The Carrero Contract - Selling Your Soul (Mafia Romance) novel Chapter 135

Heart plummeting and head consumed with worry and frustration. I know it could just be that they don’t want to be disturbed and both have their phones on mute, I have never tried to call him at a dinner before, so I don’t know if that’s normal protocol.

I trawl my phone to see if I have Daniels’ number, or any of the other men on his watch, then try Mico again when I find none. It just goes to answerphone right away this time and I shudder. Completely overwhelmed with this and hating how overwrought it has me feeling. I’m just cut loose and lost and don’t know how to act. My brain is spewing over a thousand scenarios and visions that turn my stomach inside out. I need to stop thinking the worst but I can’t help it.

Something is wrong. I can feel it in my bones and soul, and Alexi never usually ignores his phone at any other time of day. It seems like Mico has turned his off suddenly and I start to tremble crazily.

The panic which started upstairs hits doubly hard, almost winding me, and I rush out into the corridor to shake myself and take a breath. I head back to look for Jackson to have him call any of the other men he knows are on Alexi’s security detail, but I am stopped with him meeting me half way. He looks ashen and so very serious.

‘No one is answering their cell … complete communication blackout,’ he states, almost as though he read my mind and tried to call people when I was. I wonder if we cross called Mico and that’s why I got his answerphone.

I instinctively try again and this time Mico’s rings out in the same way Alexi’s did.

Shit!

‘Not a single one of them is answering, Jackson. What does that mean?’ I ask him grabbing onto his jacket pathetically, which only emphasizes my growing despair.

‘It means something is going down and Alexi has put everyone on no comms mode … it’s normal for him. Keeps the channel clear and stops prying ears from any Intel.’ He looks a little stressed, but not in full-blown freak out like me, and I grip him harder.

‘Meaning?’ I can’t handle it. I’m visibly shaking and clawing at him for answers to still my beating heart but I cannot get control of it.

I feel sick. Something inside me knew … it just knew.

‘It means something is happening and we wait. We use the radios like Chinese whispers across the city. If there is news it will be passed on until it gets to us. These mics are secure and we all have our own channels.’ Almost as soon as it’s out of his mouth he pauses and covers his ear with his finger and thumb. Looking up and past me towards security down the hall and my eyes follow too. I see them all pause and listen, and I guess something on their wireless has come through, passed on just like he said it would. Everything just stops dead as I hold still and wait for whatever it is.

‘Shit!’ Jackson pales and presses his ear.

‘It’s Jackson, I need the venue location … We’re on our way from Zone 3 Club. We’ll take over the pick up.’ He says to some unknown voice in his ear and I tug at him crazily. Emotion taking over as my heart starts racing again. Mind turning faint with the overwhelming assault of everything I am feeling. I feel like my surroundings are starting to spin wildly.

‘What’s happening … What’s wrong?’ I squeal as he pulls me off, starts clicking fingers and pushing men, who all seem to crowd this way. Two of them from the group pull me aside and it seems they are organising something between them agitatedly, all abuzz with whatever they heard, and I am shoved away as unimportant. The air is crackling among them and hitting me with bad vibes.

‘Jackson? What?’ I squeal at him in hysteria and pull him by the arm out of the fold of his men frantically. He clears his throat, seems to pull himself together and holds onto me with a firm grip on my arms.

‘There’s been a shooting … There are casualties. We need to go pick up our men as police have cordoned off the restaurant and cars can’t get out.’ His face is unusually white and I can tell he’s not as calm as he’s making out. I pale as everything in me turns to ashes and a numb shock hits every part of me. The blood rushes to my head so that my stomach lurches and eyes blur.

‘What about Alexi? What about Mico?’ It comes out like a strangled gasp and Jackson’s eyes drop from me agonisingly. His face haunting and eyes wide as something hits him hard.

‘I don’t know. No names—only that we need to pick up five survivors from their party of eight.’

That’s all I remember as my body gives out and my mind blanks with the heavy pain I can’t handle.

I pass out.

I wake up on the couch in the apartment, a cool damp cloth on my head that’s been draped over my eyes, but no one is here with me and I clamber to get up in panic. My shoes are on the floor next to me and there is a throw pulled over my body by whoever deposited me here. I blanch in complete disorientation.

I guess the men put me here, probably Jackson, considering the care I have been shown. I have been shoved out of the way and left to sleep for God knows how long; an unimportant hysterical woman who just got in the way of the bigger picture. They are probably down there like panicked rabbits, running about in chaos, falling apart, trying to find out if their leader is dead.

Alexi might be dead.

It hits me with the same shock it did downstairs and I instantly wretch in reaction to a real magnificent trauma to my heart. Pulling myself off the couch I have to run to get to the kitchen sink before I vomit all over it. I throw my face in the steel sink and brace on my palms, either side of me as sheer devastation consumes me.

Despite the heaving of my body trying to expel what’s in my stomach, nothing comes up except pain and saliva through tears and desperate choking. I continue to wretch over and over, but again there’s nothing there because I haven’t eaten in hours to even bring anything up. I was so overly anxious all night I couldn’t think about food.

I slump down when it subsides, clutching my ribs, sliding down the unit into a heap on the floor, fatigue gripping me suddenly. My body’s giving up on me and I roll down into the foetal position as I try to gasp for air as all my thoughts come cascading in on me at once—The realisation that this isn’t a dream.

I can feel the atmosphere in the building around me, almost as if it were trembling in movement. The chaos of a kingdom trying to find it’s king and tearing apart, crumbling to dust… or maybe that’s just me. Maybe it’s me that’s falling apart.

My body hits full blinding panic mode and as it all comes rushing back for another sweep. I turn, hysterical in excruciating pain, convinced my insides are going to self-combust or I may pass out from the inability to breathe. My lungs are aching with the effort as I try and drag air into them, shaking like a leaf as tears pour down my cheeks, blinding my vision, clog up my nose and throat and soak my dress. I can’t move; the weakness that has overtaken me is suffocating me with extreme weight.

I believe the worst … five of the eight he said—that means three are dead …

Alexi and Mico wouldn’t answer their phones.

Maybe because they can’t.

The two men who mean the most to me.

I can’t survive this.

I don’t know how.

I start sobbing all over again, howling like a dying animal with a noise I never knew I could expel, and gripping at my hair as I try to stop the gnawing pains stabbing through every single cell of my entire body. It’s more than I can bear and I am just wailing desperately, brain crashing and stuttering because it cannot function anymore.

I have my first panic attack in years. The room closing in and vision blacking out as my heart pounds; it feels like I’m having a heart attack inside my ribs and my limbs stiffen in chaos. I gulp and gasp and claw at my throat and will myself to breathe, but end up face down on the floor as I struggle to get control—A mess of tears and running makeup as I claw for something to take this pain away.

I knew … deep down … I knew something was wrong.

Why didn’t he listen to me? Why didn’t he stay with me?

I manage to crawl to my knees desperately and head for the table like a child learning to move; trying to just stop the terror from an inability to fully expand my lungs.

A part of me is telling myself to get up, to pull myself together and rationalise. Trying to find that little girl who curled up to die at eleven years old, much like this, and pushing her to stop … just stop Camilla.

Breathe.

Except how can I breathe when my oxygen is gone? Snubbed out and taken from me before I really got to see if there was more for us than this. I’ll never breathe again if he doesn’t come back to me. I will lie down and go with him.

He promised me.

HE PROMISED ME!!!

I reach blacking out levels of oxygen starvation, and as my lungs finally realise, I gulp in air; my brain pushing through and urging me on. That sense to survive reigns supreme, and gives me enough to haul myself back together and calm the god-awful noise coming out of me.

I haul myself to the table heavily and grab my phone painfully. Robotically type in his name, doing the only thing I can to get my shit together. I push it to my ear as a part of me tries so hard to just make him answer. It’s all I have to cling on to, to make this not true. To stop myself being ripped apart by the devastation of the possibility that my Alexi might never come back. I can’t allow myself to think that way.

He can’t be gone … I won’t let him go. I won’t let him leave me.

I push my back against the table as I come to curl on the floor in the space between it and the couch, tears streaming down my cheeks as it rings and rings and I close my eyes and curl up tight, sobbing as once again I get his answer phone. My mind is unable to accept that it’s true.

I just need him to answer. I scrunch my eyes tightly closed and even consider praying to a god I don’t believe in. I’ll do anything to bring him back.

‘Cam?’ A painfully familiar husky voice startles me, only not from my phone … it comes from behind and I spin in muddled brain confusion to the figure in the open doorway looking my way, and double blink at the shadowy form framed by the bright lights behind him.

My heart somersaults and blinding tears halt mid-sob in disbelief. Everything in me just stops dead. A moment of complete pause as my world stops spinning and my head catches up.

He can’t be real … it’s not him. I’m having some sort of grief-fuelled hallucination as I scan the unfamiliar casual clothes, knowing he left in a tux, and he can’t be standing looking at me like that if he is dead. He’s dressed all wrong, in a black hoody over black trousers and a pair of trainers.

He looks confused, normal in every way and completely the best sight I have ever laid eyes on, and I just gawk at him stupefied and blink away the tears and hazy vision to look again.

‘Cam, what’s wrong? What is it?’ He sounds deeply concerned, genuinely so, as his eyes search mine for signs of a reason, and I just openly stare at him. I can’t quite get my mind to translate what I am seeing.