Mafia King's Contract Breeder
Chapter 10 You Need To Leave Now

Chapter 10: 10 You Need To Leave Now

Lara POV

I hurled myself out of The Red Door and into East Windlem.

The street hit me like a wall — noise and exhaust and the grey mid-morning light that passed for sun in this part of the city, where the buildings were packed close enough to turn the sky into a strip of pale nothing above the rooftops. The pavement was still damp from overnight rain, the gutter running with dark water that carried cigarette ends and a crushed paper cup toward the drain on the corner.

I walked fast. Then faster. My tote bag swung against my hip with every step, the strap cutting into my shoulder, the contract folded inside it against my library card.

I looked back at the first corner.

Then at the second.

Then at the third.

Homeless Bob was outside the office on Crenwick Street, settled into his usual doorway with his sleeping bag rolled around his waist and a plastic cup in his hand. I’d seen Bob approximately three hundred times. He’d once lent me his lighter when mine ran out and hadn’t asked for anything in return. Today I clocked him and my heart did something stupid and sharp, an animal read of unknown variable, threat-check, re-evaluate.

The trio of men outside the convenience store on the next block — grey coats, one of them with a phone out, smoke curling up from two of them in thin white threads in the cold air — turned their faces toward me as I passed and I felt the back of my neck prickle.

I was darting around like startled prey.

Which was a terrible, inadvisable thing to do in East Windlem. You learned this young, around here, the way you learned other basic survival facts — don’t cut through the underpass after eight, don’t make eye contact outside the bookies on a Friday, don’t look lost. Predators got their eyes on you when you looked weak. The district had a nose for it, the way all places with this much hunger did. Weakness was a resource, and East Windlem had been mining it for decades.

Somehow I forced myself to slow down.

Walk normally, I told myself. You live here. You know this street. You have been on this street a thousand times and nothing is different.

Except the man who was responsible for my father rotting in prison had his signature on a contract in my bag and his card in my pocket and his child — theoretically, eventually, pending the biology cooperating — in my future.

I breathed through my nose and walked.

Five blocks passed before I had the presence of mind to care where I was going.

Money. That was the first thing I needed to sort out.

The cash machine was on the corner of Brenwick and Hale, the one that had been there since before I could remember, bracketed between a chicken shop and a shuttered phone repair place with a metal grille rusted permanently half-open.

I looked left and right, made sure no one was behind me, and stuck the card inside.

The zeros were green in the screen’s sickly light, which gave them a quality of being slightly unreal, like figures in a dream.

I leaned in a fraction. Checked the decimal point. Counted back from the right.

For one wild moment, I thought about taking out the cash and running away. Out of East Windlem, beyond the reach of Emmanuel Sagres. Fuck his contracts.

He owed me as much for my dad, anyway.

The thought lasted approximately four seconds before my own brain shut it down.

No one stole Emmanuel Sagres’s money and got away with it.

I kept my distance from shady dealings as best as I could in East Windlem, but as a hooker, I heard all sorts of wild information, like how Emmanuel Sagres’s men regularly dumped bodies through the old chemical factory. How he once tore a man’s guts out personally for daring to double cross him.

This money was the price, and I had to give him the goods.

Me.

With cold, shaking fingers, I transferred the money to my account.

Then I took the luxury of a taxi home.

"Chloe, wake up." I dragged my sister out of bed. "Where’s mom? Has she gone to the gambling den again?"

"Lara?" Chloe rubbed her eyes. "I don’t know. Is everything okay?"

"Ha." Everything was about as far from okay as it could be. I dragged out a tattered suitcase from under the bed and moved a pile of textbooks into it, just so I was doing something with my hands.

"Start packing, sweetheart. Quickly, please. I’ll get mom."

I dashed out of the house before Chloe could slow me down by asking questions.

I had to check three of the usual spots before I spotted my mother’s frizzy blonde head, where she was parked at a poker table. I didn’t even have time to feel angry at her, it was more of a cold, dead resignation.

The sun rises in the east, Emmanuel Sagres rules the slums, my mom’s standard habitat is a gambling den.

"Mom!"

She jumped hard enough to rattle her chips.

"Lara?"

"Lara, sweetie," said Mrs Pashmar from across the table. "Haven’t seen you in ages!"

I forced out a smile, nodding around at the usual suspects who populated the gambling den at this hour of the night.

"Come with me."

I dragged Mom up by the arm, bodily hauling her out of the poker hall and down the street. Nothing unusual, I had been hauling my mom home like this since I was about twelve. It used to be easier when I could threaten her with my dad’s fists if she didn’t come home before he did.

I didn’t stop for breath until all three locks and the latch had been closed behind us.

"What the fuck is going on?!" Mom cried out, irritated.

Chloe came clattering down the stairs with a packed bag, wide eyed and terrified.

"What’s going on?" she asked, her voice wavering.

"You’ve got to leave," I said. I vaguely registered that my face was too blank, and that I probably should make an expression or two in order to not terrify my sister. I kept talking. "Get out of here. Tonight. Don’t come back."

Silence.

Then both of them started at once.

"Tonight? That’s absolutely not—"

"What? Lara, why? What happened?"