Cartel B!tch

By Chelsea Camaron

There was a fine line between love and hate, we walked it together.

Unforgiving.
Relentless.
I'm to be feared.

When your family is as much a friend as an enemy, there is no one to trust.

I am Javier Almanza.

Cartel kingpin.

No one can touch me.

No one can hurt me...

Except her.

Mari Belle Dominguez.

He was raised as family.

My brother’s best friend, my first kiss, and my first betrayal.

He planned to make me his Cartel Bitch.

The joke was on him; I’d never break nor would I bend.

I would fight until the end for myself.

My will was stronger than his want.

He would soon see.

This is book one in the Almanza Crime Family Duet. This is a dark, edge of your seat romantic suspense novel featuring an antihero, so there is a level of violence inside that may not be suitable for some readers. This is not meant to be an actual depiction of life inside a Cartel but rather a work of fiction meant to entertain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chelsea Camaron
• Release date: Mar 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370377671

Chelsea Camaron

USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Chelsea Camaron is a small town Carolina girl with a big imagination. She’s a wife and mom, chasing her dreams. She writes contemporary romance, erotic suspense, and psychological thrillers. She loves to write about blue-collar men who have real problems with a fictional twist. From mechanics to bikers to oil riggers to smokejumpers, bar owners, and beyond she loves a strong hero who works hard and plays harder.

Book preview

PART ONE

The Past

The times we hurt the most were the times we felt the deepest, held on the longest, and made promises we would go through fire and ash to keep.

Mari Belle Dominguez

The decisions we made as teens and young adults were raw, consuming, and burned so deeply into our souls they became part of who we were. From top to bottom, I belonged to her and she belonged to me.

Javier Almanza

CHAPTER 1

Javier

Sweat rolled down my forehead into my eyes. The salt burned, but I blinked it away, letting the air hit my face. The heat dried the moisture against my skin, wicking the sweat away and into the air. That went smooth, I told Maricio as we made our way back to the spot.

The streets of Juarez go from blacktop to rock depending on which road you walk, or in our case, ride a bike. Not that it made a damn difference to us. This was home.

We passed the infamous bridge where the bodies hung in warning.

Yes, bodies, as in more than one, hung naked and sliced under a bridge. The stench, the gruesome display of violence, and the regular occurrence brought fear into our community. Strangers didn’t understand and locals simply knew to walk the line.

For us, this was normal, but to the tourists who drove into Mexico from the United States, they were shocked, appalled even. In Juarez the line was drawn in the sand—either your family stood with the Silvia Cartel or against it.

And being against the Silvia Cartel was a death sentence.

Honestly, Maricio and I hadn’t felt like most people here. They all said there was no choice. Every time the Federales caught someone, they always said, it was life here and they had no way out. It was what they felt was a clever excuse or way to avoid trouble.

Liars. All of them were liars.

Life was what you made it, like Paco, our handler, always said. We had the chance to make something for our families, something for ourselves. Or we could walk the other way. We wouldn’t get a second chance, he told us, so we had to make our decision swiftly. That was a few years ago now.

So while the masses watched our city like it was the portal to hell, we were proud.

To us, this wasn’t coerced, forced, or pushed on either of us. No, we saw our situation as the opposite, actually. We were given an opportunity by Paco to serve the Silvia Cartel. We had a choice. There was no gun to our head. In fact, what we did was exceptionally lucrative considering the options we lacked in life here.

Today, we did a job and would be compensated for it—end of story.

A job.

A simple task to carry goods across a border, pick up a tag alerting our handlers of our completion, and return back to Juarez. A job.

Adults overthought everything. Keep shit simple. That was how we would survive and thrive.

This was about getting paid.

Get this bag back to Paco and go home to pretend like we aren’t the pequeña mierdas we are, Maricio joked as he stood and pedaled his bike.

We both laughed. Little shits. Nah brother, we’re badass boys skippin’ school to run drugs into El Paso and get home before Mamá finds out. We can repent of our sins on Sunday mass. I joined him standing as I pedaled and took in the hot desert air.

With our spirits high, we made the trek to our drop point to return the empty bag with the tag that alerts our boss that our job was completed. It was a dangerous world we had embarked into but the school of hard knocks hadn’t left us tons of options and open doors. We weren’t forced into this life, but it was definitely something that appealed to two boys like us.

Maricio and I had been making this run for a few years now. Once, sometimes twice, a month we skipped school to pedal our bicycles to the border. We stayed out of the federal police officers’ way by not going to the crossover point while also avoiding well-known spots for smuggling. We had a few carefully placed bushes that hid a gap in the United States’ precious fence line. Gaps that were small enough for two skinny boys to crawl under and shove a bag between them. We carried a decent amount. It definitely wasn’t the amount of dope they could push through with a car, but those damn dogs they kept at the border now made it almost impossible to keep the trade going that way. At least that’s what Paco told us.

Personally, I didn’t care why we got called to do the job or when we got called. The only thing that mattered to me was being able to give money to my mother to help keep the lights on, food in the cabinets, and clothes on our backs.

If the drug trade wasn’t so good in our area, I don’t know how we would have gotten by. The uproar and debate every election in America was laughable. Americans should really think about whether they love their precious border, or their drugs? The majority would stand up proudly for their country saying to keep the drugs out. While the smaller portion of the population would take down that fence and those checkpoints to open up the trade. It didn’t make shit right, but the bottom line stood that twenty percent of the population addicted to dope controlled more money than the eighty percent of the population trying to stop the drug deals.

One thing I knew for sure in my life was that drugs equaled power. They weren’t going anywhere and the earlier you could have some control over them, the earlier you began the pursuit of power.

The whole thing was crazy. If we really stopped and thought about it. The fact that grown ass men would trust two punk kids with their drugs wasn’t the smartest of ideas.

Then again, it worked and it worked well because we had been at this for years. I guess to them they had enough security in place that it was still better to let us take the fall if we got caught than to take it themselves. The risks if we got caught were minimal compared to what our adult handlers would face. As minors crossing illegally into the United States of America, the penalties were what some might see as harsh if they were American. In the end, though, it wouldn’t be followed through with—that’s what most people didn’t understand. They would simply ship us back across the border to Juarez after charging us with drug trafficking. Those city officials knew their system and their budget restrictions in America. Therefore, they wouldn’t want to reform two thugs like us. We would be tossed back to our home country. Once returned here to our corrupt judicial system, we would be lost in the wash. Crime in Juarez was a way of life and the police knew it as much as the mothers begging their boys to stay out of it did. We lived in a city with the highest crime rate in the fucking world so it should be no surprise two young boys with no men in their lives would find themselves neck deep in illegal