The Carrero Contract - Selling Your Soul (Mafia Romance) novel Chapter 175

I roll over in the overly warm bed and groan loudly as light hits me in the face, someone’s pulling the curtains back in our room to flood us with an unearthly glow. Burying my head under the duvet I try to stop the swirling insane motion of the room and the penetrating pain as shards of light try to slice my skull open. Head booming away like someone is merrily stamping on it, and my body is fragile like cracked glass that’s about to fully shatter under pressure.

“Time to get up. We have a tour this morning of our future abode.” Alexi is way too chirpy for a guy who partnered me in drinking ourselves into oblivion last night and I cannot remember anything past the first bar and the twenty shots we downed in a drinking game with his brother. My head’s thumping out a badly played rhumba beat, and nausea is swirling in my throat so that I gag anytime I move. My mouth is literally carpeted with some old man’s swirly 50s shag pile and I have the awful taste of metallic that I just can’t shift. I’m suffering and this demon needs to leave me be. I don’t want to go anywhere.

“Nooooo.” It’s all I can mumble out, muffled pathetic whining in my nest of covers and sheets that seem to be wrapped up around me. Not all that comfortable but it’s better than the light slicing my retinas and impaling my brain. If I move, I may actually die. My stomach contents are warning me that any slight tilt up may end in exorcist style spewing. Every single inch of me hurts and I’m suffering the hangover from hell.

“I have aspirin and iced water here. Come on, get up. Don’t be a lightweight.” Alexi tugs the sheets from over my head and I immediately squeal at the searing pain of level 1000 sun glare once more.

“Stop it. I hate you.” I cry and grip at them to get them back, but he doesn’t stop there, catching my foot under the end of the duvet and yanks me free from the covers and drops me nakedly on my arse at the foot of the bed. A lovely ungraceful thud as my naked booty collides with a furry rug, and I curl into the foetal position, grimacing, covering my head with flailing arms. Much like a vampire about to be toasted to death. I don’t know what the hell he is on but he’s about to be castrated for this. Covering my eyes with my palms as I try to adjust to this assault.

“Tosser!!” I bark at him but that smug grin as he towers over me, freshly showered, shaved and in an open white shirt over dark trousers is all I get in response. Blinking his way and trying not to grimace with this god-awful pain. I swing a slap at his face and get nowhere near it, yanking what I can reach of the bedclothes back to save my eyesight, but Alexi stands on it. Stopping me from hiding once more.

Arsehole is a sadistic prick.

“You loved me last night. So much.” He emphasises the last two words and gives me a knowing wink which earns him a slap in the kneecap for torturing me this way. It’s all I can reach, and I end up hurting my hand on hard muscle and bone while he just continues to smile at me.

Owww

I blow on my dented digits and wave it around to curb the burn of hurting myself on his leg.

“Drunken sex is not loving you. It’s alcohol-fuelled horniness, and you were available.” I snap at him. Insanely tearful with how miserable I am in my current state; head almost reaching pressurised explosion level, I squint as my eyes water. I crawl up weakly and back onto the bed awkwardly, uncaring about being starkers and hauling the sheets to get back under them into a safe little cave. My brain feels like it’s colliding with the insides of my skull and my eyes are all but glued shut. My tongue has an inch-long fuzz covering it and my throat feels like I have drunk sand.

I honestly reckon I must have drunk a bar’s worth of booze to get in this state and it’s the first time in my life I have lost all memory of a good night out. I know we had sex because my body feels like we had sex. A lot of it, mostly wild, definitely aggressive, and judging by the fact I feel bruised in every muscle and joint, we had ourselves an adventurous workout. Only sex could leave me feeling this way. Only sex with Alexi, anyway.

“Well, you loved me enough to marry me, so …”

“What?” I lose all forms of rejection and stiffen completely.

Alexi catches me around the waist as I give up my pathetic doggy crawl to the top of the bed and lifts me up like a weightless lump before propping me back on my feet at the side of the bed this time. Not that I’m fighting, while my brain pulls out his sentence, stretches it out across my dark muggy space and dissects every single word slowly. My blood runs cold and magically all hangover symptoms just freeze.

“What did you say?” I stand up by myself this time, turning to him abruptly with widened eyes as he bends to pick up a sheet and drapes it around my shoulders for me. He looks completely serious now and gives the covering a little tug so I can catch it at the front and cover myself fully. Automatic pilot initiated, I catch hold of it, eyes glued to his face and I can only imagine. I’m bug-eyed and gawping.

“That you love me. Even when you say you don’t.” A wink, a smile and a peck on the check before he saunters off towards the bathroom to continue his morning routine of getting ready. Mr chirpy and not hungover at all and I have to blink, shake myself to recall his exact words, so sure I just imagined them.

I just stand very still, brain catching up and repeat what he said in a slow, deliberate manner. Feeling them out.

“Married you, so …” I almost choke on the words as my stomach dives like a brick into the depths down there. My mind a swirling mess of hazy memories, bars, clubs. An Elvis impersonator and Alexi fucking me on the bonnet of someone’s car in a dark car park behind a huge white building. Broken images and slight foggy replay slowly come back the longer I stand here, but nothing at all to do with any kind of marriage.

Alexi wanders back through with a toothbrush in his mouth, letting go of it and holding it in his cheek, he walks by the side table and swipes something up before bringing it to me. It’s a piece of A4 paper and he holds it up to show me it in all it’s awful and so not funny glory.

He pulls out his toothbrush, slight disbelief overshadowing that smile as he stares right back at my shocked, probably white pallor. Not sure if I’m being serious or not.

“You married me in a Chapel of Love, London. So, Good morning, Mrs Carrero.” He looks smugger than fucking smug. Seriously, even for him, it’s like all the fucking smugness available in the universe just landed on his arrogant fucking face of intensified, quadrupled smugnicity and I snatch that offending A4 sheet of bullshit right out of his hand, dropping my damn sheet and pulling it to my face for my blurry vision to cut through.

I devour it with the speed of a cocaine addict and literally gasp out loud in an agonising muffled wail. My brain melting on impact.

My head just stops dead, and every fear I have ever had about being someone’s possession, their belonging, their servant, runs through me at a searing level of terror as that paper of ownership swims before my eyes painfully.

I was Rick’s; I was his prisoner. I was my mother’s, legally hers to do as she pleased. Now this … tied to Alexi, a man who destroyed me, and irrational as it is with no real obvious reason to feel so terrified, I am. I know how owning something negates all worth of them as a person and behaviours change. I saw it in his cousins today and what they expect from a wife. It’s how this world works, and Alexi was once that man. I was an object he owned.

I was an object my entire life and what came with that?

Debauchery, pain, a misery that ripped me to shreds and left me as only a shell of a person. This binding law that straps you to another human and silences your voice because you no longer belong to yourself.

I know I’m being ridiculous on some level, but I can’t help it. Blinding fear that I just put myself in a cage and threw away the key is bearing down on me with that suppressed pain of years of slavery to a man who ruined me. I cannot separate the two. The faith and security I have been building with him die in the face of a drunken decision.

It’s like a choke hold on my throat. Losing my identity, my freedom myself. Becoming the shadow to a man that already has severe ownership flaws.

The blood runs from my veins all the way down my body, leaving a cold wave of pale in its wake as I read the tiny cheesy scrawl on the worst looking marriage certificate I have ever seen. So bad it cannot be real.

A cream printed sheet with a border of hearts and musical notes in red ink. The certificate itself basic, black ink and right at the bottom two very familiar signatures, followed by two more traitorous bastards’ scrawls.

“Elvis married us.” I baulk at the writing on the bottom, scanning over the legal crap, eyes falling over our two witnesses.

Alessandra and fucking Gino. Wankers.

“This isn’t funny.” I stutter breathlessly, literally losing the ability to breathe. Tears hit me hard as I read it over and over and my heart and stomach join my blood flow down in my feet. My legs turn to jelly and I stumble back to sit on the bed as the shock overtakes me. I flop on the bed and can’t do anything except stare at it in utter horror.

“Marriage isn’t a joke, Cam.” He says it so calmly I snap my head up and glare at him stupendously.

“Why would you do this to me? What about fucking trust?” I yell, tears cracking through, my voice hoarse and painfully raw, louder than is warranted, but as fire and rage bring everything back up, my body and cold limbs burn hot with the lava I’m spewing. Tears blurring everything and panic coursing through me at a rate of knots. I’m on the verge of an all-out panic attack.

Alexi has the audacity to look pissed now too.

“What the fuck has trust got to do with us getting shitfaced and rocking up at a chapel in Vegas?” He snaps it right back, missing the memo on the proper handling of your girlfriend when she wakes up to your stupid as shit behaviour.

“Because I fucking know you!! Everything you do is planned and coerced and I can pretty much bet my life on it that this was your planning and manipulating. Do you think marrying me means you get more control? That now I can’t ever leave you? Well, fucking watch me go, wanker.” I get up to toss the paper at him, with a very anticlimactic flutter as it see-saws to the ground between us and I turn on my heel to stomp my way out of the room. I don’t care if I’m naked. I can’t take a breath and the walls are closing in on me as I struggle to inhale any oxygen. Flailing, grasping at my chest because it feels like I’m having a heart attack.

The room is still tilting from side to side and I’m walking on Bambi legs with a pounding face, but I still give it a go.

“Nice. Sure, just fucking leave. I’m sure roaming the hotel naked will work out great for you. Oh, and by the way … it was your idea. So, your anger is a little misdirected, babycakes.”

I stop dead in my tracks, a glimmer of an idiotic idea about being Queen Carrero and having Mico shoot that Marianne woman in the eyeball flutters across my brain, and once again all my insides slump to the deck. I was so consumed with marriage before I got drunk that it’s not farfetched to assume that while intoxicated, I rolled with it. I literally crumble where I stand and clutch my face in my hands with an almighty groan as I slump in a dishevelled heap on the floor.

“Yeah thought that would cool your jets.” Alexi sounds peeved, agitated and that snarly, husky tone he usually reserves for fight mode is spiralling around me.

I spin on him, ungraciously, seeing as I’m on the floor and it’s more of an animal like manoeuvre, but I’m not willing to back down as my entire life flits before my eyes.

Marriage is like a prison sentence for someone like me. It’s ownership. Jail bars, handcuffs on me from now on and I already know what a controlling dickhead he can be, at the best of times. There’s a good chance he will turn into his cousins and treat me like something he owns once more.

This is the worst thing ever and the last thing I would ever have done sober. He was supposed to take care of me.

“You shouldn’t have taken advantage of me in that state. The fact I have zero memories of much of last night is a sign you should have taken better care of me!” It’s venomous and yet also anxiety fuelled. Sobbing, voice hoarse as I throw accusations at him. Heart weighed down like a steel block is resting on my chest.

I am full-blown panicking, head racing at how to undo this, but he just stands holding his black toothbrush and glares right back at me. Fighting mood engaged and I know I’m going to get limited sense out of him when stubborn arsehole mode is activated.

“You do realise I was as drunk as you, I can just handle it a little better. I didn’t take advantage of anyone, and I sure as hell didn’t betray your trust. It’s fucking marriage, Cam, without a prenup. I have way more to lose than you in this. Think about that while accusing me of shit.” He rages, yelling this time. That face snarling, frowning, and looking incredibly hostile with a tense jaw and lowered brows.

“Sure. Like I believe that!” I toss back angrily. Wiping my face and refusing to accept anything he says.

“You were the one with your hands down my pants, your tongue in my ear, begging me to make it official. You were the one who dragged me into the first chapel we came to, and you were the one who hauled me out the side door to consummate our marriage on Elvis’s car right after. I’m the idiot who threw all caution to the wind and married you, exposing everything I own. I lose half if you divorce me now. I think if anyone was fucking coerced then it was me!” He throws his toothbrush at the bed, obviously needing some way to vent and turns on his heel, body bristling for a physical release and storms off towards the bathroom door.

“You’re lying. You wouldn’t be that dumb, and me. Why would I do that? Why would I tie myself to you after dating you for five minutes of my life? I didn’t even want to get married …EVER!!” I crawl back to the bed, pull myself up on shaky limbs and slump down on the edge as I come level with it again, burying my face in my hands as everything crumbles around me.

I just can’t function at the moment.

You cannot annul a marriage if you made a point of screwing your betrothed right after the ceremony, and Alexi won’t be up for any sort of dissolving of this, judging by how he’s reacting. My head’s racing with all of this and how stupid I was to have this kind of faith in him.

“You said you wanted to untie my hands and let me deal with that Marianne bitch once and for all. That if I couldn’t, you would.” He comes storming back, throwing more words at me venomously. Clearly not done with this either.

I jerk my face up to look at him, now standing framed at the bathroom door, looking upset, angry, a furrowed brow, clenched jaw and narrowed eyes that are almost black with his swirling emotions. Body tense. He’s a little dishevelled compared to the happy mood he woke me up in. He looks hurt through and through, and even this mad and devastated at the situation I find myself in, it eats at me guiltily. He is bristling, stiff and ready to fight. Like he might just go kick someone in the head thirty times and then stomp on their lifeless body some.

My face just feels numb and I’m sickened that I would be this dumb. That we would both be this dumb. He’s right. No prenup for someone with his wealth and power is insane, but then again, he isn’t against snapping my neck should I dare to ask for a divorce. In his world women who know as much as I do, do not get to drag you to divorce court to claim any of your finances.

“Why would you agree if that’s why I said I wanted to marry you?” I bawl at him in utter desperation, hoping this is all some vague joke or a dream. Maybe I just haven’t woken up fully.

If it’s real though, Alexi had to have his own motives. Because he is Alexi, and he obviously saw a means to an end with my stupid garbled drunken plan. He may have found mine laughable but doesn’t mean he didn’t have his reasons. He does nothing in life without an ulterior motive. Always has a plan, always has a use for someone.

It’s what he does. It’s what he is.

“Because I love you and you are it for me. Whether we married now or in years to come, it was inevitable. I didn’t lie when I said I was in this with you forever, Cam. I didn’t care that you had an ulterior motive, it was beneficial because I knew you wouldn’t marry me anytime soon without one. I know you love me so I figured it would work itself out when we were sober, and marriage gave me an option we didn’t have before.” It’s a defeated low tone and I can tell there isn’t a single lie in his answer. His whole manner shifting from raw fury and yelling to this anguished, wounded response, and he tears his eyes from me to stare at the floor.

Cutting my heart open like a knife as my insides spew into my lap and I shiver involuntarily.

“That’s a sad reason to marry me.” The tears return, voice cracking and I cry softly at the hopelessness of that statement. I feel so broken and confused as reality sinks in that this is real, and this is where we are at.

I was a million miles away from being ready for this kind of step and boom, it’s done. It’s like being stabbed in the chest for so many conflicting reasons.

“It’s the truth. I can love you and be with you for the next ten years, but I wouldn’t be able to protect you the way I can as my wife. My name comes with so many boundaries. No one can touch you now. You’re Carrero. Family. Protected. My family cannot sit back and ask me to remain neutral now we have done this. She tried to abduct and murder my wife and that holds a hell of a lot more weight than it did twelve hours ago.” He moves back, leans heavily against the frame behind him. Voice so low and raspy and yet I can still hear the pain in his words from my reaction. I can’t feel remorse though, when suspicion and anger, regret and fear are circling inside of me like a venomous poison affecting every inch of my being. I am in survival mode, stuck on defensive and powerless to come down.

“So, there was a partial motive, beyond how you feel for me?” I’m clawing at myself inside, dying a little with so many crazy thoughts and one very stupid one which is hurting me above them all, even though it’s insane.

I have no memory of my own wedding day.

Whether I wanted one or not … it’s done. And I won’t ever be able to recall it one way or another. That, in itself, is like being kicked in the heart with steel toe-capped boots.

“The motive was keeping you safe. You can’t be mad about that.” His eyes come up and lock on mine, while I’m still half sprawled on the bed and clutch at sheets to pull up over my body, trembling as everything filters through and my hangover comes back into focus. Suddenly shivering with a cold growing from within me.

I inhale heavily, tears rolling down my cheek hopelessly and I just stare for a long moment. Instincts are to run, and I know I need space. Now. He needs to leave so I can think, pull my shit together.

“I don’t know how to feel right now. I’m still half drunk, majorly hung over and my head is about three seconds away from exploding. I need to process this. I need a shower, an aspirin, and an hour without looking at you to think about this.” I sniff back the torrent of tears lingering inside my head that are threatening to turn into a tidal wave of sobbing, body beginning to shake violently with shock and Alexi sighs loudly. A tense shoulder flex, a twitch of that square jaw as he visibly snorts at my request. Anger and heartache don’t go together well on him.

“Fine. I need to go see Gino anyway and make some calls. Room’s yours for an hour. Be ready for when I come back, we have to go to the casino.” He sounds clipped and cold. Directing attention off topic and pushing the details of what we are fighting about to one side.

I know he is pulling back whatever it is he is feeling and just showing me the angry side for now. I can tell he’s hurt deeply. Alexi displays pain in this way. Anger, aggression, yelling. Anytime in the past, he’s reacted like an utter cockwomble towards me for anything relating to emotion, it’s usually him in pain. He isn’t hard to fathom when you know that.

This is no different. He turns cold and mad when you hurt him. He fires what seems like hate your way, but the reality is, it’s because he loves me and the pain I inflict cuts deep. He doesn’t know how to process or display it like most humans do.

He walks forward and picks up the certificate and looks at it for a long moment with an unreadable expression before carefully laying it back on the side table, his shoulders sagging slightly and turning away from me.

“I don’t regret it. One day you might agree with me.” His words strike me right in the feels, casting a new slicing pain.

He leaves it there then turns and heads back to the bathroom to grab his phone and watch, and buttons up his shirt over all that exposed tanned muscle quickly in the mirror before turning back to me.

“Just remember … my main reason for saying yes is because I love you. That’s it. Secondary, it was to keep you safe, so maybe sit and think about that before you accuse me of fucking betrayal.” He strides out, stopping to pick up his shoes from under the nearby table and then walks around it and heads for the bedroom door to leave. Not another look my way. Just a tall, clipped posture, stealth mode and stocky walk of a man who might just go and beat someone up because he is that pissed.

I watch silently, wrapping my arms around myself while still shivering from the shock of what I woke up to.

I don’t know how to feel but I know one thing. You shouldn’t be contemplating doing a terrified runner from finding out you just drunkenly married your boyfriend of five minutes. My legs are literally jelly or I would already be hauling arse and getting the hell out of here. I feel sick and cannot begin to unravel everything going through my head.

I pull myself upright properly, determined not to sit here and dwell. I will drive myself insane if I do. I need to deal with my physical misery right now—my hangover. Get a drink, take pills, sort that shit out best I can. Think about all this once I clear my brain a little and the urge to throw up simmers from severe to subtle.

I lift my chin despite everything inside me crumbling to dust, climb unsteadily off the bed and walk purposely to the bathroom. A little fragile, swaying around as I do so.

Focus on the tasks and not the problem.

That’s what I do. When hit in the face with an epic head fuck, I push it aside, get a grip, pick myself up and get on with what I need to. Even if I throw up and cry my eyes out while getting washed.

Shower, dress, eat, get your shit together, Camilla. This is what you do. Crisis pushed aside and make yourself presentable to face it head-on once your brain catches up.

I will figure this out. I will find a resolution to this little bump in the road.

I do love him.

I just don’t know if I love being married to him.

Not like this.