The Carrero Contract - Selling Your Soul (Mafia Romance)

I wake up with a throbbing face, shooting pain across my entire skull and forehead and the worst kind of headache from hell. I am on the cold, hard wooden floor of my apartment and for a moment I have no clue where I am. My body is stiff from it, and freezing from being here for a prolonged time in a very awkward position, like a dead animal.

Disorientated and woozy, I turn on my side and throw up when the taste of blood hits the back of my throat making me gag, and I realise that my face is covered in it. Feeling out my features, I can tell that my nose is a mess, blood crusted around it, and it feels like it could be broken at the bridge where it’s swelling badly and near unbearable to touch. Tracing it tenderly, so very carefully with my fingertips and recognising the burning ache of a bone that has to be at least cracked. My face already feels puffy and even though it’s still so dark I can tell I am completely alone in my surroundings. It has that eerie feeling of emptiness that comes when you are truly alone. It’s a moment that causes me internal pain and a huge wave of fear as I realise, I have been out completely cold and vulnerable in a place you wouldn’t want to find yourself unlocked.

My brain jumps to my last memories and I automatically push my hands to check my body and clothes erratically, feeling myself out and exhaling heavily as I do so. Pyjama bottoms are still on, as are my underwear and tank top over my sports bra. So I can thank my lucky stars I haven’t been raped … this time. They don’t tend to stop and re-dress you after the act.

The overwhelming ache of emotion hits me harder and I push it down, along with the burn of tears, thanking my lucky stars I won’t have to drag myself to a sexual health clinic and try and explain this away to be tested. It makes my head and heart throb as the realisation hits me how lucky I was this time; how lucky I am he didn’t kill me with the force he must have hit me, or did worse to me. I am so lightheaded with an obvious concussion that I barely feel like this is real.

I crawl until I get to the nearest piece of furniture and use it to lever myself to my feet, almost knocking it over on uneven legs, shaking and swaying all over the place before I slump down on top of it and feel around for the lamp on the table beside me. It’s not there, and as my eyes adjust to being awake, I can see my apartment is trashed, the lamp laying a few feet away in the light cast by the moon from the sitting room window. They must have been braver with me contained and dead to the world, and went through this place like enraged animals in a bid to find something of worth.

The door in front of me is wide open and I get up and walk unsteadily to it to close it. Not sure what else I should be doing.

It’s completely fucked up; bolts and locks are mangled from what I suspect was a crowbar entry that I slept through in my drugged stupor and my supposed security has ripped clean out of the woodworm ridden door almost effortlessly. They knew this door wasn’t a match and probably didn’t make much noise getting it open anyway. Sheer luck it was on a night I had put myself into an induced deep sleep to get well.

My door won’t shut and when I switch on the overhead light my eyes immediately go to the gaping hole in the floor by the window as the dull illumination shows me the full horror, and I literally sink to my lowest. I don’t care that the apartment looks worse than it did; it’s not really hard to make a shithole look more like a shithole. It’s what I can see that rips my soul out and the breath from my lifeless body in one fell sweep.

The hidey-hole for all that I have scraped and saved and kept together, the loose floorboard by the window, they found it.

I don’t even check, even from here I know it’s all gone and as I sink to the floor heavily, losing all life, I cradle my face in my hands and start to cry.

Everything inside of me dying all at once as all hope and light of a way out of this place is taken away on the breeze. They have just snubbed out my chance of a new anything; the theft of all that I had, my plans, what I could squirrel away, gone.

It’s one thing to start over when you have something behind you to enable a future, it’s another thing entirely to start over with absolutely nothing except a pot to piss in when you’re completely broke and all you had just got stolen by some arsehole looking to fuel his drug habit.

I’m screwed.

have nothing

well, this place looks like home sweet home for a very long time at this rate.

that it’s how he has left me. Camilla would have taken this in her stride, picked herself up and put herself to rights. I am so

dry of their own accord. Not because I am able to stop them,

mind on the task of securing my

and all they will do is make me hang around while they take statements and then harass me to go to the emergency room,

I’m fucking penniless.

fighting me all the way. I am too weary and dizzy for this, and I eventually jam a chair up against it in a bid to keep it closed while I get to the sink and clean the worst of my face up

image blinking back at me under dim, buzzing bathroom lighting in a cracked mirror

blue darkness and the bridge of my nose is swollen and bruised already. My skin pale and blotchy from tears and traces of being unwell and my eyes look red and veiny. The blood cleans away to reveal an ashen face and a swollen

lot of questions at work and piss Joe off that I’m not his star turn on for sleazy customers looking like this. My head is pounding and I’m not sure if it’s from this or the fact I feel like death and barely capable of staying upright. The room keeps swimming and the turbulent motion going off inside my stomach is making me queasy. My nose is running with both blood and mucus so that I have to sniff, which then

bolts are now splinters, gouges and splits. I have no tools and no knowledge on how to repair a broken door. I also

Fuck my life.

my bare foot and stub my toe in the process. Yelping, mad at myself while I cradle my throbbing foot and glare around me. So much going off inside of me;

to be in. My skin has goose bumped in high alert, and I am aware that it’s still

to the extra effort to find something to steal at all. Getting myself knocked out just gave them time to have a good look around and I guess that’s how they found my space in the floor. When you walk over it, it tends to pop up a little at one end and make a

did my mother find my secret stashes in our old flat? Little boxes where I hid what money I could stash for bills and food, and she would waste

accounts and cash withdrawals are the worst kinds of paper trail if you have the means to look;

one place where I could grab it at a moment’s notice—ready to run, like always. I went off grid,

Robbed!

a shithole part of the city, and the only thing I have to