Mafia King's Contract Breeder
Chapter 3 The Mystery Client

Chapter 3: 3 The Mystery Client

Lara POV

"Rob. I—"

A wave of humiliation came over me when I stopped Rob before work the following night. I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. After I had so confidently promised that I was done with this life just last night...

The brother manager looked me up and down before a satisfied smirk spread over his lips.

"Your mom gamble the money again?" he asked knowingly.

I gritted my teeth.

"No. But I need more money."

"What did I tell ya?" Rob said condescendingly. "Always the same story with you whores..."

It’s not the same story! I told myself furiously.

This was for a good cause. It was worth it.

Rob pulled out the burgundy tablet I’d come to hate almost as much as him. The cracked faux leather case looked exactly the same as it had three years ago. I’d signed away little pieces of myself on that screen more times than I cared to count. He pulled up my personal details and lifted the screen in my direction.

"I expect you need another look at your list of limits?"

I looked at the ceiling instead. Anywhere but the screen. Anywhere but the list that measured exactly how much of myself was still for sale.

The word scraped against my throat.

"Yes."

Every hooker had a list of things that they wouldn’t do. But let’s be real, men don’t come to brothels to make sweet love missionary style, and the more fucked-up the kinks, the more they had to pay for it. One rough scene stacking multiple kinks could pay more than an entire night’s worth of 15-minute blowjobs.

As for me, my limits fluctuated wildly depending on how desperately I needed money.

And also, well— depending on where I was in my hormonal cycle.

Some nights a rough fuck could just really hit the spot, okay?

Rob handed me the tablet and turned away, picking up the phone. He began having a loud conversation with some friend of his, swearing every other word, not bothering to watch while I agonised over which pieces of myself I was willing to give up for love.

I scrolled to the bottom of the page first, the way I always did. I don’t know why. Maybe to gauge the distance. To make myself look at the hard nos — the things that stayed checked no matter what — before I worked my way back up to the negotiable territory. The things I’d built back up over the last year, box by careful box.

I kept my face utterly blank, as though this was an easy, breezy decision.

I unchecked half a dozen boxes.

It didn’t feel like much, physically. Six little ticks disappearing. But my stomach did something slow and complicated as I worked through them.

I signed my name and handed the tablet back.

Rob read it. His eyebrows went up — just fractionally, like a man reading a mildly interesting stock update. And then, finally, the corner of his mouth pulled into a gleeful, greedy smile. He rubbed the back of his bald head, the way he did when things were going well for him.

"Eyy, Little Miss Moneybags is back," he said.

The nickname was from my first year, when I’d had the highest booking rate in the house for three months straight.

"Oh, shut up."

"I’m running a business here, babe. Sucks that yo mama’s a bitch, but it’s good for business!" He tucked the tablet away in his suit jacket again and clapped me on the shoulder.

"I’ll give you the good ones, Emerald. You’ll be topping the charts again in no time."

I watched him walk away whistling before I let the grimace surface. I suppressed a sigh as I pushed open the dressing room door to get changed and be Emerald.

--

"What’s gotten into you lately?" Candi asked.

It was a week later. A Saturday night, always a good night for business in the red light district.

You could feel it even back here — the particular charge of a weekend, the city louder than usual, bass thumping from the club two doors down in a rhythm that came up through the floor and into the soles of your feet. Through the one high window above the lockers, the glow of the street was pink and amber, neon bleeding through the frosted glass and painting a stripe across the ceiling. Outside, the district would be in full swing: the slow crawl of cars, the tours of men in rented confidence, the girls in the doorways of the older establishments doing the arithmetic of the night.

I had just finished servicing a bachelor’s party, a group of six men who must have blown five figures for the show that they requested from me. I didn’t disappoint.

Now I was sore all over and throbbing with unfulfilled need. The way they had passed me between them– the way it stopped and started–

Fuck, what a tease.

Hope he gave his bride a better performance than that tomorrow night.

I draped myself gingerly over a stool in a silk dressing gown and damp hair.

Around me the dressing room was in its Saturday-night state — which was to say, barely controlled chaos. Every station was occupied or recently vacated, lipstick uncapped and left at angles, false lashes splayed on the counter like shed insect legs, a straightening iron abandoned too close to the edge of someone’s station. Three conversations were happening simultaneously in different corners; someone was on the phone arguing in a fast, angry dialect that blurred together.

"What?" I said distractedly, mentally adding up my earnings tonight.

One thing had to be said for the pros of prostitution, it really brought in an income that no other job could, for a girl of my skills.

"Why are you working so hard?" Candi said, snapping her fingers when my gaze turned vacant. "Everything okay at home?"

"Fine," I said with a shrug. "You know how it is."

Candi pursed her lips disapprovingly. She wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, considering that her break up with James the lazy drunk didn’t even last the week. She was working just as hard.

A burst of laughter erupted from the cluster of girls near the door, someone’s phone producing a sound clip that sent them off again. The music from the club next door shifted into something with more bass, enough that the small vanity jars on the counter trembled fractionally against each other, glass ticking on glass.

"You wouldn’t believe what a fantastic school my little sister got into," I couldn’t resist telling her after a moment of silence.

Candi snapped her fingers, her long nails clicking together.

"Oh, there it is. The little leech."

"You take that back." I waved a finger warningly.

You could insult anyone in my family and I would nod along and curse them too, but not Chloe. My little sister had done nothing to deserve this.

"Why can’t she take out her own student loans?"

"No respectable institution would give a loan to someone from a family like mine," I said grimly. "And if she gets involved with those loan sharks she can kiss any hope of a future goodbye."

I turned back to face my own mirror. My reflection looked exactly like what it was — a woman who’d worked a long Saturday and wasn’t finished yet. The makeup was still good, Emerald’s liner intact, but my eyes had that particular quality of someone whose thoughts were somewhere else entirely, somewhere less warm and less pink.

In our country, background checks all considered immediate family members. That was one reason why it was so hard to get out of the slums – by the parents that we were born to, so many doors were already closed to us.

My mum’s credit score was probably negative numbers, if that was even possible. And my dad’s criminal record would preclude either of us from qualifying for most need-based grants and loans in this country.

I knew it all in intimate detail.

After all, I had just received my own college acceptance letter when my dad was arrested. He was a low ranking drug dealer, working for Emmanuel Sagres. The man who had united the mafia kingdom in East Windlem, the king without a crown in this crime-infested hellhole. Everyone and their dog worked for Emmanuel Sagres around here.

There was a police sting, and my dad took the hit. He was guilty, but they made him guiltier so that the higher ranking mafia members could escape unscathed. He was doing life in prison now.

The way I experienced it, all evil in the world could be traced back to Emmanuel fucking Sagres.

My dad got arrested pumping his drugs.

My mom got addicted to gambling in his casinos.

Even me, working here at The Red Door? The brothel belonged to him too.

For as long as I could remember, this name had been like this giant hand that covered the sky over my head, choked out all the sunlight from the slums I grew up in.

If my practical dream in life was to get myself and Chloe out of here, the impractical fantasy would probably be to mount an assassin mission and stick a dagger into Emmanuel Sagres’s cold, dead heart.

And done: world peace achieved, for a eighty mile radius from East Windlem.

"Emerald," Rob called out, swinging open the door. "Got a guy who wants hard anal, thirty minutes. Do you want to take it?"

My fantasies faded at his words; back to the cold, sticky reality.

"Yes," I said, pulling myself to my feet.

--

It was almost morning when Rob gave me my last client of the night. My body had already given up hours ago—hips screaming, my skin felt sticky no matter how well I cleaned up, the raw ache between my legs pulsing with every step. But it was the other thing that had me moving like a ghost: the numbness. That thick, gray quiet that settled behind my ribs when I stopped feeling anything at all.

"Room Seven," he said. "Bondage, blindfold, full access."

The words landed like a fist in the sternum.

Three of the six limits that I had just opened up to — in one session.

A full bingo card.

The ones that weren’t always bad, sure—but bad enough, often enough, that my body still remembered the shape of the fear even when my mind tried to lie about it.

A gamble.

In this line of work, a man who actually knew what he was doing with rope and control was rarer than a needle in a haystack. Most of them just wanted to feel powerful.

Being tied up and blindfolded would make me completely vulnerable and at the client’s mercy.

Full access meant exactly what it sounded like. Mouth. Cunt. Ass. Whatever hole he wanted, as long as he used a condom. I wouldn’t even know which one until it was already happening.

I wasn’t expecting kindness. I wasn’t even expecting competence. I was expecting to survive it.

But when I saw how much that package would pay...I decided that I could take another fuck tonight.

Rob looked at me expectantly, tapping his thick fingers against the tablet.

"Well? If you don’t want it, I’ll give it to someone else."

I swallowed hard.

"I’ll do it," I said.

I had no idea what kind of mind-blowing experience was waiting for me behind that door.