Clara

 

So, I knew I hadn’t just had sex with Mason, but my face blushed as I realized I’d had that dream in front of Skull 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,” Skull 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, Clara. 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 Storm’s Angels 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 Mason’s building, I couldn’t shake the horrible revelation that Mason was right about the attack at the park. If he was driving the car now, it meant he was the driver then.

 

“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 Mason’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 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?” Skull replied.

 

“You know what I mean. Why did you have your men come after me at the park and again behind Mason’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.

 

“Yes, that’s true,” he said thoughtfully. “But at the same time, Clara, 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 smartass answers were gone. This was Skull 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 Mason, 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?” Skull 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 Skull 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,” Skull clarified for me.

 

“I guess you could put it that way,” I sort of agreed.

 

“Well, how you would you put it any differently, Clara?” 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 Mason bringing all the drugs back into the Storm’s Angels 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, Clara. 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, Mason 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.

 

“All right,” 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, Clara. 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, Skull,” 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, Clara, 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 Mason showed up soon. I hoped I hadn’t burned that bridge by leaving the way I did. I hoped that when he saw I’d taken the gun, he would know I was concerned for my safety.

 

Keep your promise, I thought. Protect me, Mason.

 

I should have stayed at the apartment. I never should have made that call. I didn’t care how cocky Skull wanted to be about the whole situation, pretending he’d planted the address of his hideout on the street so Mason and his men would go to the wrong place. If I hadn’t called to tell him that Storm’s Angels were on their way to kill him, Skull 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. Mason would take care of me and protect me, and Skull’s organization would have crumbled to the ground as his body fell, limp and lifeless, as Mason’s feet. There wouldn’t have been anyone to track me down, because everyone would have known that I was under the protection of Storm’s Angels.

 

I would have been untouchable, but most importantly, I would have been free instead of lying in the back of Skull’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?