“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 treating 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.