Tamara woke up in a cube. It was moving, so she assumed it was a truck or a train. She was lying on something hard, a wooden bench, maybe, and her head felt like it might explode. She tried to use her arms to push herself up and look around, but they were weak and shaky. She felt drugged and for a few seconds she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten there.

“Hey, you’re alive.” Slowly she pulled up her aching head and after several seconds of trying to focus, her eyes landed on a young boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. He had soft-looking blond hair that fell to his shoulders and he was slim and pale.

“Yeah…I guess,” she said in a raspy voice. “Where am I?”

“Transport truck,” he said, flatly. Tamara used all the strength in her weak muscles to push herself upright on the bench. Her limbs were shaking and she felt sick to her stomach. She felt even sicker when she took in the scene around her. There were at least ten other people in the truck. Other than the boy talking to her, they were all girls or women. Some of them looked unconscious and the rest of them looked ill or terrified.

“Where are we being transported to?”

The boy shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said.

Tamara closed her eyes for a second and tried to remember what had happened earlier in the day. That’s when it came back to her…Eddie. He had her tied up and he’d handed her off to the sick pervert. Oh, God! Did they rape me? She looked down at her torn blouse. She remembered Eddie ripping it and then giving the big man permission to rape her, but that was all she remembered. After that, everything was fuzzy.

“How did we get on the truck?” she asked the boy.

“I walked,” he said. “They carried you.”

“Why weren’t you drugged like the rest of us?”

He shrugged. “I guess because I didn’t fight them. I’ve been used for sex most of my life. This can’t be much worse. Maybe they’ll sell me to someone rich.”

Tamara rubbed her eyes and when she looked down at her hands she realized her wrists were rope burned and swollen. “Used for sex?”

“I’m just guessing that’s what they want with us,” he said. “I’ve heard rumors that Eddie is in the sex trafficking business. I was working at one of his porn shops and they just showed up and told me to get in the truck.”

“Jesus. How old are you?”

“I’ll be fifteen in about a week.”

Tamara clutched at her stomach. She was sure she was going to be sick. She looked around the cube and saw that a few of the others had already been sick; the floor was littered with vomit and oral secretions. That made her retch. Once the spasms in her stomach passed, she was grateful that she hadn’t eaten anything for a while. The dry heaves beat the hell out of another smelly mess on the floor.

“What’s your name?” the kid asked her.

“Tammy. What’s yours?”

“Ben,” he said. His voice was flat and his blue eyes were devoid of all emotion. Tamara hated to think what must have happened to him in his short fourteen years of life to make him that way. The girls and women who were curled up into fetal positions and rocking back and forth sobbing were less frightening to her. Tammy thought about her dad and Tommy. They must be losing their minds looking for her. She wondered if Gunner knew she was missing. She’d thrown him out and she’d been so mean. She wondered if he even cared. She was probably just another notch to Blue-Eyes anyway.

“How long have we been driving?” she asked Ben.

“A couple of hours, I think. It’s hard to tell how much time is passing in here.”

Tamara nodded and looked around again. There were three women probably close to her age, in their early twenties. Besides her and Ben, there were five very young girls; one of them looked like she’d barely reached puberty. She was lying on the floor with her knees to her chest and her small body was racked with sobs. Tamara tried to stand but her legs were too shaky. At last, she just slid to the floor and scooted on her butt over to the girl. “Hey, my name’s Tammy, what’s your name, honey?”

The little girl looked up at her and Tamara saw that she was probably thirteen or fourteen, just small for her age, not that thirteen was any better, considering. “Please help me,” the girl sobbed out in a tiny voice.

“I will if I can,” Tamara told her. She lay down next to the girl and put an arm around her. The girl folded her tiny body into Tamara and she could feel her shaking all over. They lay there like that for a while, the little girl’s tears soaking into Tamara’s skin. Finally, the girl got quiet and once she had her sobs under control, she looked up at Tammy and said:

“Chloe.”

Tammy did her best to give the girl a smile. “Hi, Chloe. We’re going to figure this out, okay? I promise I won’t let anyone hurt you.” Tammy had no idea what she was saying or why. She had no idea where they were going, what they were facing, or how the hell she’d get out of it…much less protect the girl. She could feel the terror the girl was feeling seeping into her bones, and that caused anger to seep into her veins like poison. She wasn’t going down without a fight. She had just learned something new about herself that day—she had a maternal instinct. For some reason Chloe brought it out in her, and like a mama bear she was determined to keep her safe.

* * *

When the truck finally stopped, everyone was herded down a ramp and onto a wooden dock. It was dark and the only light came from three big men with flashlights. They also had guns, big ones, automatic rifles if Tamara wasn’t mistaken. “Hurry up,” one of them shouted at the woman in front. When she didn’t move, he shoved the gun into her side and she screamed. That caused Chloe, who was clutching at Tamara’s hand, to start howling.

“I want to go home! Let me go home!”

“Shut up!” another gunman said, pointing his gun at Chloe, only making her scream louder. Tamara surprised herself by stepping between the man and the girl.

“She’s just scared, leave her alone.”

The gun was in Tamara’s face then. She willed herself not to flinch. “You shut up too,” the big ugly guy with a pockmarked face and unibrow snarled.

“Do you know who I am?”

“Yeah,” he said, running his tongue over his lips. “A half-dressed ho on her way to make some Cartel men very happy.”

Chloe was digging her nails into Tamara’s arm, she was holding onto her so tightly. “Wrong,” she said. “I’m the daughter of the VP of the Head Hunters.” She thought the man blanched, but it was too dark to tell for sure. “That’s right, I’m Randall Covey’s daughter, and whether I’m dead or alive when he finds me, he’s going to kill you for your part in this.”

“I wish that old, fat bastard good luck,” the ugly man said. “Now get moving and make sure that brat moves with you.”

Tamara started walking again, urging Chloe along in front of her. They walked across the dock to a ramp that led to what looked like a passenger ferry. Tamara felt the anxious tickle in her belly growing deeper. She had grown up listening to talk around the club when the men didn’t think she was paying attention. Randall never wanted her involved in club business, but she’d been around it long enough to have absorbed more than even she wanted to know. She didn’t know for sure where they were but, if she calculated the approximate time it took them to get there, and took her surroundings into consideration, she’d have to guess they were in Corpus Christie. She’d heard a lot about boats leaving out of private docks in Corpus Christie and heading toward the South Texas portion of the U.S.–Mexico border. That area is extremely rural, with long stretches of sparsely populated land. Drug traffickers have notoriously used the infrastructure to smuggle drug shipments into the U.S., or to store those shipments before transporting them to larger towns and cities along the border area. Tamara had been hoping that Ben didn’t know what he was talking about, but if the area was as good for transporting drugs as she knew it was, then it stood to reason that it might be good for transporting humans under the cover of night as well.

She and Chloe walked slowly across the dock with a gunman urging them along every step of the way. Her head was pounding with the implications of what was about to happen and her brain was struggling to figure out how the hell to get out of it. They were the last in line, and everyone else was five or six feet in front of them and already on the ferry when it was Chloe’s turn to board. She froze in place and clung onto Tammy. Sobbing again she said, “I’m not going.”

The man with the gun poked her with it in the back and said, “Yes, you are, or you die right here. Your choice, kid. I have a schedule to keep.”

“Look at her,” Tammy said, hoping the big man had a heart. “She’s just a little girl. You have so many, would they even notice if…”

“Move!” He shoved Tamara and her shaky legs gave out. She fell forward onto Chloe, which only made the girl scream louder. Tammy had claw marks on her arms and neck from where Chloe had clutched onto her. “Get up!” Tammy pressed her sweaty palms into the dock and tried to stand up. Between whatever drug they’d given her to make her muscles weak and Chloe’s weight, she couldn’t push herself up.

“Please, Chloe,” Tammy pled with her in a whisper, “we have to go.”

“You promised. You said that you wouldn’t let them hurt me.”

“I won’t…” Tammy felt Chloe’s arms ripped away from her neck. The big man had ahold of her with one hand and Chloe was clawing at his face like a feral cat. Suddenly he tossed her like a rag doll toward the dark water, and she landed in the murky river with a splash.

“What the fuck?” one of the guys from the ferry yelled. The man hovering over Tamara ignored him and poked her with the gun again.

“Get up, bitch!” Tamara felt like she was watching a movie in slow motion as she pushed herself up off the dock. The man was threatening her with the gun. Chloe’s screams and splashing were getting weaker and the man on the dock was yelling louder. Tammy stood on shaky legs and in a split second made a decision that could cost her life. She got to the edge of the dock and dove into the water toward the spot where Chloe had disappeared only seconds before.

Tamara’s body was immediately enveloped by the dark cold water. She felt an incredible pressure in her chest, and her lungs began to burn. Her heart was already hammering into her rib cage, but it increased in intensity and speed as she tried to claw her way to the surface. Her head was filled with panic and she opened her mouth and sucked in an icy cold lungful of water that sent jolts of pain through her body. She couldn’t see or hear anything other than a buzzing in her ears. The buzzing turned into a hum and she felt the edges of her consciousness beginning to fade to black, and then she bumped into something. It was cold and hard…Chloe! She wrapped her arms around her and fought to get to the surface, but she wasn’t facing up, she was perpendicular and her body was going numb. The last thing she remembered was a vise-like grip on her arm, pulling her up.