Today is our stop on the blog tour for Exit Wounds by Nikki Archer. We’re so excited to share this contemporary crime novel! Check out our post and grab your copy today.
About Exit Wounds:
Colt is on the run. After a family argument ends with her father dead on the floor and the murder weapon in her hand, the heiress to Mexico’s largest drug cartel is left with few options. As the police rush to piece together evidence and name a suspect, Colt and her boyfriend speed south. If she wants to stay out of jail, she’ll have to sacrifice a different sort of freedom and leave America for the anonymity and relative safety of Mexico. But at her drug lord uncle’s Playboy-esque villa, the outlaw princess must make a choice: accept her place in the family legacy, or try to make her way alone. And her uncle may have more skeletons in his closet than even Colt could’ve imagined.
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EXCERPT
With eight months left of our senior year, the
countdown to graduation ticking in everyone’s ears, Dallas and I collided in
the only way two people like us could.
Some of the kids I went to school with knew my
dad, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, that meant that sometimes they came
looking for me when he stiffed them a half-gram or flaked out on orders. None
of them seemed to understand that it wasn’t a family-run operation.
One particular buyer, a guy by the name of
Brady, caught up to me on my way home from school one day, wanting to score.
Probably in more than one way.
Brady was rude in the way that only misogynistic
jocks can be. He was an ass-pincher and tit-grabber extraordinaire. And God, was he annoying.
Because I didn’t hear him come up behind me, he
went so far as to literally pluck the iPod buds out of my ears to get my
attention. Silly me, I guess, for being caught unaware.
Already pissed off, I turned to find him in his
letterman jacket, spitting a stream of tobacco dangerously close to my foot. He
smoothed back his too-long hair and replaced his hat. "Hey, Colt. Your
padre ain’t answerin’ his phone. I need some coke for this thing tonight. How
much for an eightball?"
I yanked my headphones out of his fingers.
"Brady. For the thousandth fucking time, I don’t mess with that shit. And
if you had any brain cells left they’d be telling you to find something better
to do with your time."
My elbow caught him in the ribs as I tried to
shove past him, barely hard enough for him to notice, but apparently hard
enough to send him from zero to dickhead in under two seconds.
He shoved my shoulder with one of his huge
hands, spinning me back into the fence behind me. "Listen, don’t bullshit
me—I know all you ghetto kids are hooked up." He grinned a sharky,
Kevorkian grin. "So hook me up."
My father’s temper flared up
as the fence-wire scraped the back of my legs. That overpowering urge to teach Brady a lesson written in
his own blood. I forced it down, at least for the moment. I
took my time tucking my iPod into my backpack, Brady’s eyes following my every
move. I brushed my hair back from my shoulders and gave him my nicest, sweetest
smile.
"Alright, Brady, here’s
what I’m gonna do for you. I’m gonna walk away, before you make me late for
work, instead of smacking that smile off your face." I pointed left with
my whole arm. "And I’ll even send you in the right direction to score,
unless you’re too much of a pansy-ass white boy to step foot in my
neighborhood."
Brady’s face darkened and his linebacker’s shoulders
pulled back. "You calling me a bitch, Alvarez?" The way his voice got
higher with his pride wounded struck me as hilariously ironic, and I laughed,
not bothering to try and contain it. I laughed right in his face.
"No, Brady. I’m calling you a fucking spoiled,
entitled mama’s boy who’s such a pussy he’d order coke off Amazon if he could,
just to avoid rubbing shoulders with the tough motherfuckers who deal it."
I shot him another overly sweet smile and turned to go, hoping I’d manage to
make it to the garage on time, wondering if my boss would give me a hard time
for being late.
Brady, however, wasn’t ready to let it go. He
grabbed my arm at the wrist, twisting and pulling me backward hard. When I
yanked away from him, the momentum sent me stumbling forward. As I dropped my
bag and got my arms up to defend myself, I caught sight of Dallas at the end of
the street, already running in our direction.
Brady was nearly purple in
the face, babbling a mix of swear words and racial slurs, already reaching for
me again. I slapped his hand away.
"Drop it, Brady. I’m not
joking."
He closed the space between
us with one step, grabbing the front of my shirt and curling it into his fist.
"You fuckin’ spic," he breathed at me, a vein in his forehead poking
out. "You think you can talk to me like that?" The tobacco in his lip was
dribbling out, a thin stream of juicy brown spit trickling from the corner of
his mouth.
Past the nonsense Brady was spewing, I could
vaguely make out Dallas’s voice, yelling Brady’s name. When Brady’s eyes
flicked off of mine to find Dallas, I wound up as best I could and socked him
in the jaw. Tobacco-spit went flying; my knuckles exploded with pain, and
Brady’s hand unclenched, releasing my shirt.
I stepped back from him just as Dallas closed
the last few feet and skidded to a stop next to me. "Dude!" he barked
at Brady. "What the hell are you doing?"
Now fully purple, Brady pointed at me with fingers
tipped with blood from his mouth. "Fuckin’ spic bitch was tryin’ to sell
me blow. Didn’t wanna take no for an answer."
That Latina temper flared again, and I lunged at
Brady, intending to slap him across the face, in the same spot that was already
turning red from my right hook. But Dallas caught me around the waist, holding
me just shy of arm’s distance from Brady.
"Whoa, whoa, let’s all calm down a
sec." Dallas, always the voice of reason. The rock. He leveled a stare at
Brady over my shoulder. "Dude, you’re not foolin’ anyone. Whole dang
school knows how you party, so let’s cut the bullshit, okay?" His hands
loosened from my waist, leaving just the trace of a tingle where his
fingerprints had stamped my skin.
Brady narrowed his watering eyes. "Dallas,
come on, man." He gestured to me, his tone more disbelieving with each
word. "You’re really gonna side with her instead of me? You don’t even
know her. I do. She’s a dirty spic,
just like her old man."
If Brady had anything else to say, it was cut off
when Dallas’s hard right landed in the corner of his mouth. He fell back
against the fence, the metal links clanging in protest. I made out a few choice
swearwords in between his moans of pain.
And Dallas turned, meeting my eyes for the first
time. "How about I walk you home?"
About Nikki Archer:
Nikki Archer lives in New England, where she teaches high school English and spends her free time pursuing as many degrees as humanly possible. She divides her life into hockey season and baseball season, and she really really hates socks. She spends all of her extra money (and some that’s not exactly extra) on concert tickets and trips to interesting places. Her first novel, “Whatever’s Left,” is a YA romance, but “Exit Wounds” is her first venture into the world of crime writing.
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