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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.
