Dante.
He was there, across from her, tied to a chair, with ropes going across his chest, his hands, and his feet. He was still shirtless. Why was he shirtless?
Amara pushed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, a long-term habit that somehow always calmed her down a bit. Inhaling deeply, still feeling the greasy fingers of black stroking her mind, Amara looked around the room, trying to distract herself.
And felt her heart plummet.
It was the same room.
The same room she’d been in a decade ago for three days, tied to a chair, her bloody footprints on the floor as she tried to escape. All the therapy over the years could not have prepared her for the mental assault of this place. The walls started to close in on her.
‘Does Dante Maroni have anyone we can use against him?’
He had her. He had a baby he didn’t even know about. She had to tell him. God, she needed to tell him.
Amara opened her mouth but her eyes stayed glued to the wall over his head, where the chains still hung free. Her throat locked. The greasy fingers came over her consciousness, dripping tar into her lungs, weighing her down.
“God damn it, look at me!”
A shout penetrated the fog.
“Amara, baby, look at me,” a man called from the distance. “Give me your beautiful eyes.”
Beautiful eyes. She knew that voice – that voice of smoke and chocolate and twisted sheets.
Dante.
She looked at him, confused for a second as to why he was there. He hadn’t been there the last time. She’d been in this room, all alone, scared. She was scared now – so, so scared. Her hands started to shake.
“Amara,” his dark eyes locked on hers, fierce and intense and blazing. “I am going to kill every single man in this building for this. Not one of them will get close to touching you. I promise. Trust me, baby.”
She started to tremble.
She trusted him, but her memories kept clashing with his words. Amara tried to calm her heart down, tried every trick in the book to shut the door in her mind, but it crept in. She was stuck in a thick marsh of pain, wanting to move out, move forward, but stuck.
‘Should we tell Maroni we have his little girlfriend here?’
The laughter. The jeers. The pain. The blood.
Amara closed her eyes, the ropes on her wrist brandishing her, the scar on her neck feeling like a noose, the marks on her feet flashing back to slipping in her own blood as she limped away.
“I’m here with you, Amara,” the words came, dragging her back to the present. She focused on him, on the ropes cutting into his chest as he leaned towards her, on the one tattoo he had on his chest, a tattoo she had licked countless times.
Win.
Dante said a few battles were worth losing deliberately if it meant winning the war, and he would always win. She would win too. She needed to win. Against the assholes who had victimized her, against the demons who had possessed her, against the people who hadn’t accepted her. She needed to win.
Keeping her eyes glued to his chest, she let out a long breath, gripping the hands of the chair, and took in a deep breath.
“That’s it, baby,” he encouraged her. “Calm yourself down. I’m right here with you. You’re not alone again. I’m right here. That’s it, take in another breath.”
His voice soothed her, other memories seeping in, replacing the ugly ones – his fierce promise to her besides her hospital bed, his months of carrying one-sided conversations with her every day when she couldn’t talk, his dirty words whispered into her skin every time they connected, his murmured secrets into her ear as they lay in bed, his voice a connecting thread through the years, carrying so many beautiful memories. That voice of smoke and chocolate and twisted sheets.
Amara let it wash over her, feeling her heart slowly come down.
She opened her mouth to speak but words didn’t come. She swallowed.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “Don’t talk. You okay now?”
She nodded mutely, her eyes locking with his dark browns.
“If my suspicion is correct,” he began conversationally, as though they were hanging out in some café, “someone from the Outfit leaked that I was coming to Los Fortis to see you to the Syndicate.”
‘Do you know anything about the Syndicate?’
The ugly voice whispered, ready to drag her back down again.
“They’re who I’ve been investigating underground over the last few weeks,” he informed her, watching her closely. “I’ll tell you the whole story once we’re out of here. And we will get out of here, Amara.”
The confidence with which he stated that eased some of her nerves.
She saw him, really saw him, and the ways he’d changed over the weeks. For one, he had the dark scruff on his face, something she’d never seen him with before. It made him look wilder, more dangerous, and she wasn’t entirely sure she minded that. But it was his eyes that gave her pause. There was something darker in them, in his entire aura, and that gave her pause. She wasn’t sure if it was because of his father’s death or him taking over or his time undercover, but it hardened him, even in private, in ways she hadn’t seen before.
“Why did you run?” he asked her, his gaze steady on hers, holding hers, anchoring hers. “You knew I wasn’t dead.”
Amara swallowed. She had to tell him. But she needed to ask him her own question first. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she croaked out in a barely-there whisper.
His eyebrows pulled down slightly before understanding dawned in his eyes. “You’re mad at me.”
God, she wanted to hit him.
Amara felt herself begin to shake, the rawness of her emotions overpowering her, the pain she had been suppressing for years bubbling to the surface, mixing with the rage of being in this place, mixing with the agony of that one moment she had thought him dead, mixing with the hurt of being alone for so long, mixing with the guilt of not telling him about the baby, mixing with the panic that still infused her. It all fused together in an amalgamation of emotions until she couldn’t differentiate one from the other, her entire body beginning to quiver in the chair as her eyes burned.
“Amara,” she heard his voice from the distance, every syllable getting farther and farther as she lost herself to the sea of emotions, drowning in every single one of them, closing her eyes.
She couldn’t breathe.
“Can you loosen your ropes?”
The random question filtered through the fog.
She opened her eyes to see him looking at her calmly.
“They didn’t spend time tying you up,” he informed her. “You were unconscious and they wanted to contain me, so they didn’t focus. I’m assuming your knots are pretty sloppy. And with the scars on your wrists, the skin would give you more space to pull it out. You think you can do that?”
Amara looked down at her bonds, the fog in her mind slowly dissipating with his words. He was right. The skin on her wrist with the scars was slightly sunken, giving her hand more room. Testing the rope, she calmly tried to pull her hand instead of struggling as she’d been, and felt it get to the base of her thumb.
“Yeah,” she told him, looking up to see him looking at her thighs with furrowed brows.