Viper (Hell's Handlers MC 9)

Though still a virgin, Cassie wasn’t stupid or naïve. She lived in the real world, and had no illusions that sex was only for marriage, love, or some sacred moment between two people. Her friends had sex all the time with fuck buddies, significant others, random hookups. Sometimes an itch had to be scratched. She’d just never found someone she wanted to scratch hers. After living with a father whose repeated and public affairs had destroyed every relationship he’d had, she just couldn’t take such a casual approach to her body.

Cassie wanted to at least be sure she wouldn’t be left humiliated, shamed, and with a mountain of regrets the first time she’d had sex. So she’d waited. And now she fucking regretted that because she sure as fuck didn’t want her first time to be with some disgusting biker who thought of her as nothing more than a fancy sex toy. Her entire body locked up at the thought. But if it would work to get her freedom, she might just have to suck up the revulsion and do it.

The fate waiting for her if she failed to escape promised to be far worse than one romp with a dirty biker. Before yesterday, the notion of human trafficking had been an abstract one. Something she’d occasionally read about in the paper when a young woman went missing. Something everyone pitied but never quite devoted much brain power to. Especially the people in her life who only cared about three things, their public image, their wallets, and who they were fucking. It was those very people who’d driven her to get trashed in a bar alone, forgetting Street Smarts 101.

Not two days ago, she’d discovered her married father had been screwing her best friend Marissa. It’d been going on since Marissa had turned eighteen, three years ago.

During those three fucking years, her friend had been meeting her for coffee dates on study breaks, partying with her on weekends, crying during difficult times. Three years she’d been deceiving Cassie and sleeping with her father behind her back.

Her father.

Were there a greater betrayal, she wasn’t aware of it.

And how did she find out? Well, that would have been when her four months pregnant ex-best friend showed up at Cassie’s apartment sobbing and begging for advice. The entire story spilled out in a torrent of tears and hysterics.

The nerve of her, thinking Cassie would somehow, what? Empathize?

Cassie supposed if she’d been a better person, she’d have felt some compassion or even pity toward her friend, but she didn’t.

She couldn’t.

All she’d felt was rage, hatred, and betrayal—well, after the initial blinding shock. When Marissa confessed to being in love with Cassie’s father, Cassie had nearly fallen over. Her foolish friend wanted nothing more than for Jim—as she’d referred to the man she’d called Mr. Falk since she could speak—to leave his current wife and raise the child with her. She hadn’t really come to Cassie for guidance, but to implore Cassie to speak to her father on Marissa’s behalf. Maybe the pregnancy hormones had made her stupid, but Marissa actually believed Cassie would support their…their thing.

She refused to refer to it as a relationship.

Good Lord, her father was her best friend’s baby daddy. Their families used to vacation together. Just five years ago, they’d all gone on a six-day yachting cruise in the Mediterranean. Marissa had been sixteen. Had her father been watching her? Lusting after her as he sat there sipping champagne with Marissa’s parents and his own wife?

That was about as screwed up as it got.

After kicking her bawling friend out, Cassie had turned her fury on her father. All that accomplished was being told she was acting like a spoiled child and to grow up. Excuse her for thinking her fifty-three-year-old married father knocking up her twenty-one-year-old best friend was fucked up.

In a fit of illogical rage, she’d threatened to go to the media if he didn’t support her friend financially and stop seeing her romantically. He’d laughed and said his lawyers would handle it and her “pathetic, social-climbing” friend would never see a dime. He’d then threatened to cut Cassie off if she went to the media. So, she’d taken care of the problem herself and stormed out of the house determined never to return. Screw him and his money. Maybe had this been his first twisted offense, she could have considered forgiving him, but her father’s sexual proclivities had put him in hot water on more than a few occasions.

Hell, another shameful affair with a barely legal teen had been the reason his second wife left in the dead of night and never returned. She’d often wondered if the same thing would have happened to her mother had her life not ended tragically early.

Her father was part of the wealthy, corporate, high society elite, yet he was far trashier than any of these bikers. Men her father would consider the lowest of low. She wanted no part of that life anymore. With extreme wealth came lies, manipulation, backstabbing, and greed. Family didn’t matter, friendships meant nothing. All those people cared about was money and how to earn more of it. And once they had it, they saw it as a license to do whatever the hell they wanted.