The Emperor (Dark Verse 3)

She came to with the sound of her name being called.

Blinking her eyes open, she shook her head to clear the grogginess, unable to move. Looking down, she realized why. Her hands were tied to the arms of a chair, the roped binding her wrists to the wood right over her scars.

Her stomach sank.

No.

No.

She started to struggle to get free, chafing her wrists against the rope, her breathing escalating. This couldn’t be happening again. She couldn’t survive it again.

God, please. No. 

“Amara!”

The loud, masculine voice calling her name had her looking up.

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.

“Are you starting your period? It’s not your time.”

The absurd question gave her pause in her act of tugging on the rope.

Of course, she didn’t start her period. Following his gaze, she bent her head down and saw it.

Blood.

Just a little, but there, between her thighs. 

No.

No, no, no, no.

“No, no, no,” she started chanting, shaking her head, staring in horror at the little stain of red on her skin, panic cloying in her chest.

“Amara, what-”

“I haven’t had my period in weeks,” she whispered, her horrified eyes coming to see him.

She saw him absorb her words. He knew she was extremely regular, he knew her cycles. Hell, he used to time his visits according to them. The implication of the words dawned upon him. She could see it click in place, the last time they had been together, and a fire blazed in his eyes she had never, not in the entire time she’d known him, seen.

He didn’t say a word, just absorbed all the information his brain was processing, his eyes never moving from hers.

“Calm yourself,” he finally spoke, his voice a hard command. “Get out of your ropes and I will get us out of here. Not one motherfucker in this place is touching you or my child. But you need to stop stressing.”

Amara knew that too. She also knew he was pissed to be cursing like that. Dante Maroni didn’t curse in the company of ladies; he was too well-mannered for that.

She swallowed, closing her eyes, taking a deep breath, and nodding.

“Were you never going to tell me?” he asked after a few minutes of silence, his entire body still, on the edge.

“I probably would have in a while,” she admitted. “I just-”

“You just what?” he grit out.

“Excuse me for protecting my child while you were off playing dead without a word of warning to me, you bastard!” she burst out, her throat straining, her anger matching his, years of frustration bleeding out in her tone. “Do you think it’s easy, Dante? Living alone in a city on enemy territory, without friends, without protection, without anything but a promise for years – did you really think I’d let my child go through that?” 

“Our child,” he growled. “And did you think it was easy for me, Amara?” he asked her, his voice calm, his eyes anything but. “Did you think I was having the time of my life ‘playing dead’? That I was having a blast all these years living like this? That I was not working and bleeding every damn day to make a future for us?”

Amara felt her lips tremble, her heart aching to reach out to him. “It wasn’t easy for either of us, Dante. That was exactly why I wanted it to be easy for our child. He or she shouldn’t have to pay for our choices. For years, you and I waited for each other, but I feel like somewhere, we lost our way. The goal became so much more important we forgot about the journey.”

Her honesty silenced him for a long minute.

“I had my father killed,” he told her quietly. “I watched him bleed out like a slaughtered pig, and I smoked. For years, that had been my goal. Turning the fringes of his empire in my favor, manipulating people, making a name for myself – all so one day, when he was gone, I could give you and our children everything you deserved.”

Her heart clenched at the sincerity of his words. That was one of the things she’d always loved about Dante – he never shied from his emotions. He felt what he felt and gave zero fucks if anyone called him anything, and nobody dared because Dante Maroni was a legend already, the most masculine of men in their toxic society, the most powerful because he knew exactly what he felt and didn’t lie to himself about it.

“As soon as we are out of here,” he told her, his voice firm, his eyes heated, “you and I are going to have a long due conversation about keeping shit from each other.”

Uh oh. Something in his tone prickled at the back of her neck, raising the hair there. She looked into his eyes closely, seeing the pain and rage there, but also an anguish she didn’t think had anything to do with their conversation. Heart stuttering, she inhaled deeply. “Dante-”

“You didn’t tell me, Amara,” he spoke, his jaw clenching.

He knew.

She didn’t know how, but he knew.

“For years,” he continued, the fury on his face matching the fire in her veins, “you took me inside your body, welcomed me to your bed, let me have you every way possible. But. You. Never. Told. Me.”

Tears escaped her eyes.

“And I suspected something. I should’ve fucking asked. You know why I didn’t? Because I trusted you. I trusted that you’d tell me if anything like that had happened. And you never did, so I never assumed, because I didn’t want to insult the memory of your experience.”

He was killing her. “Dante-”

“We both fucked up, Amara,” he told her, his eyes blazing. “And we’re both going to own up to it. And we’re both going to talk about this and forgive and move on. I’m not giving you a choice here. I didn’t work my ass off all these years for something trivial as lack of communication to break us.”

“It isn’t trivial,” Amara murmured.

“Yes, it is,” he told her. “We get out of here. We fucking reconnect. Did you really think I was going to let you go? After fighting for us for a decade, did you really think that, Amara?”

Amara fisted her hands. “You hurt me.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a dick.”

A reluctant chuckle escaped her at the way he said that.  

His lips twitched before he sobered again. “Did you know,” he went on, searing her with his dark gaze, “that while Tristan and I killed the assholes who took you, I’ve been searching for the guy who gave the order for years? It’s been my side project and going undercover just made me realize I should have given it more time. Because it’s all connected and I was too focused on Bloodhound Maroni. Fucking dead bastard.”

God, she hurt. She hurt for him, for herself, for everything they had been through because of one man. For the second time in her life, Amara was glad of someone’s death.

“You couldn’t have known, Dante,” she told him softly, wanting to ease the pain she could feel emanating from him. “What he did isn’t on you. Who he was isn’t on you.”

“I am a Maroni, Amara,” he told her, and she realized the change in his demeanor taking over had already brought. He had been an heir, a prince, who now sat on the throne. “I am his blood.”

“Yes,” she nodded, holding his stare. “But it’s not what you’re given that makes you who are. It’s what you do with it. It’s not the weapon but the one who wields it that holds the power, and you, Dante Maroni are a powerful man.”

“Fuck, I want to kiss you right now,” he cursed out, his eyes fire on hers.

Amara felt her breath catch, and for the first time, felt her lips twitch. “Get yourself out of the chair first, badass.”

His lips mirrored hers for a second before he spoke again. “You really think they have me here against my will? That I’d be foolish enough to risk myself if this wasn’t my plan?”

Amara felt her heart begin to race, her eyes looking down at the ropes secured tightly around him. “What do you mean?”

“My father was working with the Syndicate for a long time,” he explained to her. “And he wasn’t alone. The organization wouldn’t want someone disagreeable in power in the Outfit. Whoever their mole is would have been waiting for an opportunity to eliminate me.”

“So, you handed it to them on a platter by traveling alone to Los Fortis,” Amara finished, comprehending exactly what he was saying. God, how could she have forgotten he was such a good player? Something akin to pride filled her.

“I hadn’t anticipated them taking you.”

“Still well played, my king,” she whispered, a small smile on her face. “What are you waiting for now?”

“For them to come to the room, to interrogate me,” he told her calmly. “I’ll be leading them. Though they’ll probably hit me a little, I need you to stay calm and keep working on the ropes. Had I been alone, I wouldn’t have worried. But you and-”

“I know,” the smile dipped from her face, her stomach turning. “I’ll try. It’s just this place, I can’t control my responses.”

“This hell is my kingdom now, Amara,” he told her, his eyes solemn. “As long as I’m alive, it won’t touch you. And I intend to live a very long, very happy life with you.”

The knot she’d been holding inside her melted a bit. Even in the middle of her hell, Amara felt a feeling of safety wash over her.

Taking a deep breath in, she nodded and began to work on the ropes.