Page 165 of Altered

I couldn’t do anything except try and survive the pain that was ricocheting through my body as another contraction wreaked played havoc on my cervix.

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Chapter Sixty-Eight

Lucky

Six months.

It had been six achingly long months since I'd laid eyes on Hope Carter's face.

Four of those months, I'd been strapped to a gurney floating in and out of consciousness and fending off death.

I'd fought off more infections than I cared to remember, and hell, most of them Ididn’tremember.

When Gonzalez took me out that night, I'd been sure I'd never open my eyes again.

In the moments before I lost consciousness, I had been absolutely convinced that the bastard had thrown me under the bus for his own financial benefit.

Waking up four months later on that gurney in Mexico, finally in my full senses, had shocked the hell out of me.

No one told me a goddamn thing.

I had no fucking clue how I'd gotten there or why they were keeping me alive.

Spending twomoremonths trapped in a drug-infested cesspool of violence, literally fighting for my life on a daily basis in underground fighting rings before being tossed back into the kennels with the dogs.

I didn’t knowanythingexcept thatI was in a foreign country, surrounded by non-English speaking thugs and whores.

And hell, even the ones that could speak English weren't about to risk their lives by talking to the white boy.

Brothels and containers, whores, and rotting corpses.

Death was on my doorstep every second of the day in that compound.

The only thing that had kept me alive was my survival instincts and skills with a blade.

When Gonzalez finally decided to show up at the compound three days ago, I'd been so goddamn stunned to see him that I ended up losing my first ever fight and getting stabbed in the thigh for my troubles.

After being patched up by a charming whore named Rosita, I'd been dragged into the HQ to talk to Gonzalez.

And that's where he explained everything to me.

David had gone to Gonzalez with a proposition.

He knew about our business arrangement and had offered Gonzalez 50k in exchange for my life.

When Gonzalez turned him down, telling him that I was worth far more than any money he could offer, David pulled his trump card.

Maria Gonzalez.

G's twenty-one-year-old daughter.

David had her locked safely away, and in order to get her back in one piece, all Gonzalez had to do was kill me.

So together they set up the whole ploy at the Ring of Fire to corner me, and Gonzalez smuggled in the best damn doctor dirty money could buy in to keep my ass alive.

At the last minute, he even tried to double-cross David by threatening his own daughter, but that went south fast when he ordered them to shoot her dead.

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