The contract

I saw the challenging look in his eyes. He was expecting me to back down because of the peculiar nature of the whole situation. The contract had to be at least twenty pages long.

However, he was offering a choice, which was not truly a choice. I could either tell him the truth or I could agree to sleep with him for the foreseeable future.

“Can I read the contract at home and then get back to you?” I asked.

There was no way I was going to be able to read it in front of him. Dominic had a gun in his holster, and I was afraid that saying the wrong thing would get me killed. There had to be a reason he asked me not to tell anyone about our meeting.

And yet, like the naïve girl I was, I did as he told me. I should have thought of the situation a little more critically, but he hadn’t given me a choice. After he left me in the bathroom, I had thirty minutes to decide.

“Okay. You have a few hours.”

“And if I decided to sign it?” I asked.

“I’ll find you, Ms. Marino. Don’t worry about having to track me down.” He stated. “Dominic will escort you out.”

I got up, eager to leave his place before he changed his mind and decided he wanted to kill me. He looked very dangerous. The man had a tattoo of a skeleton with a snake inside it on the side of his neck.

That was enough to tell me everything I needed to know about him.

“How did you know it was me?” I asked. I was sure my disguise had been solid. It had never failed me in three years.

“Have a good night.”

I watched him walk away and go up the stairs, probably heading for his bedroom. I turned and rushed out with Dominic accompanying me. He didn’t say anything to me or even acknowledge me, just like before.

He had probably driven a million women home from Nero’s penthouse.

The weird thing was that I didn’t even tell him my address, and he took me home. Of course, Nero knew everything about me, including where I lived.

I tried to open the door to leave the car, but he locked it. He handed me another document. It was an NDA.

“You leave this car when you sign this.”

“I’m not going to tell anyone—”

“Sign it.”

Judging by his tone, he was not playing around with me. He wasn’t going to let me leave until I signed the document. There was no telling what he would do if I refused. I was always outspoken and vocal.

But when it came to dealing with Nero, I suddenly went mute. I lost the ability to defend myself.

I grabbed the document from his hands and swiftly signed it. He unlocked the car, and I didn’t hesitate to get out and run as fast as I could to my apartment. When I got there, I locked the door and leaned against it, wondering what I had gotten myself into.

I lived in a small apartment in the middle-class parts of New York. I didn’t want to spend the inheritance I had received on luxurious things. I needed to make sure my brother made it to college.

I walked towards my bedroom and took out the contract. It had the words, ‘DOMINANT-SUBMISSIVE CONTRACT’ written in bold.

That alone was enough to send chills down my spine. When I finally got around to opening the first page, I almost died. I couldn’t believe a contract could have the most degrading words ever known to man.

There were rules on the first page that stated that I couldn't tell anyone about our arrangement, I had to do whatever Nero wanted, disobedience was forbidden, and I didn’t have a say on when and where Nero wanted to carry out our intimate dealings.

He was taking all my power and voice. If that’s what submission was, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be submissive. And that wasn’t even the worst part.

Nero demanded that I shouldn’t have any sexual contact with other men in the duration of our arrangement. I wasn’t allowed to beg, cry, or be overly emotional unless he asked, I was supposed to accept my punishment obediently, and I shouldn’t develop romantic feelings for him.

As if I would ever fall for a sick man like him. He was backing me into a wall and all but forcing me to engage in his sick fantasies of what sex felt like. I felt like I was in Fifty Shades of Grey for crying out loud.

The worst of the worst came when I read the soft and hard limits of our arrangement. The soft limits were spanking, bondage, blindfolding, edging, teasing with implements such as feathers, ice, and wax, use of words like sir or master when addressing him in the bedroom, and no speaking without permission.

I was horrified that it was even a soft limit. It should have been a hard limit.

He also included light degradation and humiliation, role-play, and the use of toys on me.

The hard limits made me want to catch the first flight back to France.

They included blood play, branding, permanent body markings, breath play, suspension bondage, fisting, anal sex, dubious consent, monitoring of my movements outside the bedroom, and kneeling when I am addressing him.

It was all very degrading, even without all those acts. I wasn’t sure I could sign a document like that. He was treating me like a dog without any say in what she wanted and less like a human being.

The period of our arrangement was supposed to last for six months.

I was floored that people enjoyed that kind of thing.

I walked to my closet and opened a secret door there. There were pictures of all the DeLuca brothers and the people I thought were involved in my murder. A red string connected all of them.

I knew my quest for the truth would be hard, but I didn’t know if I was willing to sacrifice my body for six months to a man who would use it for his own pleasure and hang me out to dry afterwards.