by Zoey Parker
“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” he said thoughtfully. “But at the same time, Sasha, I wanted to make a point.”
“What point was that?” I asked.
“This is a business. Wouldn’t you agree?”
It was frustrating trying to talk to him with my back to him, but I couldn’t manage to turn over.
“Yes, I’d agree, this is business.”
“Okay. You were sent to do a job, were you not?” he continued, and I didn’t like where he was going with his questions. He was setting me up to look like I hadn’t done my job for him.
I didn’t answer. All of my smart-ass answers were gone. This was Fang talking to me this way, treating me like I was some stupid kid who didn’t know any better. I knew better than to try to smart off at him the way I loved to do with everyone else. If I talked to him the way I talked to Cole, the consequences wouldn’t have been pretty. Of course, I was beginning to see that the outcome of this situation wasn’t shaping up too well for me anyway.
“What did I send you in to do?” Fang asked after I didn’t answer.
“You sent me to steal drugs that weren’t there,” I told him. “You sent me to follow faulty intel, just like I warned you it might have been, and it turned out to be a trap.”
“Has that ever stopped you before?” he asked.
“I’ve never gone into a trap like that before,” I answered him. “You’ve never given me half-assed information like you did this time. What happened this time was you got greedy and didn’t think before telling me to act.”
The hands on my leg tightened as a warning for me to watch my mouth, but my anger was starting to boil. There was no watching my mouth now. I didn’t have to rely on my sarcasm. I was just going to let Fang have it for setting me up and sending me in blind.
“So, when you failed to follow up properly on the information I gave you, what happened to you?” he asked. I couldn’t believe it. He was really going to blame me for his fuck up.
“I fell into the trap I’m starting to think you helped set for me,” I said.
“So you got caught,” Fang clarified for me.
“I guess you could put it that way,” I sort of agreed.
“Well, how you would you put it any differently, Sasha?” he challenged me.
“Exactly as I did a moment ago. I trusted you, just as I always have, and I walked right into a trap you should have seen from a mile away as soon as you heard that blatant lie about Cole bringing all the drugs back into the Hell’s Overlords clubhouse,” I said, trying to put as much blame on him for it as I could. He was right, though. I should have known better than to follow his lead without doing my own research first. We were both too excited about the news we’d heard. He rushed to tell me, and I rushed to take advantage of it.
“You’re a professional thief, right? I thought that was what I’d trained you for,” he said, his tone thick with accusation.
I didn’t respond. I wasn’t going to honor him by acknowledging his accusations while he talked to me like a child. I wasn’t a child. I hadn’t been a child for many years. I was a professional, and I’d done a good job for him, to the point that we were maybe both a little overconfident in my abilities.
“Tell me this, Sasha. What good is a caught thief in this business? What good is a thief who’s been identified by her target?”
“No good,” I said lowly.
“Right. No good at all. And to make it worse, you weren’t just caught. You were taken in. You were staying with your captor at his apartment. Did you get any good intel that way?” he asked sarcastically.
“You know I did,” I snapped. “I told you they were on the way to kill you.”
“Yes, about that. I already knew. See, Cole isn’t the only one out there who can plant information on the street. I will tell you this, though. He did move it.”
His last statement sent chills down my spine.
“But it didn’t stop me from getting more of it,” he added.
My stomach turned to ice. My heart stopped. My breath caught in my throat. Someone else had stolen drugs for him, someone who wasn’t me. I wondered if he’d gone and found another young girl off the street. I wondered if he was training her just to be a thief or if he’d used her for anything else first. He was such a pervert with other girls. There were a few I wasn’t even sure were old enough to be in his little inner circle, but I never said anything to him about it because he’d done so much for me.
I clenched my fists.
“Are you angry because I stole from your boyfriend again or because I used someone else to do it?” he asked.
“Alright,” I sighed, “how is this going to go?” I asked.
“Well, you and I are going to sit down and talk, and hopefully we’ll come to some kind of agreement before the night is out,” he said slowly.
“And if we don’t?” I asked.
“You’d better hope we do,” he said.
“What I don’t get is this, though,” I added. “If you wanted to talk, why did you send these worthless men to grab me? If you wanted to talk, you would have come alone. You would have picked me up at the park, and we would have handled our business.”
“I don’t handle business with you, Sasha. You must have yourself confused with some of my other girls.” I could hear the sleazy smile on his perverted little face while he spoke to me. His voice sounded so greasy.
“You’re disgusting, Fang,” I told him, and he just laughed. It made my skin crawl to think he might have had another use in mind for me. He might have been thinking about giving me an alternative way out of the mess I’d caused. It was gross to think about. I couldn’t even imagine what it might have been like to be with him. He probably liked all kinds of degrading, kinky sex. I shuddered.
“Well, if you do decide you want to handle business in a different way, you let me know,” he said, and my stomach churned. He was thinking about it.
After everything we’d been through together over the last five years, I couldn’t imagine that he could even look at me and think that way about me. It was appalling to think I was just a piece of meat to him. At the end of the day, I was just another girl.
“When I look at you sometimes, Sasha, I still see the same young girl I picked up off the street, so forgive me if I expect a little more gratitude out of you sometimes.” His tone was growing darker.
I knew what he meant by gratitude. He meant sex. He wanted me to show him how thankful I was for everything he’d done, and he wanted to think of me as the same nineteen-year-old girl I had been when he found me on the street. There was no telling what thoughts and images were running through that sick mind of his while he looked at my backside in the rearview mirror.
I closed my eyes against the horror. I just hoped Cole showed up soon. I hoped I hadn’t burned that bridge by leaving the way I did. I hoped that when he saw that I’d taken the gun, he would know that I was concerned for my safety.
Keep your promise, I thought. Protect me, Cole.
I should have stayed at the apartment. I never should have made that call. I didn’t care how cocky Fang wanted to be about the whole situation, pretending he’d planted the address of his hideout on the street so that Cole and his men would go to the wrong place. If I hadn’t called to tell him that Hell’s Overlords were on their way to kill him, Fang might have been there when they showed up.
I wouldn’t have been in the back of his car. He would have been shot, and all of this would be over. I could quit and go to live a quiet life with my new man. Cole would take care of me and protect me, and Fang’s organization would have crumbled to the ground as his body fell, limp and lifeless, as Cole’s feet. There wouldn’t have been anyone to track me down, because everyone would have known that I was under the protection of the Overlords.
I would have been untouchable, but most importantly, I would have been free instead of lying in the back of Fang’s black sedan, tied up and listening to him make perverse advances at me after treatin
g me like his daughter for so long.
What the hell had I done?
Chapter 21
I managed to roll over so I could see out the windows. We’d been driving a long time, and it seemed like we should have been wherever we were going pretty quickly. Nothing downtown was ever more than five or ten minutes away, but we’d been driving for what felt like an eternity.
The light outside was beginning to fade. I tried to sit up, but it was difficult with my wrists and ankles tied.
“You think I could get a little help here?” I asked the man in the black suit sitting with his hands on my leg.
“Yeah, sorry,” he said quickly. He let go of my legs so I could put them underneath me. Then, he leaned over and pulled me upright by my arm.
“Thanks,” I said curtly. I could finally sit up and look out the windows. Where the hell were we?
The city was gone somewhere behind us, and in the dying light of dusk, trees rushed by on either side of the interstate. The light outside had already gone from the amber light of sunset to the blue-white light of the coming night. I looked behind us for any single-headlight vehicles, any obvious signs of Cole and his men, but I saw nothing. This stretch of the interstate was never that busy to begin with, but tonight it was simply vacant.
“Your knight in shining armor didn’t show,” Fang taunted me. “I guess my guys back at the hideout must have taken care of him.”
I could see his dark eyes in the rearview mirror now. He glanced away from the road to meet my stare in the reflection. I could see his smile in the corners of his eyes.
“You bastard.” I spat my words at him.
He laughed in response.
“Have you figured out where we’re going yet, Sasha?” he asked me.
I looked around the highway again in the quickly fading light.
“We’re heading north?” I checked.
“Last time I looked, we were,” Fang told me.
“We’re heading up to your hideout upstate,” I said, nodding. I knew about his upstate hideout deep in the woods. From what I’d been told, it was an old cabin, nothing special, but he used it as a retreat or a place to take people who weren’t coming back. I was pretty sure I knew my place in that equation.
“Yeah, we’ve got to get out of Dodge for a little while, let things cool down a bit before we go back,” he said with a smile. He was cruel. Everything he said was intended to taunt me now.
“And you and I have to talk, right?” I said, looking out the window.
“Right.” He laughed.
“Do we have to have an audience for our little discussion?” I asked him. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I couldn’t believe I was playing along with his twisted little fantasy about me.
“We don’t, unless you want one.”
“Up to you. You’re the boss,” I reminded him.
“Yes, that’s right. I am,” he agreed.
I knew we were just playing at this point, though. He didn’t want me to work things out with him some other way. I’d been kidding myself with those thoughts of him wanting me the way he wanted those other girls, or wanting to work out a deal where he took whatever frustrations he had out on my ass. If we were heading towards the cabin upstate, it meant that my time was up. I was going to be one of those people who didn’t come back.
The air in car grew heavy as the realization weighed on my conscience. It seemed that Fang could also sense that I realized what we were doing. He grew quiet and stared at me with a thoughtful look in his eyes. We rode in silence for a few minutes as the air hung over us. The only sound was the wind outside as we sped down the interstate.
“I’m very disappointed in you,” Fang said to me after a few minutes of dark silence. His tone was even heavy at this point.
I knew he was talking about more than just my getting caught by Cole. I could hear it in his voice. He was being serious with me now. The whole mood of our ride had changed. He wasn’t just messing with me now, taunting me with his words. If things went the way he had planned them to go, this was very likely to be our final conversation. It was time to air things out.
“I expected more professional behavior from you,” he continued. “Even after getting caught, I expected you to continue treating this business with the Overlords as a job.”
“But I was,” I argued. “From the moment I walked in that room and saw that it was empty except for Cole standing against the opposite wall, I could tell that he desired me. So I decided to use that desire against him, and that’s what I’ve been doing.”
He kept his eyes straight ahead as the light beyond his headlights faded almost completely away.
“I was trying to seduce him to get intel out of him. I knew the best way to get him to open up to me was to play into his desire for me, and that’s what I’ve been doing. He didn’t want to torture me. He barely even tried to interrogate me. He took me under his wing almost immediately,” I explained.
“What does that mean to me?” Fang asked me.
“That means I played along so I could find out that he was coming after you. That meant I knew he’d moved his drugs elsewhere. I knew where he was at all times. I knew who was at their headquarters at all times. I’m in, Fang. Or I was. Now that I’m gone—”
“Now that he’s dead, you mean,” Fang interrupted.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m no longer in. I ran away to try to get back in with you, but it seems like you’ve got other ideas,” I told him.
“I do.”
“I figured as much. When I realized where we were going, I realized what you were planning. I’m not going home, am I?” I asked finally, getting straight to the point.
“Well, Sasha, you tell me what you would do. Put yourself in my position. You’ve got someone who’s been working for you for years. Normally, they do a damn good job. Occasionally they get off track a little to make things work faster, better. Like they might let themselves get caught so they can get information that wouldn’t otherwise be available. Maybe they sleep with a mark to get what they want out of them. Stuff like that. Now people know who your person is, and they can keep an eye out for them, making it harder for them to do their job. Sound familiar yet?” he asked.
“Getting there,” I said flatly.
“So, when I see what I saw with Cole, naturally, I get suspicious. I decide I need to keep track of my investment, because that’s what you are, Sasha. You may work for me, but don’t forget how much time and energy, or how many resources I’ve put into you, into helping you hone your skills.” Again with the accusing tone.
“If you’ve got something to say, Fang, just say it,” I told him. I couldn’t listen to that accusing tone any longer.
“Okay, I’ll say it. I had someone follow you and report back to me everything he saw. I’ve got recordings, photos, videos.” He paused to let that last word sink in. “I’ve seen you two on his balcony. I’ve seen you two prancing around naked in his apartment. I’ve watched the two of you fuck. Several times, Sasha.”
I felt my face flush, and I was thankful it was dark enough in the car now that no one could see it. I was vaguely aware that the man in black next to me turned to glance at me. Even through those damned sunglasses that he never seemed to take off, I could feel his eyes undressing me to help him imagine what watching me in bed must have been like.
“Okay, so you saw me working,” I said, trying to keep my voice even and hide the fact that I was quite shaken by this revelation.
“I even saw him toss a guy out for you,” Fang added, and I knew he wasn’t just grasping at straws, but I wondered. How did he know it was for me unless his guy was planted somehow on the inside?
I didn’t say anything. I figured I’d let him keep talking and give up more secrets. He may not have thought much about what he was saying—after all, I was going to be out of the picture soon—but I wanted to know everything I could about his little tail that he’d put on me. It sounded like it might have been more than one pe
rson because someone on the inside would have been noticed near the apartment.
“You seem pretty loyal to Cole, Sasha, and that bothers me,” he added.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean, it takes you days to call me sometimes. You can’t pull yourself away from your new boyfriend to make time for your boss, your employer, the man who brought you off the fucking street and gave you a place to stay. No, instead, you’re out there sleeping with my top rival when you’re supposed to be helping me take him down!” His usually calm tone was gone. He ripped it to shreds right in front of me as he let his anger out.
“You’re a traitor,” he added.
“I’m sorry, what?” I asked.