Chapter 51 Amara
AMARA
Bohemian Rhapsody is five minutes and fifty-five seconds long.
I know every word of it. Honestly, most people probably do. Even the guitar solo is easy to sing with some improvising. I sang it when Ransome first took me blindly to the warehouse before he was sure if he wanted me to know everything that I now know.
I knew where we were, roughly, because of how many times I’d sung it from engine on to engine off. Or at least, I knew how to tell someone else where to find me.
And that’s exactly what I’m doing now. As Electra and I sing, I make a mental note every time we stop.
Every time we turn. And I keep track of how many times we sing it from start to finish.
The very act of it seems to be working with Electra to calm her down.
She doesn’t ask questions, just keeps singing under her breath.
“Queen?” Tristan asks at one point. “I fucking hate Queen.”
But we keep singing. We sing through every twist and turn and acceleration.
We’re headed northeast, that much I know.
We sing until the air pouring into the vehicle smells like water and musky wood and fish.
We sing as we hit potholes and make slower, sharper turns.
We are somewhere industrial. Docks. Warehouses, maybe.
We sing for forty-five minutes (around nine rounds of the song) and then the car stops.
“Honeys, we’re home!” Tristan sings out like the lunatic he is, and Electra starts to cry again.
I press my forehead back into hers. A moment later, the back of the SUV opens, and I feel Electra sliding away from me with a muffled whimper followed by Tristan’s voice.
“Run and I’ll shoot you before you make it ten feet from the van. Got it?”
Honestly, I can’t imagine her running. She’s still got a sack on her head and her hands are bound and we have no idea where we are. Well. I have a vague idea, but not as far as surroundings go.
Tristan’s hand clasps around my ankle. Next thing I know, I’m being pulled out of the SUV too. Luckily, he’s nice enough to set me on my feet, but after that, he grabs me hard by the back of the neck. Guessing by the shriek that comes out of Electra’s mouth, he does the same thing to her.
We are steered like cattle into the building. It smells like mold and wet cement, and something else I can’t name.
It’s also freezing.
We walk blindly through the warehouse in the dark.
Actually, I don’t know if it’s dark or not.
Hard to tell with the bag over my head. I work on breathing, making mental notes of how many steps we’ve taken with each twist and turn.
Just in case we don’t get killed and can actually make a run for it, I have the hallways mapped out for our escape route.
We come to a stop and Tristan pulls the masks off. Electra has tears running down her chapped cheeks and her hair is matted from sweat. I’m sure I don’t look much better.
As if he can read my thoughts, he takes Electra’s chin in his fingers.
“Shame it had to end like this, doll. I like your kind of crazy.” He smirks before she yanks her face from his grip. “I have some business to attend to, ladies. Why don’t you just chat amongst yourselves. Improvise another little concert where I don’t have to hear it.”
“You mean like this?” Electra asks before screaming, “Help! We’ve been kidnapped! Somebody help us!”
Tristan’s smile vanishes, but not in anger. More like he’s bored with us. “Do you really think I’d bring you somewhere with people around? Scream all you want. No one can hear you. There’s nobody here for miles.”
He tosses us one more sadistic smirk before walking off.
“Fuck.” Electra turns in a circle. Between the cuts and bruises and tear trails, she looks like hell and I feel terrible for her. “Fuck!”
“El. You have to calm down.”
I wince as a sharp pain slices through my belly. It reminds me of the pains I was having the night I went to the hospital. But I do my best not to panic.
“How can I be calm?” she pants. “My boyfriend beat the shit out of me, ran us off the road, threw us in the back of a van and brought us to a murder spot because, surprise surprise, he’s a fucking psychopath!”
While Electra has her mental breakdown, I lower myself to the ground. My stomach is as hard as a rock and the pain is literally shooting into my lower back.
“Of course he is,” I agree with her through my teeth. “He’s Tristan Chadovich.”
“Wouldn’t it be my luck that I’d date a mafia guy,” she sniffles as she sits down next to me.
“Bratva,” I correct her.
“See?! This is why I have the three date rule. Any more than that and they go Bundy on you.”
It’s a bad joke, but it almost makes me smile.
Electra sighs. “I’m sorry, Amara. Like, really, really sorry.”
“I know,” I tell her. “And it’s not your fault. I should have connected the dots.”
“Could you have? Connected the dots, I mean. He didn’t even give me his real name.”
“Yeah, but the fact that he wouldn’t let you take any selfies with him, no social media, and refused to meet me were enough red flags to tell me he was someone I should have dug into,” I tell her.
“I forgot you’re an A-grade stalker,” she says. “And yeah, that would have been helpful.”
“Thanks,” I mumble.
“Why does that seem like forever ago?” she asks. “Why does our previous life literally seem like another lifetime altogether?”
Tears burn the back of my eyes, but I refuse to let them fall. “I know.”
“I miss it.”
“I know.”
“Ladies!”
We both jump. It’s Tristan’s voice—because of course it is—echoing through the empty building as he walks back in.
I wince hard at the pain in my abdomen and back. My belly hardens again, but I try to breathe through it.
“It’s time to get the party started,” he says.
“Are you going to kill us?” Electra jumps the gun. “Because if you are, kill me. Not Amara. Not the baby. Just me.”
“Jesus, you are so dramatic,” Tristan says, reaching around to his back, and my heart stops. But it’s just his phone. “Not that I don’t love that idea. Though I’d do it in the other order. Because honestly, I cringe every time I see your belly. Knowing that baby is a Rozanov makes my skin crawl.”
Tristan’s reptilian smirk is back as he couches down in front of me. Our eyes meet and, for a moment, he just stares at me. But he blinks first and then holds his phone up. “But first, we’re going to make a little phone call.”
Suddenly, his phone starts ringing. He looks down at it in surprise before his grin widens. “Speak of the devil,” he says, holding the phone up for me to see.
There’s no contact photo, but there doesn’t need to be. I know that number by heart.
Ransome.