gun at the Garcia runner. With three of us here, they were outnumbered. The Hernandez and this slave with him couldn’t survive a bullet from my gun, Dean’s gun, and the Garcia’s. Not simultaneously. Someone was dying, and it wasn’t going to be me or the ones on my side.

Yet, as I failed to keep my gaze from the stubborn woman standing tall and straight, eyeing death directly and not breaking her composure, I wasn’t so sure that her death was necessary.