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 the going to go?” I asked.