A contraction hit her stomach, making her gasp as she gripped her stomach.
Braxton Hicks. That’s what they were. She’d read about them. Yes.
“Oh, is the baby coming?” Nerea asked with mock-concern, her pretty face twisting into something ugly.
Amara shook herself. “No.” It couldn’t be. It was too soon. She wasn’t ready. There was no way the baby was ready either.
Nerea pointed the gun at her, and Amara felt panic, true panic, fill her system, her anxiety hitting the roof as she tried to fight it and contain it inside herself. Fear, fury, and fire mixed inside her, twining around each other so closely she couldn’t even differentiate which was which anymore.
Protection came to the fore.
She had to protect the baby. She had to protect herself. She had to live a long and happy life with the man she loved. She deserved it.
But she was on the second floor in a room nobody ever visited while most people were downstairs preparing for the wedding. Amara took a step back, her hand going behind her. She made it look like she was searching for the windowsill to support herself; instead, her fingers came into contact with the surface of the boxes behind her, searching for a weapon, anything to help her.
Nerea stepped closer once, twice, three times, until her gun was right over Amara’s stomach, barely an inch away.
Her heart stopped, before thundering inside her chest, the flush of adrenaline wild in her veins, her entire being acutely aware of every single breath she took that pushed her stomach out, closer to the mouth of the gun. She tried not to breathe too hard, and another violent contraction hit her, hard.
No. No. No.
Fight with me, baby, she begged mentally to her unborn child, her heart racing.
“I’m sorry, Amara,” Nerea said, her words building up inside Amara until her hands started to shake. “You can’t have everything. You won’t have anything. I won’t live knowing you got happiness. I can’t.”
Nerea’s thumb clocked the top of the gun, unlocking it, her finger tightening on the trigger.
Amara went wild on the inside, searching behind her, her hand hitting a small can of paint.
Another contraction hit, faster than the one before.
Just a little more, baby.
“You don’t have to do this, Nerea,” she urged the other woman, buying some more time as her hand worked to lift the lid of the can. Amara felt a nail break, the pain in her finger making her wince which thankfully got masked with another contraction.
Amara gasped, exhaling loudly, covering her stomach with the other hand, the back of it touching the gun.
She just had one shot at this. Just one shot and she couldn’t miss.
Swallowing, Amara picked up the can of paint with one hand, swinging her arm around to throw it on the woman’s face, while pushing the arm of the gun to the ceiling with the other. A shot rang out just above her shoulder, and Amara felt her water break at the sound, her heart palpitating as she slugged through the pain.
Nerea went down with a gasp, her free hand trying to wipe her eyes. Amara bent even though she shouldn’t have, grabbing the gun from the woman’s hand, and turned it around.
And then she emptied the entire clip into her half-sister.
The bullets emptied.
Someone came rushing into the room.
Amara felt her knees give out as a cramp hit her, all the pain she’d been holding crashing into her, her low-pain threshold making her vision blur with the red stars that started to dance behind her lids.
Everything became a blur. She felt someone pick her up, carry her, move her. She felt the movement of the car and then the stench of the hospital. The thing she felt most was the endless pain.
Dante’s hands came to hers at some point, his voice whispering and shouting words of encouragement to her. Sweat drenched her. Lights came in and out of focus. And it went on and on and on and on.
And hours later, Tempest Talia Ava Maroni slid out into the world with a scream louder than her mother’s. Her lost sister never followed.
Dante looked down at the little warrior princess in his arms, his little storm, and felt something shift inside him, fall, click into place, locked tight. With the names of both women who had protected their children in their own ways – his mother and Amara’s – Tempest was a wrinkly, scrawny little thing, with a head full of dark hair and eyes squinted closed, looking nothing like the babies he saw in the media. He’d never seen anything more beautiful.
With her rump on his palm and her entire body – waddled in a blanket – fitting in the crook of his arm, Dante felt his eyes begin to burn.
“Dante-” the voice croaked from the hospital bed, bringing his attention to the woman he didn’t even know what he felt for anymore. Love was too tame a word, adoration too juvenile. Broken and bleeding at fifteen, she had made his world tremble; exhausted and spent now, she owned it.
He went to sit beside her, putting his precious bundle over her chest, watching as the woman his entire life belonged to gave a tearful smile, sobbing as she brought up a scarred hand to hold her, her ring glinting in the muted light.
“She made it,” Amara rasped out, her liquid eyes taking her in, before coming to his, shimmering with such endless emotion he felt himself falling into them again. Her eyes, those unique, beautiful, expressive eyes, had always been the hook into his chest.
“She’s a fighter,” Dante said, his voice sounding rough to his ears. “Like you.”
Amara’s lips trembled. “She ours, Dante. Ours. After all this time.”
Dante pressed a kiss to her wet lips. “My warrior queen. I’m so proud of you.”
Amara nuzzled her nose against his. “Did you count her toes?”
“Every one of them.”
The princess made a mou with her lips, a mewl coming from her little body.
“We will keep her safe, won’t we?” she asked him quietly, still looking down at their miracle. Dante rubbed the baby’s soft skin with a finger, his heart clenching as she gripped it with her tiny hands, the trust in the action the same unconscious trust fifteen-year-old Amara had shown him. It made everything inside him vow to shield them.
“Yes, we will,” he vowed.
“And if she ever cracks?” Amara locked her gaze with his.
“Then we fill her up with gold.”
She smiled, and Dante pressed his forehead to hers.
“Oh my god, she’s precious,” Morana cooed at little Tempest as Amara sat up on the hospital bed with her in her arms while Dante sat on a chair by the side.
They had just told Amara the story. Morana had been the one to find her in the room, having heard gunshots, and she had been the one to scream for help. Tristan had been the one to rush in, pick Amara up and carry her to the car while giving out instructions to get Nerea’s body away. Morana had sat in the back with her while Tristan had driven like a madman to the hospital, calling Dante on the way. She had been in labor for five hours with Dante by her side before Tempest came out, screaming like a banshee at being inconvenienced out of her mother’s snug womb.
The baby blinked around, her eyes a little more open.
“She has your eyes,” Tristan noted, standing behind Morana. Yes, and Dante loved that. Just like Amara had inherited her eyes from her mother, Tempest had inherited them from her.