Chapter 6 - The Cartel Matriarch
I stared at the name on the glowing screen, feeling the air completely leave my lungs.
"My mother is a cartel boss?"
The concept was so absurd, so entirely detached from the woman who hosted Sunday dinners, that I almost laughed.
"She used your father's failing real estate business as a front to wash dirty cash for years," Sarah explained calmly.
Sarah revealed that she had discovered the truth during her messy divorce proceedings with Mark.
"Mark and Matt were just low-level pawns completely terrified of your mother's immense power."
The realization hit me with the force of a speeding freight train.
The midnight phone call asking for twenty thousand dollars was never about an emergency room bill.
"It was a coded message," I whispered, the horrifying truth finally clicking into place.
Sarah nodded, her expression grim and utterly serious in the dark car.
"She was activating a cartel extraction team to clean up the mess Mark made when he failed to kill Emily."
Emily had found the physical master ledgers hidden in my mother's attic and attempted to blackmail the entire syndicate.
"They ran her over to get the ledgers back, but Emily didn't have them on her."
If Emily was still alive in the hospital, the cartel would definitely send someone to finish the job.
"We have to get to the intensive care unit before my mother's extraction team kills her!"
Sarah threw the car in reverse, tires screeching as we sped back toward the city hospital.
The drive felt like an agonizing eternity, every red light amplifying my suffocating panic.
We arrived at the hospital and bypassed the main entrance, sneaking in through the underground loading dock.
We navigated the quiet, sterile hallways, avoiding the night shift nurses and security cameras.
When we finally reached Emily's private room in the ICU, the door was cracked slightly open.
I pushed the door wide, completely prepared to fight off a cartel assassin to save my sister.
The hospital bed was completely stripped of its sheets, and the life-support machines were loudly flatlining.
Emily was entirely gone.
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Lying in a massive pool of dark blood on the linoleum floor was a man dressed in dark tactical gear.
The cartel assassin was completely dead, his throat slashed with surgical precision.
