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He thrust against the back of my throat one last time, coming across my tongue and down my throat as he cupped my face in his hands.
Guillermo was waiting on his bike when we finally made it downstairs, his engine purring loudly, helmet secured. He was ready to go. He took in my slightly dishevelled appearance and made a tsk-tsk noise.
‘You two are like fucking animals,’ he said, shaking his head in mock disapproval.
Dornan, who’d killed other men for saying less, laughed as he started his own bike. I fastened my own helmet under my chin and straddled the seat behind Dornan as delicately as I could, using my hands and the hem of my dress to shield the fact that I wasn’t wearing any panties.
Dornan tore out of the parking lot and I had to hold on tight to make sure I didn’t fall off the back of the bike. The man liked to go fast.
Seeing Dornan had sated me, but the closer we got to the clubhouse, the more anxious I became. It was always the same fucking shit with these people, and after nine years I was growing weary of it all. I wondered how much longer Emilio planned to keep me around.
I wondered if he’d ever decide that I’d paid my father’s debt and was free to leave.
Ha. When hell froze over, I’m sure. I knew deep down that he never had any intention of letting me leave.
CHAPTER FOUR
MARIANA
Ten minutes later, we were pulling up at the Gypsy Brothers clubhouse. One of the young prospects manning the entrance waved us in, and Dornan steered his bike through the razorwire-topped gates, parking in the lot.
I climbed off the bike, smoothing my black dress down. I’d already checked my make-up in the mirror and made sure my cleavage was on display. See, I didn’t want any attention, but more than that, I needed it. I needed to appear non-threatening. When I’d first started work in the cartel, processing accounts and siphoning money offshore for Emilio and his counterparts, I’d dressed plainly to avoid roving eyes. I thought it was the best course of action, to blend in, to be invisible. But I’d quickly learned that the prettier I looked, the less suspicious people were of me. It was a lesson I’d learned from my predecessor, Bella. She’d been the cartel’s chief accountant before me, and she’d ended up in landfill somewhere, a bullet in her head and a swathe of stolen cash to her name. Collateral damage, Dornan had called it.
I had vowed not to meet the same fate.
She wasn’t all that good at embezzling – creating fake receipts and paying ghost vendors twice. When Emilio had tasked me with investigating the shoddy paper trail Bella had left in her dim-witted wake, I’d encountered a mess the cartel should have noticed a lot earlier.
I was much smarter with the way I stole from them.
Technically, it wasn’t even stealing; it was keeping my options open. Because although I loved Dornan, there was still the ever-present possibility that one day my existence would become too much of a liability and I’d be snuffed out. So I kept my own collateral in the form of offshore accounts. Nobody ever needed to know that I was a required co-signatory on most of them, not unless it came down to a situation where my life was at stake and I needed a bargaining chip. It wasn’t even about the money. It was about being smart, about realising my gig with the Il Sangue Cartel and their offshoot branch, the Gypsy Brothers MC, could be terminated at any moment. Because although Dornan had shepherded me away from his father and Il Sangue, the reality was that the Gypsy Brothers weren’t exactly any safer.
The Gypsy Brothers weren’t even a one-percenter club.
They were worse. They were the one percent of the one percent, a toxic wasteland that chewed up and spat out everything they touched.
They’d chewed me up nine years ago, when I was taken from my family.
I was still waiting for them to spit me out: kill me, sell me, destroy me.
In the office, I sat in my chair, rigid, as Emilio circled around behind me. I flinched minutely as he sifted his hands through my long ponytail, tugging lightly on the ends.
His touch – his very presence – was nauseating.
Across from me, Christopher Murphy, one-time federal air marshal and now a top-ranking DEA agent, was smirking as he held my gaze with his cold blue eyes. In another person’s skull that hue might have been beautiful, but in his, it was freakish. He’d barely changed in nine years – tall and built like a weed, with shaggy brown hair he’d cut a little shorter and an imposing stature. Someone, somewhere, found him attractive enough to date, because he’d backed off from all the eye-fucking he’d been giving me since we met. Not me, though. I couldn’t get past the fact that he was a total fucking psychopath.
‘The figures are up this week,’ Emilio murmured, tracing light fingers across my shoulders and down each of my bare arms. I swallowed thickly, not daring to move, not daring to recoil from his touch. I’d done that once, back in the early days, pulled away when he reached out. That earned me two black eyes, a face full of cuts and a bruised ego, since he’d beaten me to a bloody pulp while Murphy sat and watched with a cruel smile. And then probably went home and jerked off to the image, knowing him. Sick fuck.
I never knew exactly where Il Sangue’s money came from, and I kind of preferred it that way. I knew they dealt in coke and weapons, but I didn’t see the particular transactions, didn’t know what was what. A hundred grand here, twenty grand there. Sometimes it came in as cash. Sometimes as numbers on a statement, deposited into the bank accounts of any number of front businesses the cartel controlled. I didn’t like the cash. Often it was marked with cocaine, or blood. Sometimes both. I didn’t enjoy peeling apart and drying what was, quite literally, blood money. The smell always reminded me of death.
Mostly I just did my part, funnelled the majority of Emilio’s funds out of the United States and into offshore accounts. Kept my mouth shut and my head down. I managed Murphy’s money as well, made sure it didn’t look suspicious when he was living a caviar lifestyle on a government agent’s salary. Needless to say, Murphy had some very generous fictitious relatives.
I hated that part more than anything, the fact that I was enabling the two people I despised the most in the world to live lives of affluence and grandeur. I spent many an afternoon daydreaming about making their cash disappear and burning their houses down.
It was better than the alternative. Better than being dead in the ground.
Most of the time.
Moments like this, I wasn’t so sure.
