by Zoey Parker
“Do you know where they went?”
“I didn’t get a good look at which way they went from here, but they turned north up at the next street.” He nodded at where the alley opened up to the road about a block away.
“How long has it been since they left?”
“I don’t know. I’m not too good with time out here, but it couldn’t have been more than maybe ten or fifteen minutes, man. They just left.” He scratched his filthy, matted hair.
“Thanks for the info, man.” I fished out a twenty and handed it to him.
“No. Thank you, man,” he said, smiling and laughing at the money I’d handed him. He was probably going to go get something to take the edge off the heat of the day, maybe take away the ache in his bones from being on the concrete all day.
I hurried to the parking garage and called Dante back.
“That was fast,” he said when he answered.
“Yeah, a guy living by the dumpster out back saw the whole thing. Apparently she was jumped again,” I told him.
“Did he say if she was okay?”
“He made it sound like she was. She took one of my guns and apparently shot one of the guys trying to abduct her. They had to put him in the trunk according to my friend here.” I laughed.
“Right on. Did he happen to see where they went?”
“Yeah, he said he thought they turned north on the next street,” I told him. “Mean anything to you?”
“Yeah. You’re right there by the interstate, right?” Dante asked.
“Yeah.” If they’d gone onto the interstate, I knew there was still a chance of catching up with them. It was a fairly straight highway, and chances were, they weren’t jumping off immediately. It was better than trying to figure out where they were going within the city.
“Alright. Rumor has it Fang has a hideout upstate. He’s probably taking her there. He knows we’re on to him. If that’s where he’s going, and he doesn’t have a huge head start, we can still catch up with him,” Dante explained.
“That’s the best news I’ve heard all day,” I told him.
“Good. Now get back here so we can get everyone together. I’ll grab a few guys and meet you outside when you get here. We’ll ride out together and try to catch up with them. Don’t worry. If she’s alright now, she’ll be alright when we get there. Then, you can do whatever the hell you want,” he said with a laugh.
“Yeah, but I think karma may be handling all of that for me right now,” I told him.
“Good.” He killed the call.
I stuffed my phone back in my pocket and hopped on the Roadster. It was time to head back to HQ to get the guys together. We had to hurry. Fang already had at least a fifteen-minute head start, and that gap was widening every minute that we weren’t on the road behind him. If we could catch up to him, I knew that it would get ugly, but at least we would get Sasha back.
I would get Sasha back.
I gunned the engine and pulled out of the parking deck. I didn’t know what I intended to do to her once I got her away from Fang. All I could think of clearly was what I was going to do to Fang once we caught up to him. He’d earned every bit of our scorn over the past couple of years, and he was about to face the full wrath of Hell’s Overlords, especially after taking so many guys from us.
I wondered what Sasha was thinking that very moment. I wondered if it had occurred to her yet how badly she’d screwed up by trying to play both sides of the field on this one. She’d tried to be a double agent, and it didn’t seem to be working out for her.
Now, in an attempt to go back to her old boss, she’d been kidnapped by him, and we were about to be on our way to rescue her. The irony was ridiculous.
The good news was that with her in Fang’s custody, it was less likely that anyone would be contacting him to let him know what our next move was. The bad news, of course, was that he probably already knew his boys hadn’t taken out everybody, which meant that someone was going to be riding up on his ass at any minute.
Hopefully, we could get to him before word did, and we’d still have some element of surprise. Plus, being one guy down on his ride, we had an advantage over his fire power, or so I was telling myself. I needed all the morale I could get.
We were about to go toe to toe with our biggest rival and the man competing for our reputation of being the toughest, meanest organization on the street. He may have had better weapons, but, like I always said, he didn’t have the balls it took to do what was really needed when the shit hit the fan.
And the shit was about to hit his fan in a big way. He’d taken business from me. He’d taken men from me. He’d even gone so far as to take my old lady from me. I wasn’t having it. I wasn’t going to put up with his shit anymore.
The orders were going to be to shoot to kill. We were going to take out Fang and whoever else was in that car besides Sasha. Sasha was going to be the only survivor. If anyone else showed up, we were going to take them down, too.
This was war, and we weren’t about to back down.
The engine roared as I sped away from the apartment building back towards HQ.
“Hey, man, we’ll get her back safe and sound.” Dante offered his encouraging words with a hand on my shoulder once I arrived. He could see how troubled my eyes were when I pulled up. He stood outside with four other members armed and ready on their motorcycles.
Afternoon had begun to turn to night, hurting our chances of catching up to Fang and his men. I looked at my guys, who were waiting to hear some encouraging words from their president, especially after having lost so many men earlier in the day, but I didn’t have anything left in me. This whole mess was really starting to take its toll. Part of me wanted to just throw my hands up and walk away, but I knew I couldn’t do that. I owed it to Sasha to go after her.
I couldn’t explain why I owed it to her after everything she’d done, all the trouble she caused, but I felt it deep inside. I owed her another chance. Trust was hard to come by in our line of work, and she’d worked pretty hard to earn mine, despite turning around and stabbing me in the back with it. But I would have done the same for any of my guys. I understood the relationship she had with Fang.
I walked up to the closed bay door and turned to face the members who were prepared to ride with us in pursuit of Fang and his goons. They had guns strapped to their backs, and they were just waiting on the signal to go. I wanted to make sure we were all on the same page and not just running wild out there on the highway. We needed to handle the situation, get Sasha, and come back with minimal deaths. We’d lost quite a few men already.
“Alright,” I told the guys, “if we’re going to go, we’ve got to leave now. Fang has Sasha. He picked her up at my apartment earlier this afternoon. He’s heading north on the interstate, we believe. He’s got a hideout upstate, and we think that’s where he’s going. Now, look, it’s a couple of hours away, and they’ve probably a good thirty-minute head start or better by now. We’re going to be chasing them down in the dark, but we can do it.”
I looked at their faces, and they still looked lost. I felt like I should have been able to give them some sort of pep talk, but I just didn’t have it in me. I felt just as tired and defeated as they looked. I glanced over at Dante.
“It’s all you,” I told him, patting him on the back as I stepped aside.
“Alright, it’s go time. They’ve got a pretty good head start, and it’s getting dark. You know how this works. We’ll ride together. Stick close to each other but keep your distance from them until it’s time to take them down. And remember who we are,” he said. “We’re Hell’s Overlords, and we’re going to ride out with Hell on our backs.”
Dante sounded like he was ready to kick some ass, and that seemed to get everyone else in the mood, too. I was just ready to get it over with. I wasn’t going to be happy until I saw Fang dead and Sasha back in my arms.
Chapter 20
Sasha
So, I knew that I hadn’t just had sex wi
th Cole, but my face blushed as I realized I’d had that dream in front of Fang and whoever else was in the car with us. I went to move my hands to cover my flushing face, but they wouldn’t budge. My wrists were tied together. I moved my legs. They were, too.
I lay across the backseat of his sedan, except I wasn’t alone. Two strong hands held onto my bound ankles. I started to piece together what had happened to land me in the backseat of the car.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Fang said. “We had to take some precautions for everyone’s safety.”
“Motherfucker,” I growled.
“Such foul language,” he said in his smooth voice. “I really don’t like what’s happened to you since you’ve been hanging out with those bikers, Sasha. We need to work on your attitude once we get you home.”
“Where are you taking me?” I snapped.
“Up the road. Out of the way. We have a lot to talk about.” Behind his calm tone was a dangerous threat. His voice was like a snake coiling itself into a striking position.
“You don’t want to talk,” I told him.
“Why do you say that? Of course I do. You’re one of my most valuable assets. Well, you were until Hell’s Overlords got to you,” he said.
I couldn’t see him. I was facing the backseat. But I could feel his eyes through the rearview mirror, staring at me.
Waking up in the back of his car with two of the guys who’d approached me behind Cole’s building, I couldn’t shake the horrible revelation that Cole was right about the attack at the park. If he was driving the car now, it also meant he was the driver at the park as well.
“You were behind the attack at the park, weren’t you?” I accused him.
“You noticed. Guys, I told you we couldn’t keep it a secret from her forever,” he said.
The other two men in the car chuckled. The one who had been shot behind Cole’s apartment did not. I wondered where he was. Then I remembered all the closing doors when they first put me in the car, and I knew that one of them must have been the trunk. We were driving up the road with a dead body in the back of the car.
“Why would you do that?” I asked him.
“Do what?” Fang replied.
“You know what I mean. Why did you have your men come after me at the park and again behind Cole’s apartment? It seems a bit like overkill if you ask me. I was willing to go with you either time,” I explained to him.
“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 altern
ative 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.
