“Look at me, Luisa Reyes.”

Chavez, I thought to myself. I will always be Luisa Chavez.

“Darling, aren’t you curious to know where you are?”

“My name is Luisa Chavez,” I said. I opened my eyes to see golden ones staring right back at me. It was like looking at an eagle. “And I know where I am. I know who you are. You are Javier Bernal.”

He raised his brow in amusement and nodded. I’d seen his picture before, on the news. There was only one, and that was his mugshot, but even in that photo his eyes made an impression on you. They saw right into your depths and made you question yourself. He was one of the men that Salvador feared, even though Salvador had more power. He was the one I had been told to watch out for, the supposed reason why I’d always been locked in the compound or escorted by the local police to go shopping.

And yet here I was, tied to a chair in a cold, leaking basement with nothing in it except five cartel members, a video camera, and a knife that lay on top of a stool in front of me.

All of that for nothing. I could escape Salvador but I could never escape the cartels.

I had asked for this fate.

“You know why you’re here,” Javier said with deliberation, straightening up in his sharp black suit. He walked over to the stool, picked up the knife, and glanced at me over his shoulder. “Don’t you?”

I could only breathe. I wanted to look at the others, at Este, at Franco, at the two other mystery men, but I was frozen in his gaze like a deer in headlights.

“What is the knife for?” I asked, my throat painfully dry.

“You’ll find out after,” he said. “It is for your husband. For your Salvador.” He stepped to the side and waved his arm at the camera. “And this is also for him.”

He eyed someone over my shoulder and gave a sharp nod. I heard a rip from behind and a piece of duct tape was placed over my mouth. I squirmed helplessly and the lights in the basement dimmed. The men stepped to the side while Javier went behind the video camera. A white light came off the front of it and bathed me in an eerie glow.

Javier cleared his throat, his face covered in shadow, and said loudly, projecting to the camera, “This is Luisa Reyes, former beauty queen of the Baja State and property of Salvador Reyes. Salvador, we have your wife and we have a long list of demands, demands which I know you can meet. I expect full cooperation in this matter or she dies in the next seven days. If she’s lucky. I’ll give you some time to think about what you’re willing to give up for her. Then we’ll be contacting you. Goodbye.”

The light on the camera switched off, but the rest of the room remained dim.

“I hope your husband checks his emails often. It would be a shame to have to put this on YouTube.”

There was a smirk on his face at that as he slowly walked toward me, the knife glinting in his hand. His eyes burned through the shadows then grew somber.

He held up the knife. “I think it’s only going to hurt the first time.”

My eyes focused on the silver of the blade, but the terror inside me grew too strong, and my urge to breathe through the duct tape became too difficult. My lungs seized in panic, pulsing dots appearing in my vision. I felt a hand on my collarbone, gripping the edge of my blouse, and then everything went black.

Three months earlier

“Excuse me, miss?”

I sighed and took a moment to compose myself before I slowly turned around, reminding myself to respond in English.

“Yes?”

The man and his buddies were staring at me with that stupid ogling look they had the whole time they were here. I was happy when they finally asked for the bill, just wanting them out of the bar and back to their drunken tourist festivities or whatever the white men got up to in this damned city of Cabo San Lucas. But it seemed I wasn’t free yet.

The guy who called me, the most obnoxious of the group, wagged his brows at me and nodded at a spot behind me.

“You dropped something.”

I opened my mouth to say something but shut it. I looked down at my feet, then behind me. My pencil was on the ground. Not that I ever needed it to remember orders anymore.

“Thanks,” I said, and bent down to pick it up. Immediately the guys snorted and I quickly snapped back up. Of course they’d wanted me to pick it up—my uniform at Cabo Cocktails consisted of the shortest skirt ever.

I ignored them, not even bothering to turn around again, and made my way back to the bar. I slammed my bill holder on the counter and eyed the receipt. The little jerks hadn’t even tipped me. Not that it was customary in Mexico, but with Americans in a tourist town, you always expected it.

“Stiffed again?” said Camila.

I looked over at her as she snapped the cap off of two bottles of beer. As usual, my colleague had an impish smirk on her pixie-like face. She always got the tips, maybe because she was always smiling.

“Yeah,” I said, wiping the sweat off my brow. The fan beat overhead but it was always a bit too hot in the bar, didn’t matter what time of the year it was. I turned around and eyed the boys who were still at the table, laughing and occasionally looking my way. “Those assholes over there.”

“You know, if you just joke with them and smile sometimes, they’d probably tip you more,” she said innocently, putting her beers on a tray.

I put my hand on my hip. “The minute I smile or play nice with them is the minute they take advantage of me. I don’t want to give them the wrong idea.”

“Luisa, I’m really starting to think you’re afraid of men.”

That bothered me a bit. “So? Aren’t you?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m a lesbian because I like pussy, not because men scare me.” And with that she took the beers over to her waiting table.

I pressed my hand on the back of my neck, trying to alleviate the constant strain I felt there. It was nearly eleven o’ clock at night, and I had been on my feet for twelve hours. I had three more hours of this before I could go home, which meant a forty-minute drive to San Jose del Cabo where I lived with my parents.

Which reminded me. My mother’s birthday was tomorrow and I knew she deserved something special. We didn’t have much money—I was the breadwinner at the house since my father suffered from early onset Alzheimer’s and my mother was blind. She was healthy otherwise, but neither she nor my father could work, which meant everything fell on me. It was a lot for a twenty-three year old but I’d been working since I was a child; even when my father was able to hold a job it was never a high paying one. I was used to poverty and I was used to hard work.

I just could never get used to being treated like a piece of meat. I could never get used to the constant fear. And working at Cabo Cocktails, working for my boss, Bruno Corchado, meant I’d been dealing with those two things since I was twenty. And now, because the only way I could get my mother a gift tomorrow would be to ask for an advance on my paycheck, I was walking right into the lion’s den.

I took a deep breath, looked around to see if any new patrons had come in, and when I saw they hadn’t, I straightened my shirt, pulling it up around my cleavage, and walked around the corner to Bruno’s office.

I gave three quick raps on it and stood back. I hadn’t seen him much today so I wasn’t sure what kind of mood he was in. I was hoping for generous and disinterested but knew that was pressing my luck a little bit. At this time of night he was usually drunk and a jackass. Or a lecherous pervert.

I swallowed hard as I heard him bark, “Come in!”

I opened the door and poked my head in. “Bruno?” I asked.

He was sitting at his desk, a row of empty beer bottles beside him, going over the ledger. He looked at me with red eyes, his head swaying from side to side, and I immediately knew I’d made a mistake. “Luisa. My beauty queen. Come on in.” He nodded at the door. “And shut that behind you.”