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
By my count, Tito has two pools, fifteen cars, five dogs, and a dozen girlfriends. The latter twelve rotate in and out, sometimes showing up in groups of as many as five, content to sunbathe or get smashed or both, taking as much or as little of my uncle’s time and attention as he sees fit to afford them. In his absence, they flirt and gossip with one another. In his presence, they vie for praise and affection, or at least more of these things than are bestowed on the next girl.
For my part, I’m mostly content to float around one of the pools, allowing Luisa to ply me with martinis, which I’ve never had before in my life. They help, though. They help me not dwell every minute of every day on what I did, on what I lost, and what my future may or may not hold. After a few dirty martinis, I can interact with the twelve girlfriends in a somewhat genuine manner, or at the very least find them amusing. Today, there are only three, and after two weeks living with Tito, I’ve finally managed to get all their names straight.
Ingrid puffs on a joint beneath her floppy sun hat, pointing two manicured fingers at me. “You a lucky girl, yah.” She stretches out on her lounge chair, her ribs poking against her pale skin. Takes another hit and smiles at me with pink-rimmed eyes. “What is the word for it… inheritance! When my parents died, I inherited barely nothing. Some money… a house… but you!” There’s a bitterness to her collagen-filled smile. “Someday you inherit this.” She gestures around her, to the pools, to the house with so many rooms I’ve still not managed to count them all, to Luisa. “You have good family to take care of you. You a lucky girl.”
I am a lucky girl.
The lounge chair is warm under my legs, and I lean back, letting the glaring sun dry the sweat off my skin. My skin feels like it’s sizzling, like I’m burning alive. But it’s okay. I deserve to be in Hell for what I’ve done, and if Hell comes with pools and martinis, I’ve got no right to complain. “So what does that make you, Ingrid? Since he’s your boyfriend. Are you lucky, too?”
As annoying as Ingrid is, she’s as good a source of entertainment as anything else. I like fucking with her, just to watch her botoxed face struggle against the wrinkles that confusion threatens to put in her forehead. She ashes her joint in an empty glass and looks over her sunglasses at me. “We all lucky girls, dah-ling. We are free like not too many people are free. We smoke, we fuck, we shop. We do Sweden for the holidays, and Madrid for the bulls.”’ She gestures to Amarra, napping on the chair behind her. “Amarra she loves the designers in Milan, so we go for Fashion Week.”
Free. Ingrid thinks they’re free. Me, I feel like a rat in a cage, albeit a pretty fucking fancy cage.
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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