2. Mila
MILA
Sweat dripped down my face, tracing along my cheeks and slipping into the corners of my eyes. The sun beat down on me as I stood out here in the desert.
Baking.
Burning.
Sweltering and steaming under the heat of midday hell.
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.
For the first time in my sorry existence, I wanted my own power.
My freedom that I’d been robbed of since I was just a twelve-year-old girl with horrible parents.
Behind me, Tomas’s voice rang out loudly as he argued with the Garcia.
More sweat dripped down my face, but refusing to budge, stubborn not to move at all, I stared hard at the man who threatened to kill me.
Stinging agony filled my face and irritated my sinuses as I resisted the urge to blink.
The salty sweat made my eyes water furiously, but I would not blink. I would not react.
“Huh?” He pressed the gun against my forehead. Exposed to the sunshine, the metal was hot already, almost like a brand. I still didn’t flinch. A single millimeter of a movement could prompt him to pull his finger on that trigger.
“Where are your friends hiding?” He didn’t take his eyes off me as he spat a wad of chew off to the side. A dribble of brown clung to his lip. “Where’d your friends take off to after trying to weasel out of paying up what they owe?”
Friends?
I stayed mute at his ridiculous demand.
Friends?
First of all, I wasn’t saying a damn thing. My silence was the only semblance of power I could trick myself into thinking I had. My word was the single thing that was mine, no one else’s, and so long as I kept my mouth shut, it would balance the scale somehow—at least in my mind.
Second of all, I had no clue. I wasn’t part of the Hernandez outfit by choice.
I was their thing, their purchased slave and grunt worker on smuggling runs like this.
I wasn’t one of them to have the privilege of knowing plans, hideouts, or anything that would count as intel.
They didn’t tell me anything except what to do.
Wherever they were hiding out here in the desert was a secret they had to themselves.
But thirdly, it was a joke. A downright cruel joke for this Garcia Cartel man to ever think I had friends. Or pals, a buddy, or even a moderate acquaintance.
Seething with hatred that simmered with that fact, I stared him down and dared him to make that mistake again. To repeat his stupid demand that I tell him where my “friends” were hiding.
I didn’t have any friends. I never had. I never would so long as I was stuck in this life of slavery and indentured captivity due to that contract my parents had signed ten years ago.
A decade of being a thing meant that I had owners. Masters. Bosses and leaders and supervisors. But no matter which Cartel currently had purchase of me, and regardless of where I was sold to, I would never be able to call any of the men who ruled this desolate world a friend.
“She ain’t telling you shit,” Tomas said from behind me, almost gloating.
My anger sizzled a little hotter at his smug tone.
Like it was a fact.
That I wasn’t a person to speak with but a thing to be conditioned and trained.
“Then you'd better start talking,” the Garcia thug said. Without taking the gun from the position at my forehead, he narrowed his eyes. “And you'd better think twice about trying to get out of here without paying up.”
“Hey, it ain’t my call,” Tomas said. “I ain’t the one who packed any bags. Ain’t no one told me what to bring or what was gonna happen. I’m just the messenger.”
“And what,” another man said from the side, near the car that had just arrived and parked, “you’ve never heard of anybody shooting the messenger?”
The man’s snark wasn’t uncalled for. Tomas could bluff and play innocent all he wanted, but it was a lie. The whole ride over here, they were all talking about how they weren’t instructed to pay the Garcias what was owed for a past shipment.
I couldn’t turn my head to watch the two newcomers enter the scene. One had stayed by the vehicles, and with him near, it meant this Garcia wasn’t alone. It was two against two.
With that other car arriving, though, it signaled that Tomas and I were now outnumbered.
What stood out the most was the confidence from this suited man who’d come with the Garcia runner. The kind of confidence and sarcasm only a boss or leader could get away with.
These two men weren’t runners. They weren’t the dirty grunt workers who moved product and snuck around at the border and on the highway.
Oozing authority and moving with the practiced stealth only a boss could. I tried not to react.
Don’t panic.
Don’t move.
Do. Not. Panic.
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.