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“Yeah?”
“You do whatever you need to in order to survive. Even if…” he trailed off.
Confused, I asked, “even if what?”
“Even if you have to… just do what they tell you to.”
My blood ran cold. He didn’t sound emotional— didn’t speak in anger or worry. It was like he was completely detached from the situation. He sounded procedural. Panic assailed me as Denis smiled and clapped a hand on Matteo’s shoulder before the gun was lowered. The chill in my body didn’t disappear with the gun threat gone, if anything it consumed me further until I could feel myself dissociating— my gaze fixing on the gray divots in the concrete wall.
Yuri jerked the phone away and took it off speaker while I crumpled the paper into a ball in my hands. He waited a moment, his chest rising and falling with each steadying breath that the chamber seemed to shrink around us. When I glimpsed his face, he was sneering and rolling his neck until it popped on both sides. “Do we understand each other Mr. Clark?” He asked.
His jaw flexed as he listened to whatever my father was saying on the other end. With a nod, he ended the call and shoved the phone back into his jacket pocket.
“It won’t work,” I whispered.
With a murderous look, he swallowed back whatever rage he felt at the moment. Straightening, he asked, “why not?”
I let every insecurity flow through in that moment, every bad thought I had ever had about the man who had effectively abandoned me so many years ago. I thought I knew my father and everything he was or wasn’t capable of, but even that phone call had left me reeling. As painful as it was to admit how I really felt— like my father didn’t give a shit about me and would leave me to rot to save his own ass, I didn’t hate that it went against Yuri’s plan. “He doesn’t care about me. You picked the wrong person.”
“Is that why he sends you money every month? Pays your tuition? He doesn’t care?”
I was taken aback, my mouth gaping open. It was one thing to know about the checks every month— but the tuition? I had only just learned about that recently. How much surveillance did these men have on my father? On me?
He knew he struck a nerve and his smirk was like a slap in the face. He took pleasure in watching me squirm, in knowing he was pressing all my buttons and it was exhausting being surprised that he seemed to know every single one. But his arrogant exterior didn’t change the fact that I knew my father personally— even if we hadn’t been close for years. I still understood him better than Yuri did and I knew how much his precious job, his precious reputation mattered to him. And I was a stain on said reputation.
“He does that because he couldn’t be fucked to actually be a part of my life. Like I said, you picked the wrong person.” I kept my eyes locked on Yuri’s, challenging him when Denis flew toward me and I felt a sharp crack along my cheek.
“Shut up! I should fucking kill you right here.”
“Denis!” Yuri shouted and shoved the man out of the way. It was tough to contain the smile pulling on my lips, even as my cheek burned, but I kept my face blank. A renewed fury blasted through me. He wanted to narrow me down to nothing but I held more power than he wanted to give me credit for.
Denis shrugged Yuri off and forced out a cackle, the sound grating in my ears. “She said it herself, we picked the wrong person. Let’s get rid of her and use the kids he does seem to care about.”
He spit his last words at me, twisting the knife. Yuri’s eyebrows pulled together slightly when our eyes locked. “Matteo,” he murmured under his breath, alerting the beast behind him. “Take her back to the cell.”
Matteo moved forward on his word, wrapping a hand around my upper arm and nearly carrying me out of the room.
At the last second, I turned my head and craned to see back in the room just as Yuri reached for Denis and gripped his shirt in his fists. By the sound of the slam, I could guess that Yuri threw him against the wall. I could just barely make out his words over the sound of Matteo’s heavy footsteps. “Don’t fucking touch her.”
We rounded the corner back to the cell and Matteo guided me in, closing the door behind me. With my hands still tied uncomfortably tight, I knelt onto the mattress and sunk, resting my tender head on the fabric.
My life was hanging in the balance— strung up between a father whose follow through was questionable and the fucking Zaragoza Cartel.
The longer I chewed on everything that had just happened, carefully dancing around the memory of Eric’s scream, the more focus I put on what I knew about the cartel. It wasn’t a secret that they were brutal and uncontrollable, slaughtering any who dared go against their empire and wholly unchecked by local law enforcement and government pursuit. They were lawless, writing the rules as they went, turning neighborhoods into slums and preying off the weak and addicted before recruiting the younger generation.
They had wreaked havoc on Tamaulipas, something south Texas loved to use to stir up support of border walls and immigration restrictions while doing nothing to really protect the people. It was the same pandering my father used to get into office. He promised to move the cartels out of Texas and make it harder for drugs to be smuggled in.
It seemed like his efforts hadn’t been in vain. But now, the cartel came to right that wrong.
Based on the three demands— the Zaragoza Cartel was sick of banging their head against the wall. I wasn’t naive to think for a second they had stopped smuggling, only that it had gotten more difficult. By kidnapping me and threatening my father, they were about to eradicate every obstacle that stood in their way. And what would be their first move? Snaking their grubby, bloodied hands into the local government through me, their pawn.
But, whether they realized I knew it or not, that also meant that they needed me alive for the plan to work. And the important part was that I realized it.
And I was going to do everything in my power to fuck things up for them.
Chapter 3
Yuri
