Beauty and the Beast: A Dark Arranged Marriage Mafia Romance

prologue

luca

Beauty and the Beast.

Everyone knows how that fairytale goes, right?

How an egotistical motherfucker gets trapped into a spell by a wicked witch, because he looked down upon her, judging her by how she looked before even knowing her. Then having to break that spell by having a woman fall in love with him in his monster form.

Except, I’m no fairytale prince.

We all know that all the happily ever after’s from the movies are bullshit.

Happily ever after’s don’t exist.

Especially for a motherfucker like me.

A man who’s done so much wrong, seen things he shouldn’t have seen. Watched men and women get tortured, murdered, be ripped away from their goddamn families.

My name is Luca Costello, and I’m a man of Italian origins. I’m twenty-eight, with a dark, scruffy beard, olive skin, thick eyebrows, pale green eyes, scars on my face as well as all over my goddamn body.

I grew up in the toughest streets of South Manchester, you know, the area stretching from Hulme to Moss Side up until Longsight.

I know there’s that fucking cliché that everybody spits out from around here. “I didn’t choose this life, this life chose me.” “Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.”

Except, I didn’t choose this life.

Growing up, I was forced into this way of living. Postcode wars, Turf wars, competing for territory, gunning down any bastard who got in the way of business…

It was all I knew.

And it was all I was ever going to know.

I took over for my Pops when my Mum passed away. Pops was always so tired and depressed, and he really took Mum dying heavy on the chest. They were in love… And now, he was never gonna see her again. He blamed himself for her death. Blamed our lifestyle, because she died from a drug overdose…

I guessed that was the nasty side of business.

You can’t just leave the streets behind. Once you’re in, there’s no way out. Your past follows you wherever you goddamn go. You don’t know how many enemies you’ve made. You don’t know whether the person staring at you from across the street is a stranger, or someone connected to somebody that you’ve crossed in the past.

 I wanted better for myself.

Heck, I needed better.

And I knew from the minute I met Zara Amelle, my life was going to turn upside down.

She was sexy, bold, confident. A woman who knew what she fucking wanted.

Too innocent for my world.

But that didn’t stop me. I should have left her alone.

I should have left her to live her life.

Live her life without me.

But she was like a fucking drug. Once I got one taste of her, I kept going back for more.

Even if it killed us.

They say if you keep dancing with the devil you’ll get burned.

I’d been destined for hell my whole damn life. Living a life of sin, hurting so many people who didn’t deserve to be hurt. Except she was the opposite of me. She was like an angel.

Who was going to save her from me?

This is my story.

She was the Beauty…

And I was the Beast.

1

luca

I sat down in my office, finishing up some paperwork on fixing the finances for the launderette that we owned on the opposite side of Cheetham Hill. It was one of our numerous fronts for laundering our dirty money, so it was always necessary that we kept everything up-to-date and organized, to stop the feds from sniffing around.

This was always a tedious task, but it had to be done. I was waiting on a call from one of my men, Jamal, who was going to run me by everybody we’d allowed to borrow money from us, and who was still yet to pay back their debts.

I pulled out a fag, taking slow drags of it in and out, allowing the smoke to burn down my lungs and allow my body to relieve its stress. I picked up the phone to call my Pops, but then put it back down, knowing that he was probably drowning his sorrows in a bottle of alcohol, like he always fucking did.

A sudden knock at the door snapped me out of my thoughts.

“Hey Luca,” said Faizan, making his way inside my office.