Enslaved (Colombian Cartel #6) - Suzanne Steele Page 0,20

the dog met them at the door, the kids screamed Daddy or Mommy and held up prized pictures of their scholastic artwork. The men would be reminded of all the shit they forgot to do because: they didn’t listen. He listened. He listened when people had no idea he was listening. He listened. He watched. He calculated.

He liked his newest victim he’d been following because she presented more of a challenge. Because Kavya Page Wordsmith was self-employed. She wasn’t a creature of habit. She wasn’t a girl who lived in society’s box of normal. What the fuck was normal, anyway? He liked her because she could give him a worldwide voice about the things that needed to be discussed.

He wondered if her personality played a part in her inconsistencies. She was free-spirited—as unpredictable as the wind. There was a part of him that respected that. He’d never seen a woman who would travel the world with no fear. He guessed the only reason she hired a fixer was that they could get her into areas that were restricted. Families in the mountains who worked for the Colombian cartel were closely guarded against intruders. Outsiders weren’t trusted, and stories remained secret unless someone could vouch for the journalist’s authenticity. There was no welcome mat in his corner of the world. No need to let the enemy in.

Page was gaining a reputation in the Colombian cartel. She was known for writing the truth. There were no twists, turns, or lies to her stories and the families she interviewed, and the Colombian cartel respected that. Journalists didn’t have a good name with the cartel, but Kavya Page Wordsmith did. That reputation would take her further than she ever imagined—if…he allowed it to.

The woman had to be doing well financially. Fixers didn’t come cheap, and neither did worldwide travel. Now the bitch was writing a book. It bothered him that she was making a living off the backs of others.

His vision was skewed because if he was able to see clearly, he would know she wanted the truth to get out about what families suffered through, families that were forced to work with the cartel. Families that were between a rock and a hard place—the soldiers, the government, and the cartel. They were killed or imprisoned for the crops they grew. Their homes were burnt down, and they lost all their personal belongings. It was a hard life and one they were forced into if they wanted to survive financially. The process of how to grow the leaves, cook the paste and distribute the product was passed down from generation to generation. No detail was left out, and it was an art the farmers took pride in.

He would watch Page, and when the time was right, he’d abduct her and make her write his story. He was just as good as these other people. Why did they get a story, and he didn’t?

He had grown up poor in the mountains of Colombia. A fixer had approached his father and promised him money for a tour of the farm a journalist would write about. The fixer had been a hoax. He had killed Tadias’ parents and left the boy an orphan—forced to live off the kindness of others in a country where kind people were few and far between. He’d managed to join a group of people who came into the United States illegally. For a month, he lived on the streets of Louisville, Kentucky. On a cold winter night, when he was picked up by the police, he was put into foster care. America wasn’t the promised land for a boy who bounced around from home to home. He was abused by the bigger boys, and many times he’d run away just to escape the brutality of his body being used and abused. When he beat a boy so severely, he put him in the hospital, it was the last time he ever had to run. When the judge heard his story—his plight, he emancipated the boy and gave him a green card. He worked in restaurants washing dishes and lived in flea-bitten motels he called home. Tad didn’t care how dirty his house was; he was finally free, and he was going to make the world pay for his terrible childhood.

He would make Page write his story, and people would see the hell he’d grown up in. It was his truth, and soon it would be a truth the world had to acknowledge.