The Carrero Contract - Selling Your Soul (Mafia Romance)

I get off the subway and slowly walk the four blocks to my apartment. Tired, dirty and mentally exhausted from a day’s gruelling shift, repetitive life, and generally just can’t be bothered anymore.

I have been feeling this lack lustre and completely empty for weeks on end and cannot seem to shift the hovering grey clouds which follow me everywhere I go.

I should quit, move on and find another job, but I’m stuck. Like I am superglued to the cesspool I accidentally landed in for some respite in the sun, and now I’m withering away in the heat of the day.

I have no clue what I’m going to do beyond this and no energy in me to try. I haven’t been able to function properly in months, and every night I still dream about that complete monster, Alexi Carrero. Tormenting me, making me hate him over and over. Heart breaking to icy shards every time he walks into my dream with those soulless grey eyes and an evil smirk on his face.

I can’t deny that his face alone gives me an incomparable heart ache.

In between the shadows and the monsters and the bad memories, he’s always lurking, face shaded and shadowed sometimes, so I can barely see who he is … but I know. I can feel him, smell him. Close enough to touch. He stands in my dreams and stares at me silently, in the most foreboding way. Then other times he’s there in my face, in clear daylight and stroking my cheek tenderly as though he might actually care, melting me to liquid and destroying my mind all over again. That is, before pulling out his gun and forcing it into my hand with a cold smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.

‘Do it.’ It’s all he ever says and then I wake in a flood of tears, unable to breathe with the freezing biting feel of that heavy steel still in my palm.

It haunts me still. That I stooped so low as to try and end my own life because I was that broken. How far he pushed me to that cliff and only fate saved me from carrying it out. I was so caught in his power that I couldn’t see how weak I became until it was too late.

I shudder at the thought, a weird chill creeping over my entire body, and I try to shake it off. Sometimes when I am working, I can still feel it in my grasp and rub my hand across my hip to remove the horrible sensation from my skin. It’s something I will never do again.

I have no longing to die. I don’t even know why I did what I did, and I am eternally disgusted at myself for letting him push me. I hate him for making me go that far.

Despite all I dream about, he is the most terrifying of them all, even though mostly, all he does is watch me, stare at me, close enough to hear him breathe. It’s all in the mind games and the way he could pull me into his control and it’s the last thing I will ever let happen again.

I will never let someone like him ever have that control again. I will run far away and always protect myself from here on in.

In these months I have built up hardness in my heart and a wall of thick steel that no smooth Carrero charm will ever be able to penetrate. No one will ever get close to hurting me like that again. He will never get a chance. No one will. If he were to walk back into my life, I would run a million miles in the opposite direction.

I was weak and stupid and I gave him too much to use against me. I let him in and I let him break me. I fell in love with the parts of him he designed to draw me in as I was supposed to do. He sought out my deepest cravings—security, safety, a home, a chance to be someone else, have someone to care—and he used them to bring down all my defences. The hints of caring, the split personality character, it was all a ploy to grind me down, get under my skin and into my head. He is a devious player, with a Masters in manipulation, who needs control and destruction to thrive and I will never make that mistake again.

years of disrepair hitting my senses with a bitter foul scent in the air that dries my throat on impact. Keeping my senses alert even though no one is around. It’s not a good neighbourhood, Washington near 14th street, the crime central and downtrodden area of the city where both attacks and break-ins are frequent. I’m already tense and on high alert, overly aware of every noise and sensation as my skin prickles in anticipation. I always feel this way coming back here at the end of

times again, and always on the watch for men in the shadows. I look around quickly, scanning the hall for followers, before I slide inside and immediately lock the several deadbolts I put on the door when I moved here. Not that they are much of a deterrent. They are barely gripping the rotten wood and one of them has fallen off twice. I have no

a heavy sigh. I feel empty. Going through the motions, tired and just drained of life. My mood has been desolate for so long now that I don’t remember how to feel any other way. I honestly do

by my door as I pull off my sodden crusty

‘Meghan’—she is a pale comparison to

mirror, with her pale face, no makeup and chipped and broken nails, discarding the

girl you would step over

Plain faced, nothing extraordinary, just a young down-and-out trying to make ends meet.

wonder if Alexi has it—in a jar on his desk—along with all the other souls of broken

treasure it, even as a trophy, which I doubt. It’s probably rumpled and strewn in the gutter behind his club where he swept it out of

I’m disgusting and pathetic.

Escape was her only thought and nothing else. She did what she needed to do to survive, and she learned to take all that made her

ashes and held her own for a long time. She built a business and for a while, she thrived at it. She was bold and sassy, even while underneath it was all a lie. She played the part of accomplished hostess, and somehow along the way found a little self-worth, despite it all. She would never have accepted this as her fate and would have kept chipping away endlessly to claw herself back to some sort of cushy life and social standing. She was born to be in charge of her fate and her mindset

him take

strung it out and made it stretch over almost

to breathe and lick her wounds in the hopes that one day she wakes

eternally tired and has

me and I can barely look at

away from my reflection and yank off the rest of my clothes clumsily, heading to the bathroom to run a bath and dodge the buckets I have propped around this leaky room. Pushing my foul mood and self-pity

miniscule apartment, barely enough room to swing a cat but it’s safer to be in small

and I am so done with all that bullshit. I

down my learned mannerisms and dialogue. I have tried to sound New York as much as I can, keep my sexy on the low, and avoid

think she was dead already. I guess in a way

tasters to anyone for anything anymore. I would rather sweep up pig shit all day. I just have no set plan on where I will go, or what I will do, and I am biding my