OWN HER: A Dark Mafia Romance(123)

We were clearly at an impasse. We sat in silence, staring at each other, seeing who would break the silence first. My mind raced to find something else I could use to unnerve my captor. I still wasn’t a hundred percent convinced he wouldn’t give in to his instincts and torture me before it was all said and done. Torture would have been preferable to this gridlocked silence.



“You know, I could just let you go,” he said finally, breaking the silence first.



I wanted to laugh at him and taunt him, but I was also curious where this latest threat was going.



“So, if you don’t start talking,” he continued, “I think that’s what I’ll do. I’ll let you go and put the word out that you were captured. I’m sure it’ll get back to your boss just like the news I planted about moving my heroin to our HQ did. What do you think will happen then?” He knelt down in front of me again, this time with his face looking up into mine.



I didn’t respond. I knew what would happen. I knew Fang would find out before I could either get in touch with him or get out of town, and I knew he would have someone on the way to pick me up right away.



“Your boss will probably want to know how you got caught, why you allowed yourself to walk into a trap the way you did. Now, chances are, he didn’t know it was a trap. Chances are, he told you about the news that we were pulling everything back in because of how much you’d already stolen from our stashes. And he sent you to check it out. You were supposed to grab a little heroin and take it back to show him that the news was true. Then, you were going to be out of it. He was going to send some muscle to take it all, wasn’t he?”



I blinked. Fang had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. Everything had gone according to Cole’s plan. It was like he was recounting my conversation with Fang. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I’d been working for the wrong man all along. Fang might have been a smooth talker, but he wasn’t nearly as cunning as Cole seemed to be.



“What I’m saying, Sasha, is that it’s not your fault.” He patted my leg. “So, you tell me who sent you, and my guys go punish him for his stupidity. I get my right hand man in there to put a little extra pain on him for sending someone so beautiful into harm’s way so recklessly, and we handle it. You’re good to go after that. You take your cut of whatever he’s got laying around, and hit the road. Start a new life, Sasha. How does that sound?”



I narrowed my eyes. It sounded too good to be true, honestly. No one walked away from shit like this that easily. I opted for silence again, waiting to hear what else he had to say.



“Fair enough.” He nodded, patted my knee again, and stood up. “If you don’t talk, I’ll just let you go, and you can face him yourself, no drugs, no intel. I’m sure that your boss will just be happy to have you back safe and sound, realizing how careless he’d been to send you right into the clutches of the most notorious, most feared men on these streets.”



He walked away while he was talking, but when he finished, he turned around and gave me a smile that sent chills up and down my spine. My blood turned to ice in my veins, and my stomach froze into a ball of solid ice. I was about to see the real Cole Masterson, the man I’d heard so many horror stories about. Play time was over.





Chapter 4




Cole



Sasha Winters was my thief. I grabbed her arm and wrestled her into the metal chair where I intended to tie up my thief when I caught her. I pulled the ski mask off over her head, and when I saw the soft angles of her chin and jaw, her soft pink lips, and the cascading blonde hair falling out of the cap, I couldn’t believe it!



The rest of her outfit did nothing to give away her gender. Even when I grabbed her arm, I figured the thief who’d been stealing from us was going to turn out to be a man. I never expected a woman, but that also made the lone wolf theory a little more likely. I didn’t know anyone who employed women in our neck of the woods, not for jobs as dangerous as what Sasha was doing.



I took my time tying her up to try to gauge how her body was built. I wrapped the rope around her wrists slowly, carefully, realizing how thin and frail they felt underneath my hands and underneath the ropes. I tied her to the back of the chair gently, observing the curve of her breasts, her flat stomach, and her narrow waist. I wanted to get her out of those clothes and into something more feminine. I tied her ankles to the legs of the chair and gripped her calf muscles to gauge how thin her legs were. The image I put together in my head was pretty good, but I wanted to see the real Sasha.