The Carrero Contract - Selling Your Soul (Mafia Romance) novel Chapter 79

I slide down and do something I have done since I was old enough to bathe myself. I keep going until I fully submerge under the water, hold my breath, close my eyes and blot everything of the world away to hear only the high-pressure thrum of being underwater.

I can ignore my knees getting cold as they stick out to accommodate my laid down position as the respite from the world is always worth it. Even in an uncomfortable half sized tub that scrapes my bum with its cracked enamel.

I taught myself to hold my breath for up to two minutes as a child, even though I have never learned to swim. I used to count the seconds out and make myself do it for longer and longer. It was my escape, my secret underworld which cleansed my soul of all the sins put upon me while hiding me from the reality of my life. I used to wonder if it would be as peaceful to drown and finally be free of all that tormented me.

I can manage half that time now, seeing as I no longer do it ritually or often enough anymore. Only when I feel highly stressed and need escapism.

I relent after a minute and push myself up, wiping the water away as I inhale the cold musty air, and come back to focus on what is real. The disgusting grimy surroundings. I have to just accept this is my life now.

Tomorrow is another gruelling long shift, another monotonous Thursday when we stay open late. Fridays are no better as I work six days a week and have no respite until Monday, my one day off. I work weekends, not that I have a life to have other plans that require the odd break to use in my own time. I am carrying on that age-old tradition of no friends, no one getting close and therefore … no need for weekends.

I also feel wretched. This damn cold has been building for a few days and it’s wiping me out. My eyes are puffy; I’m constantly sniffing, feeling thirsty and have an itchy sore throat. These past months I just keep catching one thing after another as though I never fully recover before I am floored again. I seem to be sick all the time.

I know it’s because my immune system is shot, and I am hardly living in healthy surroundings; it all adds up to just being constantly under the weather. Just another layer to drag me down and make me feel like maybe it’s time I upped and left and found somewhere better to step up to.

This place is a prison that I have chosen to dwell inside of and I no longer know why anymore. Why I am doing this to myself when I have a few grand under the floor to just start someplace else.

I sit up in panic as a coughing fit hits me suddenly and almost drown myself in the process as I slide about helplessly, grabbing for a towel and wiping my face free of water. It wracks through me, burning my lungs painfully, and I end up with a runny nose and watery eyes cursing myself that I don’t even get to enjoy a soak in the tub anymore. Not that this tub is worthy. It’s well matched to my shithole surroundings. Tiny, chipped and flaky and has temperamental water flow when I manage to get it to work at all. Water that even on a good day, is always a weird shade of yellow or brown.

I get out quickly and clumsily, feeling frustrated and just not in the frame of mind to wrestle with my own patience and stay in the bath. Not even spending time washing myself or my hair, but the mood is gone and I dry myself fast.

This place is too cold and dusty to walk around naked, so I throw on the pyjamas I keep hanging in here, only place to use as a wardrobe seeing as the one in my room has rat shit and roaches inside it, crawling about and making my skin crawl. My clothes are kept in bags on the couch for more than just my need to leave, it’s also for fear that I may get critters in them and I’ve been bitten by many strange bugs here already.

I really need to up my living conditions.

I really need to sort my shit out.

I grab a handful of toilet paper as I walk to bed, knowing I’m going to need it if my nose keeps running, and climb into it. Not that it’s much of a welcoming place with a hard mattress and rough bedding that I got on sale in a hurry when I moved here.

I am ready to just blank out the world and read a book. It’s not like I use my couch nor have anything to do when I get home from work. I spend my time here on this bed just sleeping my life away, or reading. I don’t even own a TV or anything which makes a noise and might attract people to investigate the new tenant’s belongings. Nothing of comfort that would just waste my money either and I only have books because people leave them in the diner constantly. Joe throws them out if I don’t take them home.

This one’s a western with a pretty sexy man on the cover, not my cup of tea, but better than staring outside my dirty windows until sunset and wishing myself to sleep.

It’s my only source of escape – reading a book.

I’m not hungry either. I eat at work before I leave and that does me till breakfast most days, so that means hitting a gym or doing any sort of workouts isn’t needed as I am not eating enough to really gain weight. I know I am not taking care of myself in the way I should. I know maybe I am depressed in some way because of the turnout of events and I should kick my own arse. I just cannot muster that fire for anything.

I down the bottle of cough medicine I picked up before heading home in a bid to shift this bug, knowing it’s dumb but I want it to knock me out for the night. It should work like a sedative, and maybe I won’t wake tonight with nightmares and terrors if my body is drugged into nothingness.

They have come back with a vengeance since leaving Club Carrero, and now there are more sinister men scaring me shitless in my dreams than ever before.

I wake up with my book over my face haphazardly, where it’s obviously fallen when I drifted off, jumping in alarm at god knows what and blinking in the darkness of my room as I open my eyes to pitch black. My heart’s pounding crazily and the sweats hit me fast as I come to, in disorientation. Groggy from the effects of the meds I took hours ago as I slide it off and try to get my bearings.

I am unsure why I woke, as I was not even dreaming, and I feel completely odd in a sort of disconnected almost drunk way; which I presume is cough med related rather than sickness. Pushing it on to my bedside table as I feel around with shaking hands. I roll to my side to try and drift back off, but a little noise in the next room pricks up my attention. Like a tiny warning bell sending me into immediate high alert, it brings me to my senses in a breath pausing way.

I pause, holding painfully still and listen, not moving. Heartbeat rising as I try to focus on what I thought I just heard and strain so very hard to listen over the sound of my shallow breathing and erratic pounding rhythm as fear takes a low grip of my insides.

I hear something. Closing my eyes to cut off my attempts to focus on sights I cannot see and just listen very hard. So much so I can hear the blood rushing inside my head as adrenaline courses through my body. I know I am not imagining things; I am sensitive to things like this, ever since I came out to live alone again. I catch it again, so very faint, almost surreal but definitely in my apartment.

A scrape, as though something is being shifted or moved around on my threadbare floor through the door, and I sit up to strain towards it as stealthily as I can muster. My bedroom door is closed, which it makes it hard to hear anything at all but it’s unmistakable as it comes a little clearer and closer. I push my bedclothes back and sit very still, poised in a sitting position; completely petrified with a million things racing through my mind that I try to silence and just pull myself together.

Footsteps!

They sound as though they are trying to be light on their feet, but every time they venture nearer my room, the floorboards make a dull aching thud underfoot, where they are loose and I know for sure;

There are people inside my space!

No one knows who I am here!

I slide out of bed as quickly and silently as I can as trembles take hold in the cold air. Holding my breath, nerves on an all-time high as I vibrate inside, I try to hold my shit in while simultaneously waking myself fully.

Someone is in my apartment and I have no clue if this is a random robbery or something worse completely. The woman on the third floor was raped by an intruder last month, he took nothing of value and the attack seemed to be purely sexual. I am not about to go down without a fight if that is what this is. I am not some mere girl who will take being raped again so easily.

I may not be a stranger to it, but it’s still something I never want to experience again.

I keep a baseball bat under my bed and I reach for it quietly, crouching down as low as I can to slide it out slowly without making a single sound. My entire body is internally shaking yet my hands seem still as I grasp it tightly; knowing full well that I am my only saviour in this.

There’s a creak outside my door and I pause, heart hammering through my chest, body turning cold with tingles and clammy with fear. I have been in situations like this before and I know I need to keep my wits about me until I get out the other side. Women are murdered every day in this city, and I am no one special that will ever be missed.

I have no hero to intervene this time and for the first time, I wish Alexi was here, a pining so strong it almost rips my chest in two. I push him out of my head, hating that in moments of weakness I still need him, and grit my teeth in an effort to focus.

I move towards it and flatten my back against the wall beside the scraped wooden surface, as much as I can without disturbance or noise, ready to fight should they come in here, and praying they don’t. I’m ready to take someone’s head off, to get through this.

I close my eyes tight and open them fast to make them adjust to the dark faster, twice more until I can see shapes of furniture and outlines and can navigate a little more effectively. A trick I discovered as a child when I was trying to make the shadows turn into what they really were and not the monsters I imagined. Things begin to take shape as my night vision kicks in excruciatingly slowly and I can make out my room.

I start visibly shaking with the passing time, even though it’s only been seconds, terrified but poised, and waiting for the worst.

There’s a thud and a scrape, and I can hear mumbling as though there’s more than one voice just on the other side of our separator, and I know it’s only a matter of time. They will come in here if they are looking for things to steal, as there is not much out there to take. What they will find is me, and I don’t know what that outcome will entail.

I strain to listen again but jump when my door is clicked open slowly. Whoever turns the handle does so with such slight and careful movement it tells me they know someone is in here and it’s no deterrent.

Shit, shit, shit!

A huge figure in dark, looming taller and wider than me, slides inside the room quickly, looking towards my bed apprehensively and softly edges in with the grace of a cat. It’s clear they are unable to see if someone is in the bed in the darkness in here.

I see my chance.

It’s male for sure and the all black outfit, rubber gloves and Halloween mask tell me that this is no warm and friendly night-time visit. This is a planned break-in.

Aiming hard and high, putting all I have in me behind my very practised swing, I smack that fucker right in the face with a bone breaking crunch and knock him out cold to the world with a lucky whack. The reverberation as my bat collides and vibrates through the wood and then me, is followed by a satisfied crumpling and thudding of a human body collapsing on impact. I probably broke his face severely and his lack of reaction is a sure sign I did a great job of disabling him and I literally exhale in relief.

Internally my heart is pounding with a mix of fear and adrenaline, rushing of blood as I take a huge deep breath and gather my wits and what I need to do. There may be a second one out there who surely had to have heard this. I need to get to him first or by him before he sees me.

Jumping over my silent victim on the floor in a flash, panic-stricken in my pyjamas still, I high tail it towards the front door, which is sitting wide open, eyes on my escape.

I don’t see it coming at all, stupidly focused on safety and not my dark surroundings. The elbow to the face that gets me square in the middle of my nose, until my head bangs the floor viciously and it’s the last thing I remember.