When Jose is fifteen he watches the cartel leader massacre his family, then they slash his throat and leave him for dead. When he survives, the leader continues searching for him and two years after the attack Jose escapes across the U.S. border, where he starts his own American family.

Years later, he is deported and once more encounters the cartel. He achieves freedom from the cartel again with the help of ghosts from his past. After his rescue, he returns legally to the U.S. and another unexpected source assists in protecting Jose and his family from the first U.S. based Mexican cartel. He finds that the cartel has infiltrated deep and wide. And, he no longer knows who he can trust, and he realizes he must discover who runs the cartel, and why the cartel leader has pursued him for most of his life.

Jose further understands that he and his family will never be safe until the cartel leader is behind bars or dead. A white supremacist agitator and his followers decide to violently remedy an old imaginary wrong. This action sets events into motion. Jose discovers the identity of the leader of the first Mexican cartel based in the U.S., and he learns why the cartel has tried to kill him for over thirteen years.