Cartel Synonym Novels & Stories

18+ Mature content. - - - - Skye Hale swore she'd never let another person she loved die without answers. Her mother was silenced by a cartel hit, the case buried by the very agency she served. Skye became the hunter instead. Undercover. Relentless. Willing to burn everything to uncover the truth. Then Zane, the only man who ever made her feel safe, forced her to choose: him or the ghosts. She chose him. They planned a wedding. She almost believed she could leave the darkness behind. Three days before the vows, her best friend Red was gunned down in the same strip club where she danced to survive. The same cartel. The same cover-up. The morning she was supposed to walk down the aisle, an anonymous file landed in her phone. Proof that Red died trying to help her, and the killer's trail led straight back to the man who once ran her mother's missions. Skye walked out in her wedding dress, left Zane at the altar, and vanished into the night. Now deep in Australia’s dangerous underworld, she works as a stripper to infiltrate the cartel. The sexual addiction she buried years ago has roared back stronger than ever. Every slow, sensual grind on stage, every pair of hungry hands sliding over her bare skin, feeds the raw, aching hunger she can no longer control. As Skye seduces dangerous men for information, the stakes rise dangerously high. A former colleague wants her dead. The protector sent to bring her home hides a shocking betrayal. And the powerful man who ordered her mother’s murder is closer than she imagined, close enough to touch, close enough to taste. One wrong move, and she'll lose her life. One right touch, and she'll lose herself. Skye Hale came for justice. She might leave in ashes.

Shortly after we said "I do," the Family sent my husband, Dario, down to the Mexican border. He told me it was a meat grinder down there—cartel territory. where guys were zipped into body bags every day. He said he had to go—to expand the territory, for the glory of the Family. He claimed it was too dangerous and that his enemies would paint a target on my back, so he wouldn't take me with him. I believed him. I stayed behind in his old, rot-infested house in New Jersey, taking care of his bitter, spiteful parents. I spent my days and nights in the Family's moldy laundromat, washing bills stained with blood. He told me he sent every dime he made down there to the widow of a brother who took a bullet for him. He asked me to be understanding. I never complained. Day after day, I pressed expensive suits in that humid laundromat, waiting for him to come home. It wasn't until the eighth year that a mobster came back drunk. When I asked about Dario, he froze, then sneered at me through a haze of alcohol. "Dario? Are you kidding? He’s been a King in Manhattan for years. He’s the youngest Underboss of the Corleone family." I stood frozen, the iron in my hand burning a hole right through a shirt. "And he got married seven years ago. Biggest cathedral in New Jersey. Half the mob was there to toast the groom..." He pulled a crumpled photo from his leather jacket. Snuggled up against my husband was a woman in a high-end couture gown—the very same "poor, widowed sister-in-law" he had told me about. The next day, I contacted a fixer who specialized in fake IDs. On the application for a one-way ticket to Europe—a ticket to vanish off the face of the earth—I filled in the fake name I had prepared long ago. He trapped me for seven years with a sham marriage. From now on, I’d be done with this damn loyalty.