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.”