Chapter 60 Amara
AMARA
I shove Ransome off of me and struggle to my feet before running to Gianni. He’s lying on the floor near the wall and he’s not moving.
“Gianni! G!” I cry as I come to my knees.
Relief washes over me as I realize he is alive. He’s shaking and sobbing but he’s alive.
“I’m sorry,” he sobs as I pull him against me.
“Are you hurt?” I check him over for wounds or blood or anything else. There is a gash on the side of his head, and his nose is bleeding, but I don’t see much else, thank God.
“I’m fine. I’m just so fucking sorry, sis.”
“Don’t be.” I hush him and pull him into me. “Everything is going to be okay.”
But as I look around the room, I’m not sure I believe my own words.
Tristan and his guys are gone, but Baron and Ransome are hovering over Maverick who has been shot.
Blood puddles around his motionless body as Baron performs CPR.
Ransome shoves him out of the way at one point, taking over the compressions himself with rib-cracking force.
“I’m calling an ambulance,” Baron says, and Ransome nods once, continuing the compressions.
I stay huddled in the corner with my brother, watching Ransome as he does everything in his power to save his best friend’s life.
I don’t know how I got here.
I mean, I know that I got hired by Apex, by a man whose dominating stature and iron fist and carved jaw made me weak in the knees and fuzzy in the head.
He was my boss and my crush. And, as I did things to please him in ways no other assistant ever could seem to perfect, it turned to more.
Curiosity shifted to want. Want to need. Need to obsession.
It wasn’t smart. It wasn’t healthy. But it also wasn’t in my control.
How was I supposed to know he was part of the Bratva? How was I supposed to know that I would get caught up in it too? I was just trying to make money for my siblings, to get us away from our deadbeat, drunken dad and into a better place. Not even a fancy place, just somewhere better.
So how the fuck did I get here?
As minutes pass and EMTs show up, I’m trying to rationalize all of it from my end, but I’m struggling.
Because no matter how I dice it, no matter how I justify it, I feel at fault.
All of this is my fault. Gianni being threatened, the deal exploding into a dangerous war, Maverick’s blood on the floor…
It’s all on me.
Maverick is rushed from the scene and I wonder for a moment why no cops showed up, why no questions are being asked. But when one of the EMTs says a few words to Ransome and they nod to each other, it hits me.
Duh. They have men in the NYPD. They must have hospital connections too. People that don’t ask questions every time one of their guys gets sent to the ER with gunshot wounds.
After they leave, Gianni and I rush over to Ransome.
“Is he going to make it?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Ransome snaps.
“I’m sorry,” Gianni says. “I just wanted to talk cars and racing and—”
“Just go home, kid,” Ransome barks out, and Gianni looks at me.
“I need a minute,” I tell him. “Wait for me outside?”
Gianni nods. “Okay.”
Once he leaves, we’re alone. Baron went with the ambulance. It’s just Ransome and I in this giant warehouse. The air smells like copper and gunpowder and I can hardly breathe. But it’s mostly from the anger rolling off Ransome.
I reach out to touch him and he jerks away. His eyes fall on me with enough weight to knock me over.
“This is your fault.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I know and I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry.” Ransome steps over to me.
His figure looms over mine, tall and furious.
“Sorry for what? Sorry that you betrayed me from day one? That you fought me even though I showed you the weight of the situation? Sorry that your siblings, people I tried to help, couldn’t obey orders and stay out of shit?
” He is screaming at this point, and I just let him.
“Sorry that you couldn’t obey orders either?
You think I wanted to lock you up in my penthouse just for fun?
Fuck, Amara. I did it because you’re stubborn and unpredictable and it was the only way to keep you from doing something stupid.
And yet, you still managed. You doused all of us in gasoline and lit the fucking match.
Are you happy now? Did you get what you wanted? ”
His eyes shift down to the blood on the floor. His expression fills with even more rage.
“I didn’t mean to let anything happen,” I cry.
“I never wanted any part of this. You could have kept me in the dark. You didn’t have to show me this side of your world.
But once I knew, I was in. And then what was I supposed to do?
You’re the one that went to my house. You talked to my brother.
You took us to that concert where he met Tristan. You—”
Ransome reaches out and grabs me by the throat. “Do not put this on me. Don’t you fucking dare. I have done nothing but try to protect you, and for what? To have my best friend killed? After losing my brother?! I should have let the kid die just so you’d know how it feels!”
His hand is around my neck, but his words are what choke me. Because he’s right. If Maverick dies today, that’s on me.
After a moment that feels like he is considering finishing me off, his hand drops. His phone buzzes in his pocket—Baron, most likely—and he pulls it out.
But as he scrolls through a text, he stops. His mouth twists and he looks over at me.
“What is it?” I dare to ask.
Wordlessly, he shows me a string of photos. They’re from social media. Me at the speakeasy with Electra. Shots of men talking to me, flirting with me. If the photos had caught the seconds that followed, they would show me blowing the guys off.
But the last couple photos are of me and Tristan in the hallway by the bathroom. He is standing close, close enough to kiss me. And in one of the photos, it looks like he’s about to.
“Ransome. It’s not… we didn’t… I wouldn’t—”
“Shut up!” he booms, his voice bouncing off every surface of the empty room. His presence fills the entire warehouse. “Just shut the fuck up!”
“I know what it looks like!” I snap back, because he’s not seeing it for what it is. Only what it looks like. It looks bad, but it wasn’t. “I would never—”
“Lie to me? Manipulate me?” he cuts in.
Then, without giving me time to reply, he scrolls to the last attachment. A video.
He hits play.
It’s fuzzy. Dark. A little bit like bodycam footage. At first, I can’t make out where it was taken.
Then the details start to pop.
It’s the penthouse kitchen. I’m in the frame, but the angle is weird, like somebody much taller than me was wearing this and filmed me without telling me.
There are two voices on tape. One is mine, and the other—
Tristan.
“I mean… I don’t really know you.”
“True. Most people don’t. And I find that… irritating.”
“I can understand that. I’ve spent a lot of my life fighting to be on top and never truly feeling like I could get there.”
“You don’t think I can get there?”
“I just know it’s hard. Especially when other people are always in your way.”
My voice sounds so wrong here. Soft and low and velvety. Seductive, even. Not to mention the look on my face. I was fawning hard, but that’s not what it looks like here.
It looks like something else.
“Ransome.” The name catches in my throat. “Please, just let me—”
“Explain?” His fist clenches so hard, his expensive phone snaps in half like a pencil. “Spare me.”
“You have to listen!”
“You spoke to him in my house. Under my roof.” His face is twisted with rage. “What else did you do with him there?”
“Nothing!”
But I can tell he doesn’t believe me. After all, I didn’t even tell him Tristan had been there.
Because I was hungover. I was tired and scattered and then the shooting made it all worse.
I tried to tell him later, but he told me to rest. That it could wait until morning.
The words crowd my throat. Not a single one gets out.
Ransom cuts me with a glare halfway between murderous and broken. Like I’ve betrayed him. “Get out.”
“What?” My eyes are hot, burning with salt and the hurt of what is happening. The hurt of what he could say next.
“I want you to talk to your brother and sisters and leave. Leave town. Leave the state. Get far away enough that I don’t have to worry about you fucking things up more than you already have.”
My chin is quivering. I feel like I’m on a broken life raft, pulling away from the sure shore and drifting off into a torrential storm. “But…”
“Did you not fucking hear me?!” he shouts. “I don’t ever want to see you again. I don’t want to hear your voice or your name or anything else. In fact, change your name. Change it all. Leave town and leave no trace that you were ever here. No trace that you ever existed.”
My chin quivers. I put my hand on my stomach, feeling another wave of nausea. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“You can. You will. Period. Now go.”
I think about saying something else. One more thing that may or may not matter. One more thing that could change it all or make it worse. I don’t know.
But I decide against it. He said his piece and he means it. If there is anything I have learned about Ransome, it’s that he means what he says the first time, no exceptions.
I walk out of the warehouse. Gianni and I get in the car.
“Are you okay?” he asks. “Did he hurt you?”
Only my heart.
“I’m fine. Are you hurt? Do you need to go to the hospital?”
“No. I got smacked in the face with the butt of a gun, but I’m okay.” He hesitates. His gaze drops to my throat. “Are you sure—”
“Then we have to go home,” I cut him off. “We have to get our sisters and we have to leave.”
“Leave?” Gianni asks. “Leave where?”
The city. The state. The country.
The worst part? I did this all to avoid uprooting them. I could have had them living with me in the city, but I didn’t want them to have to leave everything they’d ever known. School, job, friends.
Now they’re going to have to. Because of me.
“Things are about to get very dangerous around here, G,” I whisper, choked by my own guilt. “I don’t know where we’re going, but we’re going to get as far away as we can.”
Gianni doesn’t question me after that. And as I drive, I try to organize it all in my head.
We’ll get in the car and we’ll drive. And we won’t stop driving until we feel safe. New names. New life. New home.
I put my hand on my stomach again, like I did in the warehouse. I wanted to say something. To tell him about one last secret.
That I’m pregnant.
I took the test last night, before Ransome returned to the penthouse. Bought it on the way to lunch with the excuse that I needed hangover pills.
I didn’t actually think it would come back positive. I wouldn’t have gotten hammered with Electra if I’d thought that. I told myself I was just late from stress.
But I was wrong. It did come back positive.
Which means staying isn’t an option.
Yes. We have to do this. The four of us—no, five—have to get as far away from Ransome Rozanov as possible before the war consumes us whole.
I won’t let anything happen to you, I silently say as my thumb rubs over my belly. I promise, I won’t be like my mom. I’ll be there for you.
Even if your dad won’t be.
THE STORY CONTINUES IN BOOK 2,
VICIOUS INNOCENCE!