“Any soreness?” the gynecologist asked Amara, rubbing cold gel over her lower abdomen.
Amara shook her head, Dante holding her hand. “I’m feeling tired though. I don’t know if it’s everything going on mentally or because of this little one.”
The doctor smiled. “Your body is creating another human being, Amara. It’s taxing. You need to rest more if you feel like it. In fact, I recommend you don’t get yourself in stressful situations given your risky pregnancy.”
Amara nodded and she and Dante both looked at the screen as the wand moved over her skin, the black and white flaring to life.
“Ah, look at that,” the doctor told them. “Do you want to know the gender? I can see it.”
“It’s a girl, isn’t it?” Dante asked from her side, rubbing her ring.
“Indeed it is,” the doctor confirmed, pointing to a white shape on the screen. “That’s her right there, nestled in her mother’s womb, all comfortable and safe. And she looks healthy. Congratulations.”
Amara felt her throat lock as emotion clogged her, the reality of the life inside her crashing over her, the reality of the life that should have been there but they’d lost weighing her down. She could feel the same emotions rolling over the man at her side, his fingers flexing against her hand, his eyes surprisingly moist.
“Could you take some pictures please?” Dante asked in a heavy voice.
The older woman nodded. “Sure.”
Dante looked at her, pressing their foreheads together.
One baby there, one baby missing. Amara didn’t think that would ever not hurt.
“How are you dealing with it, Morana?” Amara asked as they talked on video again, her with a hot chocolate in her bedroom and her friend with some wine in the living room.
Morana sighed. “I don’t know, honestly. I guess I’m not thinking about it too much right now. It can be overwhelming, you know?”
Amara nodded. She knew exactly what she meant. “What do I even do? My father ordered my abduction. He killed Dante’s mother. It’s just-I don’t know how to wrap my head around that.”
“I had a great biological father who protected me and died five minutes after I knew him. And the man I thought was my father my whole life hated me for replacing his daughter. I think about her too, you know. The real Morana. If she’s okay. If she’s alive.”
Amara felt her heart clench. “Are there no good fathers alive in our world?”
“Dante will be a good Daddy,” Morana gave a cheeky wink, making Amara sputter.
“So would Tristan,” Amara pointed out.
Morana raised her glass. “To finding good fathers for our kids. We scored in that department.”
They sure did.
Nerea had gone off the radar.
After that weird as hell conversation with her, she had dropped out of the Outfit without giving any reason, and Amara’s suspicions started to solidify. The possibilities of her working with MrX were high, but Amara didn’t understand why she’d spent years trying to bond with her.
After a week though, Morana had come through with his last known location a few miles out of the city, following the breadcrumb Nerea had left knowingly or unknowingly.
Dante had gotten his men together, and Amara had waited the nail-biting hours as he’d returned, telling her they had him.
It was close to midnight and as he got ready to interrogate him, Amara fumed.
“You’re out of your mind if you think I’m staying behind, Dante,” she told him in no uncertain terms.
Dante just stared at her evenly, not her man but the leader of the Outfit right then. “You being there makes me look weak. You being there would stop me from interrogating him if push came to shove. I’m not going to torture him, Amara, not in front of you, not when it can trigger you, not when you’re high risk.”
Amara took in a deep breath. “I need to see him.”
“And I need to make sure this doesn’t touch you or our baby.”
He didn’t get it. She needed the closure. She needed to find why.
“I’m coming, Dante,” she told him in the same tone, standing in his office. “You can’t order me around.”
He tilted his head to the side. “No, but I can order my men not to let you out of the room. Don’t make me do that, but don’t think for a second I won’t. Not if it’s to protect you.”
Amara grit her teeth in frustration, watching him walk out of the room. He was crazy if he thought she wouldn’t get to Xavier. She needed to know, to ask for herself why he had destroyed her when she’d done nothing. Giving him a head start, Amara waited for fifteen minutes before slowly walking out of the study, only to see two guards at the front door out of the mansion.
He’d fucking done it.
Gritting her teeth, Amara turned to the back, using the kitchen entrance his majesty would probably not have thought of, and escaped out into the lawns.
Night enveloped the hill and guards patrolled the area, giving her curious looks as she made her way towards the training center in her bohemian dress that hid her belly.
Two guards stationed outside stopped her. “You can’t go in, ma’am.”
Amara gave them a smile, showing them her phone. “Dante forgot his phone in the bedroom and it’s been blowing up with calls. This late at night, it has to be urgent. If I were you, I’d just let me pass for a quick second so I can give him the phone and walk out. He’d get really angry if they were important calls, you know.”
The guys exchanged a look, hesitating.
Amara added more. “Honestly, what do you think I’m going to do, gentleman? Lift weights at midnight?”
One of the guys nodded. “Five minutes, ma’am.”
Amara gave him a bright smile and slipped inside. While they hadn’t announced their engagement per se, people weren’t idiots. Even if she didn’t have a giant green rock on her finger and he didn’t have a band on his, the preparations for the wedding and the fact that she’d taken over the household after Chiara left right after Leo died, people knew she was going to be the mistress of the mansion, and as such, they’d begun to treat her with the respect that title demanded.
It was the first time she had ever come into the training center. From everything she’d heard about it growing up, she had imagined dungeons and torture chambers, not state-of-the-art facilities, a boxing ring, a fitness center, weapons locked behind glass cabinets at this time of the night. Amara had spent the last few hours preparing herself for this confrontation with a man she had never met but whose blood ran through her veins, and she was not going to be denied like a child who didn’t know what was good for her.
She knew from what Dante had once told her that the interrogation room was in the basement. Heading to her right, she opened the sole door and descended the steps of the training center down to the basement. The space slowly came into view, along with the people. Vin stood off in one corner of the room, and Dante sat in a chair opposite another man.
All eyes came to her as she entered.
Dante’s narrowed, a bright flare of annoyance and anger going through them, and Amara lifted her chin, daring him to say something. The vein on the side of his neck ticked, but he stayed silent.
Amara felt a calm wave of strength pass over her. This was for herself, for her child, for the world she was bringing her into. While their world would never be good and clean and straight, she could do her part in making it better. She had survived so much, she could handle this confrontation.
Feeling Dante’s silent presence there emboldened the strength inside her. He had always done that, since the day beside her hospital bed to this precise moment when he was pissed at her – he made her stronger, made her feel safer, made her feel supported. He was one of the biggest reasons she was as sane as she was, that she had held onto life through the worst of her trauma, that she had healed. He called her his lighthouse but he had always been hers, standing tall through the worst of the stormy nights, lighting up the dark, letting her know that shore was close.
The basement looked more like the dungeon she’d imagined – dark, dank, and destitute. The walls were a bleary grey, the high ceiling supported with stone pillars, yellow bulbs hanging every two feet, giving the place a miserable glow.
Vin stood to one corner – face hard, arms folded across her chest.- by a table with several weapons, seeing which twisted Amara’s stomach.
Amara removed her gaze from them to the man sitting on a chair in the middle, untied, and watching them all. A clean-shaven, well-dressed, bald man with horn-rimmed spectacles. The same man whose photo her kidnapper had shown her on the phone all those years ago. Her father.
Amara came to a stop a few feet from him, locking her eyes with his olive ones, every memory of her assault coming to the forefront of her mind.
‘MrX is here.’
He had been there.
“Why?” she asked, her voice raspy. That was what she wanted to know. Why.
Xavier smiled at her, his eyes warm. “Their first order had been to kill you, girl. I hadn’t known it was you. But when I saw you there, looking so beautifully broken, I had you live.”
Beautifully broken? She’d been assaulted, tortured, raped. She’d had her skin flayed from her flesh and acid drip over her muscles and blood cover her being. There was nothing remotely beautiful about everything that she had survived.
“So, had it been any other innocent girl, she would have been tortured and raped and killed?”
“Yes.”
He was sick in the head.
Absolutely sick.
Amara felt acid from her stomach rising in her throat. “And Dante’s mother? You killed her for the same reason you had me taken? That she overheard a conversation she wasn’t supposed to hear?”
He smiled, a warm smile that made Amara’s skin crawl. “Do you have any idea how vast, how deep our organization is? There are some very powerful people connected to some very powerful places with us. That’s why we have a simple policy to protect ourselves – no witnesses. Anyone who’s not working with us knows nothing about us.”
“So you’ve killed other innocent people over the years?”
“Of course.”
Amara swayed on the spot as the entirety of it hit her. She was just one in a line of many. Dante’s mother had been just one in a line of many. There were many who died and no one even knew a thing. Who the hell were these people?
She felt Dante put his big hand behind her, holding her just on the curve of her waist, and she leaned into it, glad to have the support.
Once she was steady, he got up, pushed her into his vacated seat, and walked to the side towards another chair.
“I want to kill you, Xavier,” Dante told the man who had sired her calmly, pulling up that chair next to hers. “I want to kill you for what you put my mother and brother through. I want to kill you for what you put my woman through. I want to kill you for what you’ve put so many innocent people through.”
“But you won’t.” Xavier relaxed back in his chair.
“But I won’t,” Dante agreed. “A few years ago, I would have. Now, you are more useful to me alive than dead. The day you stop being useful to me? You’ll perhaps go to sleep and never wake up. Or maybe you’ll pour yourself a glass of water and instead drink acid that melts your organs from the inside. Or maybe you’ll wake up tied to a chair with knives in your skin. Or hell if I’m in a merciful mood, maybe you’ll go to the grocery store and have a terrible accident. I mean, who knows?”
Damn, he was good. Amara saw her father stiffen a bit at each word, even as he stayed silent.
“Are we clear?” Dante asked, taking his jacket off.
“Yes,” her father said quietly.
Dante nodded, slowly folding the sleeves of his shirt over his forearms. “Now, let’s talk like adult bad guys. The kids my father sent twenty years ago, where are they?”
Xavier shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I was just a foot soldier then here in the Outfit. They promoted me to the ranks afterward.”
“Can you find out?”
“Possibly, yes. But the young ones rarely survive.”
“Hmm,” Dante finished rolling up his sleeves, looking back at Vin. “Hand me the gun please.”
Vin quietly went to the table and picked up a gun, passing it over to her man.
Dante placed it on his lap and took out a cigarette. “In that batch of kids, there was a three-year-old redheaded girl,” Dante began. “I want her and you will get me her information.”
Her father stayed silent.
Dante blew out a puff of smoke. “Why kidnap us a few weeks ago and take us to the same location?”
Xavier looked down at his hands. “It’s a place we started using again a few years ago. She wasn’t supposed to be taken, just you. The guys thought she was collateral.”
Amara’s disgust was probably plastered all over her face because Xavier looked at her and said, “I was never meant to be a father. Some men just aren’t.”
“That’s your excuse?” her tone was disbelieving.
“It’s the truth. Children become what their parents are. Nerea had a shitty mother who left her with me, and she grew up hard; you got a good mother who raised you, and you grew up kind. Me? I was raised by a monstrous man, so that’s what I became.”
Amara shook her head, unable to believe what she was hearing. “We are not our parents, Xavier. Children are… like wildflowers. They may be planted in one place but they grow where their hearts lead. It’s not where we’re planted but where we bloom that defines us.”
A laugh escaped the man. “Oh, you naïve girl. What a luxury that innocence must be. Yes, you’ve been through hell, but my dear daughter, hell is much bigger than you ever thought it was. This world is much bigger, much deeper, much darker than you thought it was. The places I’ve been, I couldn’t be anything else but who I am.”
A shiver went down Amara’s spine at his words.
Xavier grinned at seeing her shudder. “Let the sleeping monsters lie, girl. They already have their eyes on the Outfit because of Lorenzo’s death, which they’re writing off as an internal thing. These people have no conscience. No humanity. You will unleash something upon your family I don’t think you truly understand. You’ll see when your child-”
A wave of protectiveness crashed over her so intensely it made her heart stutter.
Amara took the gun from Dante’s lap, her hand gripping it hard. She wanted to shoot him. She wanted to shoot him and remove his essence from a world where her child would be born. But doing that would lose them a lead. He could give them information that could save countless other children. But he didn’t deserve to live.
The indecision between her maternal instinct for her child and her protective instinct for other children warred inside her. Amara put her nose on the gun, breathing in and out, trying to contain the rage his words unleashed inside her.
This man had made so many people suffer, and she couldn’t make him pay because he had the power to stop others from suffering.
Win. Dante always said when dealing with his father – lose a battle, win the war. She needed to lose this.
Amara straightened her arm, her eyes flickering to Dante once to see him watching her, and she unlocked the gun as Vin had taught her, and pointed it to the man grinning at her, her arms slightly shaking. The proximity to him allowed her to aim better, and she pulled the trigger over his kneecap.
The loud shot and the recoil hit her hard, pushing her back into the chair as Xavier screamed in pain, clutching his knee.
“That’s for fifteen-year-old me, you bastard,” she rasped out, the satisfaction of watching the blood leave him acute in her. Dante didn’t say a word, just watched her like a hawk as she watched her father, her chest heaving.
Aiming to the other knee, she blew it out too. “And that’s for Dante’s mother and countless other innocent people you’ve destroyed.”
She stood up, walking to the chair he was howling in and pointed the gun to his head.
“Listen to me, and listen well, Xavier,” Amara said, her voice firm, bringing his attention to herself. “Your organization has spies here? It’s time we plant our own there. You will help us plant a spy in your ranks. You will help us find the missing kids. You will give us answers. And you will keep your mouth shut about it. If at any point, you betray us and bring danger to my door, if anything you do directly falls on my family, forget anyone else,” Amara stated, digging the gun into his forehead, seeing his eyes widen slightly. “I will make them hurt you, over and over and over, and I won’t let them give you death until your skin is flayed from your bones. Am I clear?”
He nodded.
She turned to Dante. “Promise me, if his shadow ever falls on our children, you will make him suffer.”
“With pleasure,” Dante promised, blowing a ring of smoke in her father’s face.
Amara nodded and walked back to the chair. “So, who’s going to be our plant in the Syndicate?”
“I am,” Vin said from the side.
Amara looked at him, her heart racing. “Vinnie.”
Vin’s eyes came to her. “I couldn’t protect you then, but I can now. Let me do this.”
Amara stared at her lifelong friend, seeing the man he had grown up to be, and felt her heart soften.
“We’ll discuss this later in my office,” Dante said to him, standing up from his seat and extending his hand to Amara. “As for this bastard, lock him up here for now.”
Amara took his hand and began walking away from the scene, climbing the stairs, walking out of the center.
Dante smoked the last of his cigarette, taking a drag, staying silent. Amara knew he was fuming at her so she stayed silent too. They walked to the mansion and headed to his study, him closing the door behind her and pushing her up against it, his hand holding her jaw, his eyes blazing. “Defy me like that again when it comes to your safety, and I kid you not, I will lock you up, Amara.”
Once upon a time, that statement would have possibly triggered her. Knowing this man now, Amara rolled her eyes. “Why would I defy you if it doesn’t make sense? I’m not a thrill-seeker. I like my life quiet. And I like being safe. But when you deny me a chance for closure, I will take matters into my own hands, Dante.”
“You don’t see him anymore. You don’t deal with him anymore. You don’t even think of him anymore,” he growled an inch from her lips. “I will deal with him and I will take care of him when the time comes.”
Amara stroked his chest. “Okay.”
“The spy planting was a good idea, by the way. Well done.”
Amara looked at his face, the beard covering his jaw, the scent of his cologne and smoke mingling together in a concoction she liked. “What if he’s right, Dante? How do we stop this from tarnishing our children?”
He looked down at her and cupped her face, pulling her flush into him. “He was right to an extent, Amara. We are our parents to an extent. I have so much for my mother in me, and I know that. You have so much of yours. Our kids will have bits of us too, but we’re more than our parents. Look at Tristan. Look at Morana. Look at us. Our kids will be more than us too. And we’ll do it as we do everything. Together, you and me. We make this kingdom what we want. Tonight was a big step towards that. We have answers and we have a lead. We’re building a new house on the foundations of an old one, and if need be, we’ll paint it with blood.”
“So, what, we play them, my king?”
He chuckled, his fingers flexing on her face. “We play them, my queen.”
