I looked, I don’t know, harder, than a woman I would have recognized.
I guessed that was fitting, though.
I was harder.
Years of being browbeaten and abused would do that to a woman.
“You can do this,” I told myself, grabbing the sides of the sink as I leaned in closer, willing that niggling little negative voice inside to believe me.
I just had to find a bus and take it to the next town.
And then the town after that.
And after that.
By my rough estimate, I was about twenty hours away from the US border. That didn’t factor in transfers and possible routes that didn’t go straight in the direction I needed to go. But it would be maybe two, three days, tops, until I could get out of Mexico and, hopefully, out of the grips of Raúl.
I wasn’t stupid.
He had contacts all over the States, but it wouldn’t be like it was in Mexico, where he had people watching all over the place.
I figured that, by morning, everyone in the country who was even loosely employed by the cartel would know I was missing, would be on the lookout for me.
Once I was on US soil, I at least knew that, worst case, I could seek out police for help. Years of living with Raúl taught me that there weren’t a whole lot of forces in either Mexico or the US that weren’t corrupted by criminals. And the cartel had a pretty good hold on most of them.
Which was why the police weren’t my first line of defense.
No.
I needed someone who could operate around the law.
Someone who could help me untangle myself from the vines of the cartel for good.
Someone who was a criminal himself.
I didn’t even know how to begin to go about finding him. The last time I’d heard anything about him, he’d been in prison. But he should have been released a while ago, barring any new charges. And I really hoped he didn’t have any of those, because he would be useless to me if he was still behind bars.
I couldn’t imagine it would be too hard to find him, though.
He was a lifelong biker.
I doubted he was going to change career paths late in life.
He would have gotten out, and gone back to what was comfortable and familiar.
So I just had to figure out which of the biker, you know, organizations—or whatever they called themselves—he belonged to.
I knew that there were a lot of those, but I also knew that Cary had always belonged to the, you know, one-percent ones. Which meant that ninety-nine percent of the biker clubs could be marked off my list. I just had to look for the criminal ones.
I also knew that Cary said he preferred to have “all the seasons.” So he wouldn’t move too south or out to California.
It was a start.
I just had to cross my fingers that he even remembered who I was, let alone was fond enough of that memory to want to get involved in my mess.
I mean, it wasn’t like I was going to have him and his biker friends try to murder an entire cartel or anything. I just needed someone “in the lifestyle” to advise me on what I needed to do to get and stay safe, to be free after so long.
God, I wasn’t even sure I fully grasped the concept of free anymore.
After so many years living under such strict control, just being able to choose the color of my nails seemed like a luxurious amount of freedom. I couldn’t fathom choosing my own home, my clothes, my furniture, what I got to eat, or what experiences I wanted to have.
With a wistful sigh, I cleaned up as much of my mess as I could, then made my way out of the bathroom, walking toward a future that was uncertain, yes, but for the first time in maybe my entire life, it was mine.
CHAPTER TWO
Cary
“It’s not natural. That’s all I’m saying,” Dezi griped as he slouched in the passenger seat of the SUV we needed to take because he claimed it was impossible for a man to balance on a motorcycle before seven in the morning.
“And don’t come at me with all that logic shit about how through the course of human history, waking up with the sun was how we always functioned and blah blah blah,” he went on, stealing my argument from me. “‘Cause the way I see it, those poor saps didn’t have two-for-one shot deals at the gentleman’s club.”
“Don’t blame me, Dez, you were the one who wanted me to drag you with me to the gym,” I reminded him.
Dezi got on kicks when it came to his fitness. Which was good since, with his lifestyle habits, if he didn’t occasionally knuckle-down and work at it, he would probably be seven-hundred-pounds and need to be fork-lifted out of the clubhouse.