by Bella King
Raw Deal: An Arranged Marriage Mafia Romance
Chapter 1
Kings don’t fear pawns.
“If you weren’t so pretty, you’d be dead by now,” a rough voice grumbled from behind me.
I pulled at the ropes that bound my hands together behind my back, but the knots were so tight that they dug deep in my flesh, causing my fingers to tingle as they struggled to keep sensation. I couldn’t even turn my head to look at the owner of the voice, but I didn’t have to. I already knew who it was.
I was surprised that I wasn’t blindfolded, but that also worried me. If I could see my surroundings, then my captors didn’t fear me snitching on their hideout. That probably meant that I would be floating in the ocean by the end of the night.
“What do you have to say for yourself, Kalila?” The voice asked. It belonged to a man named Caleb, who was known for his smuggling operations on the west coast. I had stepped too close to his game, and now I was part of it.
I couldn’t find my voice. My throat was dry from whatever I had been given to knock me out, and my body was cold and trembling in the stiff wooden chair that I was tied to. A neon light hung fifty feet away against the wall, the only light source in the room.
“Thirsty?” Caleb asked, his voice still floating behind me.
If only I could nod. My head was tied tight to the back of the chair, strapped in like some kind of sick operating table from the 18th century. I couldn’t move anything. I was frozen.
I managed a squeak from my throat, just enough to signal my need for water. Caleb chuckled from behind me, but the sound of pouring liquid told me that he wasn’t just taunting me. I waited for him to bring it around to me.
His heavy footsteps were calm and calculated, as though each one was valuable to him and couldn’t be wasted. A man with such power didn’t get there without an unusual mind, and I knew Caleb to have a very warped way of thinking. It worked wonders for him but mystified everyone else.
Caleb appeared in front of me, too close for me to see anything but perfectly creased black slacks. He always dressed like he was attending a billionaire’s wedding, so unlike the street thugs that he employed. He was cut from a different cloth, a fine fabric that would cost an arm and a leg, literally, to buy a single square inch of.
“Drink,” Caleb’s voice thundered from above, forcing a glass to my lips.
The pungent liquid inside of it sloshed onto my parched tongue, stinging my cracked lips and immediately causing a fit of coughs and wheezing to erupt from my mouth. I spat it back out onto my lap, shocked by the strong alcohol taste.
“This is expensive whiskey, darling,” Caleb said, feigning offense.
“Water,” I managed to croak.
“Fine, then. You’re too young for such a beverage anyway,” he replied, spinning around silently and walking away.
I coughed, trying to clear my throat of the harsh liquid that worked its way into the sensitive flesh of my esophagus. As bad as it was, it did make talking easier, but I needed water badly.
“So,” I heard Caleb say from beside me. “They’re sending teenagers to do a man’s job. How amusing.”
Like it or not, he was right. I was only 19 when I got assigned to the case, a policewoman in training for the local academy. Caleb was the most dangerous mafia boss since his father, and nobody dared challenge him. Over six men and women on the force had gone missing this year, and they didn’t let us get close to him anymore. It was too dangerous.
My capture had been my own fault. I stepped out of line when I should have pulled back. I was busy busting low-level scum that worked for Caleb, but on a particularly gnarly bust, I had caught sight of the brutal mafia boss himself.
I was thinking with my pride by pulling a gun and running after him. I thought what a hero I would be at the academy if I managed to pick him off that easily. I should have known that Caleb didn’t make mistakes like that. It had been a trick to lure me in.
Now, I was strapped to a chair, barely able to move, at the complete will of a man who played with people’s lives like pawns in a game of chess. They had no value to him. The only thing that mattered, in the end, was the checkmate.
Caleb stepped up to me again, placing a glass of water to my lips. I drank it greedily, gulping it down painfully, letting it wash over my lips and drip down my chin and neck. I closed my eyes as the cool liquid finally eased my symptoms, giving me new willpower in which to plan my escape.
Escape was the only thing I had left for me. If I stayed here much longer, there was no telling what would happen. Would I be diced up and fed to the sharks, throw in a room full of thugs to enjoy, or strapped full of explosives and given a lobotomy to make me into a brainless time bomb to walk back into the police station where I had come from?
I wouldn’t put any of that past Caleb. He had been creative with the way he killed people in the past, but he never got his hands dirty personally. That was why I was surprised that I seemed to be alone with him. Whatever this was, it had gotten personal.
“Kalila, would you like me to undo these ropes?” Caleb asked, placing the empty glass onto a short table beside me when I had finished drinking.
I nodded.
“That will be a yes sir or no sir,” he snapped, his voice turning dark.
“Yessir,” I answered quickly. I tried to sound brave, but my voice cracked and trembled as I spoke.
“That’s better. I will undo these ropes, but I want you to promise me something,” Caleb said, taking a step back so that I could see his full figure.
I stared at him, my eyes wide with fright and my heart beating fast. This was the closest I had ever gotten to him, and seeing him in person this way was terrifying. It wasn’t that he looked particularly menacing, a slim but fit man in his 30s with a jawline like a model and ice-blue eyes, but that I knew that under the charm and good looks was a monster who was capable of ruining my life in the worst ways possible.
“I want you to listen to me closely. This could go one of two ways for you. Either you can listen to me and obey, and I will keep you alive, or you can try something silly, and I will make sure the remainder of your life is short and miserable. Do you understand?” Caleb asked, his voice like silk.
I began to nod but corrected myself. “Yessir,” I replied, my voice beginning to go back to normal.
“Perfect,” he said cheerfully, drawing a steel blade with a hook at the tip from his pocket. He stepped toward me, and I began to shake involuntarily, as he brought the blade up to my face. Light danced off the silver metal, a wicked past carved into the blade.
Caleb slipped it under the cords that held my head into place and cut through them like they were thin threads instead of burly ropes. I had to catch my head from falling over when I was finally released. My muscles were still getting used to being awake.
“That’s a little better, but we should get rid of all of these,” Caleb said, his eyes twinkling and a flicker of a smile appearing at the sides of his mouth.
My heart was thumping so painfully hard in my chest that I thought Caleb would hear it for sure. I tried to control my breathing, but I found myself gasping for air as the ropes sprung loose from my chest. I hadn’t realized how much they had constricted my breathing.
I thought Caleb would stop there, but he continued to cut loose the ropes that bound my small body to the chair until there wasn’t a single one left to hold me in place. If I wanted to, I could get up and walk out the door, but I knew it wouldn’t be that easy.
“There,” Caleb said, his voice pleasant and cheerful. “You can stand up now.”
I didn’t know if I had the strength to, but I didn’t want to disobey him. The knife hung lightly in his fingertips, his grip practically nonexistent on it. Anyone else would have dropped it this way, but somehow, the skin on his fingers managed to cling to the knife and keep it in place.
I stood up slowly, my knees wobbling under the weight of my tired body. I felt like I was a camel loaded up with to
o much cargo, unable to keep myself standing steadily.
When I rose, I only rose to chest-height of Caleb. He was a tall man, standing much higher than I imagined from the pictures I had seen of him. He was even more handsome up close than he had been from a distance. He could have done anything in the world, but he had chosen to follow in the footsteps of his father, who was still alive and living in some exotic country under a false name, retired from the mafia business.
“You’re good at this,” Caleb noted, nodding his head lightly. “Now, I want you to do something else for me,” he said, staring into my eyes.
I was pulled into his gaze, unable to break away. I was worried he could scramble the contents of my head with his eyes alone, but I couldn’t look away. What had those eyes witnessed over the years? I had seen some truly horrifying things during my training at the police academy, but that paled in comparison to what those eyes had seen.
Caleb waited for me to realize that I hadn’t responded properly to him yet. He was patient with me. With anyone else, he would have taken that blade to their neck already. I wondered why he was doing this, but I knew that whatever his plan was, it would be way over my head. That’s just how he operated.
“Yessir,” I blurted out.
He nodded, then held out the knife that occupied his hand. “Take this, Kalila.”
I hesitated, looking down at the knife like it was a beartrap that would tear apart my hand the minute I touched the cold steel. I knew that he wasn’t going to take no for an answer, so refusing was out of the question.
“Yessir,” I said, reaching my hand down and letting my fingers clasp over the wooden handle.
CONTINUE READING…