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Anthony must have seen the finality in my eyes when I faced him again. As I stood up, he started sputtering more nonsense in a final attempt to avoid his fate.
“Por favor, Ryan. I did nothing wrong,” he pleaded. “In fact, I can get you information. There’s been some guy asking questions about Mario and what he’s involved with,” he rushed out.
I scoffed at the audacity of this man to continue to treat me as if I was an idiot. Like I would trust the claims of someone desperate to stay alive after being caught as a rat. I reached to pull out my Sig from where I kept it at the small of my back.
“Too little, too late, Anthony. You knew my reputation and still thought you would be able to outsmart La Brujita de Los Muertos. You made your bed. Now you get to die in it. Dile hola al Diablo para mí,” I said.
He opened his mouth, but a shot rang out in the room before he could waste more of my time. Anthony’s head snapped back from the impact. He was lucky I didn’t have steam I wanted to blow off, or his death would have been longer. A warm feeling caused me to look down at my once white shirt, now splattered with red.
“The one fucking time I don’t wear black,” I barked out in annoyance.
Sergio huffed a laugh while opening the door leading into the hallway.
“I don’t know why you own anything other than dark colors for your particular line of work. Maybe you should start wearing painting coveralls, Brujita. Or at least stand back before you blow someone’s cabeza off.”
Of course he’d mastered the whole patronizing father tone.
I rolled my eyes. Sergio always made me feel like a teenage girl explaining why she needed another shade of pink lip gloss instead of a ruthless killer.
“Listen, Sergio,” I poked him in the chest before pushing past him and heading toward the office, “I’m a female who was raised by the streets, and now I work for a criminal organization. Sometimes I want to remind myself and others that I like dick; I don’t have one. Why do you think I keep this dark hair so long and luscious?” I paused to look over my shoulder at the large man who had a twinkle of amusement in his eye. Letting out an exasperated huff, I continued my speech, which felt pointless.
“And I didn’t ‘blow his head off.’” My fingers mimicked quotation marks. “I shot him between the eyes,” I reasoned.
“At close range, Brujita.”
He’d heard many versions of my “I don’t have a dick; I just like it” speech since his son Mario had brought me home like a stray puppy at seventeen. That was when Sergio became a pseudo dad, stuck taking in and semi-raising a teenage girl. And since he was the leader of the largest cartel in Mexico, it was a bit of a fucked-up raising.
I knew how many grams went into a block of cocaine, the going rate to pay off a Mexican politician, and my favorite subject—how to extract information from an uncooperative participant. Not to mention I could fully disassemble and reassemble nearly any firearm I came in contact with. I didn’t think Sergio knew what to do with a teenage girl, so he’d treated me like he did Mario. Now I wondered why he hadn’t just sent me away, but Sergio and I had an unspoken agreement not to discuss certain subjects. So I never asked.
But I didn’t end up too bad—killing and questionable moral compass aside. It could be argued that those traits had lived inside me well before I came to Los Muertos. Seeing as how my first kill had come before I joined the cartel. Vigilante justice made my soul sing, and being in Los Muertos allowed me to let my monster out to play. But I never killed anyone who didn’t deserve it. Not that it made me a good person, but only killing those who were guilty kept my conscience feeling clean. Luckily, fucked-up personalities were basically a job requirement in this world, so Los Muertos had accepted me with open arms.
“Well, it’s a good thing my dry cleaning bill gets paid with Los Muertos’s money,” I sassed.
An amused huff sounded from behind me, bringing a smile to my lips before my mind wandered again to my past. If I ever went to a therapist, I was sure they would tell me I had major mommy and daddy issues stemming from the fact they had been murdered when I was a kid. They fell victim to a random street mugging. The cops investigated, but there wasn’t much to go on, so the case went cold.
I managed to get a hold of the case notes. My father had been stabbed. But my mother…I was sure she wished a stabbing was all she had to endure. The need for justice had burned in my veins like a disease, consuming me from the inside out. Until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I ran from my foster family and moved into the slums of Tucson.
Hunting.
Waiting for the moment when I could take my vengeance—deliver my form of justice to the man who’d killed my father before assaulting my mother and sliding a six-inch blade between her ribs into her heart.
Jimmy, my first kill. The sin I would spend my life atoning for.
I pushed open the door to the office, trying to regain focus on the present. Velvet brushed my arms as I plopped down in the chair facing the desk, leaving my regular chair open for Sergio to take.
Sergio studied my face for a moment before speaking softly.
“Brujita, you know you could go do anything you wanted with your beauty and brains. You do not owe Los Muertos, or Mario, anything. You will be family regardless of whether you choose to do something outside the cartel.”
He’s mentioned before that I could leave, but where would a tainted soul like mine go? What would I do when the call for blood got too loud? And I very much doubted Mario would take me leaving well. He barely tolerated me being here in Arizona when he had to travel back and forth to Sinaloa, Mexico.
Sergio must not have expected an answer from me, or maybe he knew the answer already, because he continued speaking.
“I’m here because there is an MC that wants to move into the territory. And they want to partner with us to run our guns.” He paused to take in my reaction.
My head nodded in understanding as I tried to keep up with the subject change he’d just hit me with.
“We would be their supplier for their deals, taking a cut, obviously. And in exchange for exclusively supplying their MC, they will do our local drops. Taking that task off your plate,” he finished.
