Chapter 9 Amara
AMARA
Ransome is here.
And now he’s here, watching me struggle with my life.
I blink once, maybe twice, catching the sun as it frames his head in the window.
Almost like a halo. His jaw is still strong as ever, and his lips—lips I couldn’t forget if I tried—are slack as usual.
His eyes are covered in shades that I know he won’t take off because I can read his eyes like no one can.
And then my vision goes blurry. Because this has to be a dream. I am sleeping. There is no way he is here, the same as there was no way Maverick was actually here either.
It’s all a dream.
My brain making things up as a way of coping with the ghosts of my past.
As my eyes flutter open, I knew I was right. I was asleep.
Except…
I am not in my bed. I am not even in my home. My eyes flash open the rest of the way as the room materializes around me. It makes me dizzy enough that I feel sick to my stomach.
Machines whir and beep next to me. The cool feeling of an IV tube clings to my arm, dripping fluid into my veins. The bed is cold and clinical, stiff and hard.
“Where am I?” I manage to ask once my mouth remembers how to speak again.
“Bozeman Hospital,” a woman in scrubs—a nurse?—answers me.
“What… What happened?” I stutter, looking around. No matter how many times I blink, the room doesn’t change.
I am awake. And I am in fact in a hospital room.
“You were leaving work and you fainted. In the parking lot.”
“Oh my God.” My hand rushes to my face. I feel like I might pass out again. Strangely, nothing hurts.
Then I remember—
My hand touches my belly as every cell in my body is consumed with guilt and worry. “Is the baby okay? Did you check the baby?”
“We ran a full ultrasound while you were sleeping.” The nurse smiles. “The baby is fine.”
“Oh, thank God.” I melt back into the bed, as foreign as it is. But the relief is temporary as I continue to put the puzzle together. “How did I get here?”
“You were lucky. Someone just happened to be standing by your car when you fainted. He brought you in.”
So I was at work. Leaving work and fumbling to put my key in the door, a door that doesn’t always like to open even when it’s unlocked. And someone was standing there…close enough to catch me.
Someone who was towering over me.
Someone in black.
Someone…
“Hello, Erin.”
I barely stop myself from screaming.
I was so caught up in figuring out where I am and whether or not the baby was okay that I didn’t even clock the dark form sitting in the corner of the room.
Something about Ransome’s voice has a way of tipping the nurse off that we need privacy. She quietly excuses herself, though not without meeting my eyes for a hard second while handing me the call light.
“… Or should I say Amara?” he asks as soon as she leaves.
“What are you doing here?”
He comes into light. The outfit is the same as the dream, which tells me it wasn’t a dream at all.
“I heard you’ve been keeping secrets from me,” he answers vaguely.
It confuses me—until I look at where his eyes are.
My belly.
I cover myself up with the scratchy hospital blanket. “How did you hear?”
“I sent Maverick.”
So that wasn’t a dream either. I knew I saw him. I knew I wasn’t just paranoid and my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me.
A lot of things are starting to make sense now. And it makes me mad.
“You’ve been stalking me,” I accuse him.
“I hardly think that’s a word you can throw in my face.”
He’s refusing to look at me any more than he has to, which is fine. I don’t really want to look at him either. Now that I know the baby is fine, I don’t want to be here.
“I thought you wanted me gone,” I say.
“I do.”
“You sent me packing, refusing to listen to anything I had to say,” I go on.
“And I still don’t care to hear your excuses about why you were disloyal.”
“Then why are you here?” I demand.
With that, Ransome swings around, his stony eyes falling on me hard.
“Because you’re pregnant.”
“So what?” I snap.
The beeping noises pick up as my heart rate rises. Ransome’s eyes flick to the monitor. “You need to calm down.”
“Again, why do you care? You don’t want to have anything to do with me. What difference does it make to you if I am okay or if the baby is okay?”
“Because that baby could be mine,” he snaps back.
I snort. “Okay. I mean, he is yours. That’s not a question.”
“It is for me,” he says.
My jaw drops. “You think I cheated on you?”
“I think I’m going to need a paternity test to make sure you didn’t.”
“Unbelievable.” I shake my head and lean back into the bed. “Jesus Christ, Ransome. From the job at Apex to everything else you showed me, I was nothing but loyal.”
“Some of your actions beg to differ.”
I narrow my eyes at him.
“Not to mention photos,” he adds. “And that video.”
“Are you seriously still caught up on that?” I throw my hands up. “I have no interest in Tristan. Every conversation we had, I was cornered.”
“Prove it,” he says.
“How?! You don’t listen to anything I say! And in case you dropped out of school even earlier than I did, flash news: you cannot prove a negative.”
“Then prove a positive.” His arms cross. “Prove I’m the father. With a paternity test.”
“For fuck’s sake, my baby is not Tristan Chadovich’s!”
The beeping escalates again.
“Keep your fucking voice down,” he growls.
I lower my voice, but my tone stays the same. Annoyed, enunciated, bulleted. “The baby is yours.”
“And if it is—” he starts, but I cut him off.
“He.”
“What?”
“The baby is a boy. He, not it.”
Ransome’s eyes dart back down again. Something stormy flashes behind them. Something I haven’t seen before and can’t decipher.
“If… he… is mine, then he is coming with me.”
That actually makes me laugh. “You can’t just have him. I’m his mother.”
“Then you’ll be coming with me too.”
Ransome stands over me. Which I hate, but I’m stuck on a bed hooked to machines, so I can’t exactly move. Flipping him the bird is the closest I can get to showing my feelings.
But I don’t do that. Because his brow has never been darker than it is now, and I don’t want to test the lengths he’d go to punish me. Not while I’m carrying another life inside me.
There’s something else too. As he hovers this close, his face inches from mine, my senses fill with all things familiar and forgotten.
“If he is mine, he is the Rozanov heir. And there is no way in hell that the Rozanov heir will live a life wasting away in a small town in the middle of nowhere all because his mother is too stubborn to face his future.”
The Rozanov heir.
Fuck me. I hadn’t thought about that.
The weight of his words bears down on me. I fight it off just enough to answer. “How did you know where I was? Have you been stalking me this entire time?”
“You’re giving me too much credit, dorogoya.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what you did. You know how I found you.” The hairs on the back of my neck prick as I realize what he’s saying. “You logged into Apex.”
I chew the inside of my cheek for a moment, refusing to look at him.
“Either you wanted to be found, wanted to be rescued—”
“I don’t need to be rescued. We are all doing just fine. Thriving, in fact.”
“Your car barely starts. You’re working for minimum wage at a dentist’s office. I’d hardly call that ‘thriving.’”
“They pay me more than that. And I get benefits.”
“You can lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to me.” He shakes his head. “You wanted me to find you. Either that, or you just couldn’t stay away.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snap.
For the first time, Ransome’s lips crawl ever-so-slightly up into a devilish smirk.
“Old habits die hard, don’t they?”
I want to reject his accusation. Want to tell him where he can stick his habits and his assumptions about my life. The life he asked me to overhaul.
But I stay silent.
“Either way, you’re coming with me,” he says.
I stare at his hands, tight around the railing. His knuckles are whiter than the sheets. He’s angry—angrier than I’ve seen him in a long, long time.
The call light is in my hand. My thumb hovers over the button. I know he sees it, even though he keeps his eyes locked on mine.
“And if I don’t?” I dare to ask.