I gathered up the hair and tossed it before going for the box of dark brown dye, mixing, and pouring it all over my head.
I’d never dyed my hair before.
And I hadn’t been prepared for how different I would look, how strange it would feel to look in the mirror and see someone who was not quite me looking back.
By the time I was done, I had dark dye staining my arms, neck, and a couple of dots on my face since washing all that out under a bathroom sink with just an empty bottle to use as a shower head had been a lot more complicated than I’d anticipated.
But it was done. That was all that mattered.
I set to work on the makeup with clumsy fingers and only a cursory knowledge of how to use any of it.
In my childhood home, makeup had been considered prideful and, therefore, sinful. In my ex-husband’s home, he’d seen it as “whorish.”
And then Raúl had been too controlling to let me experiment.
So I was working off of random snippets I’d caught on commercials or TV shows. Which meant that my mascara had smudged all over my eyelids, my liner was a lot more raccoonish than I’d set out to do, and my dark lipstick looked like it was bleeding outward off my lips. We weren’t even going to talk about how lopsided my brows looked.
But it was different.
Different was all that mattered, not good.
I lifted the liner one last time, pressing a beauty mark up on one cheek, masking a distinguishing dimple I had there.
By the time I changed into a pair of linen shorts and a tank—clothes Raúl would never let me be caught in outside of the confines of the master suite—I wasn’t sure I would even recognize myself if I saw me on the street.
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.
He would go for a few months, eating endless amounts of shit, drinking too much, and never moving his body. He’d get a little doughy. And maybe someone said something about it and got him determined to lose the extra couple of pounds.
Which was where I came in.
Hey, Zaddy, I want to be ripped like you.
Or some variation of that phrase.
“Well, that version of me didn’t have a brain soaked in booze and memories of lap dances from some pretty ladies.”
When it came to biker stereotypes, Dezi proudly sported most of them. He liked to do it all hard. Party, drink, eat, fight, fuck, and fuck up. Which meant that when he set his mind to putting in some effort at the gym, he actually made a lot of progress in a small amount of time. The guy made me feel like I was slacking when he was in the right headspace to make shit happen.
Clearly, though, his mind was on girls and parties. And, to be fair, that was where my mind had been when I was young and carefree as he was.
I mean, I wasn’t old. But when you get to a certain age, shit starts to creak and fall apart if you don’t set your mind to taking care of it. So, I’d dedicated a lot of my life to keeping fit and eating right. To slow down the years that felt like they kept coming faster and faster.