The Emperor (Dark Verse, #3)

by RuNyx

To every survivor, whether you carry your scars on your flesh or in your soul, whether you’ve seen the worst of humankind or fought the worst of fates, you’re still here. This is for you.

“In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” Dante Alighieri, Inferno

Amara settled in and closed her eyes, deciding to read more about kissing to understand why people enjoyed it. Then, maybe one day, when she grew up and looked beautiful, she could ask Mr. Maroni’s son to give her one. He was very handsome. Maybe, he’d be nice and kiss her, after she became pretty enough to match his handsomeness.

His name was handsome too. Could names be handsome? In that quiet of the room, in that dark of the night, Amara giggled at the thought and tasted his name for the first time on her lips. Yes, she decided. He would be her first kiss.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold up, squirt.” She whirled around, her ponytail hitting his chest, her eyes blazing with more fire than her little body was capable of. “Stop calling me that!” Amused, Dante bowed his head slightly as he would to a lady. “My apologies, queen.” She liked that, he could tell.

The girl blinked once, before giving him a little smile, almost shy. “You have really pretty eyes,” she told him. Before he could respond, she turned away and ran down the hill, back to the staff wing.

“You ever try to leash me, I’ll fucking strangle you with it.” If angels could sing, that was the moment Dante heard the whole freaking choir.

Dante Maroni was a piece of art—a very fine, very exquisite piece of art. Every time she saw him, she wanted to do a chef’s kiss gesture to the sky. Yeah, he was that good. From his dark, untamed, slightly overlong hair that framed an absolutely stunning face—a face that got more and more chiseled as he grew older—to that jawline Amara traced with her fingers in her daydreams, to his deep chocolate eyes that she still found the prettiest, to his arms that flexed with muscles as he moved… yup, she was a goner. It was pathetic.

“You just look at him like he’s Zia’s best batch of cookies and you’ve been hungry for a month. Like he’s fresh out of the oven and you’re waiting for him to cool before eating.”

“How do you move past it?” Dante asked him quietly. “How do you forget?” “You don’t.”

“People are like chess pieces. Anyone on the board is of consequence.” Amara shook off the little tremor that started at the base of her spine. “And you think I’m on the board?” “I don’t know yet,” he said softly, still watching her avidly.

“You’re not going to walk through life, Amara,” he uttered roughly, each word a vow that cemented itself in her heart. “You’ll dance through it. And I’ll fucking remove anyone who tries to break your rhythm. I promise you.”

“So, I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache.” Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

Amara has always been strong but so kind in a way I didn’t think people could be. I used to think strength had to be jaded until she taught me otherwise. She is strong like water is strong—it doesn’t appear that way because it’s adaptable, but it can seep into the smallest of cracks and break open the largest of rocks over time.

‘Fate is always weaving its threads, Dante. We just don’t see them until our eyes open.’

He had actually started reading up on trauma and torture survivors to understand her psyche better, so he could help her in any way she needed to heal.

The thing between them grew, feeling the sun and the water, feeling the nurture and the affection. They began to feel more like magnets than puzzle pieces, finding their way to each other, close but not close enough, as the tension between them built and built and built. She became his person. She became his.

Over the last year, Dante had become something like the sun. She waited every day to feel his warmth, if only just for a few minutes before the clouds returned. But as long as she had the sun, the clouds were bearable.

“How do you do it?” she voiced the question to him, hating the way her sound didn’t even come out properly. “How do you forget?” He was silent for a beat, his eyes on the stars. “You don’t.” Amara swallowed, looking back up at the sky. “You need to find something or someone to live for,” he spoke quietly beside her, his tone the same gentle one he always used with her. “Something or someone who makes you want to push through all the shit the world will throw at you.”

He looked at her like that more often, like a condemned soul being offered salvation, like a blind man seeing the sun. That look always flared in his eyes before he caged it in. Usually, he was charming and easy-going with everyone else that she saw him interacting with, but with her, there was that intensity she never saw him have with anyone else either. Just with her. And every time she felt his eyes on her, she knew the look she’d find in them.

“I will kiss you and brand myself upon your heart, Amara,” he told her quietly. “Just make sure you’re ready for me to.”

“It’s always been him.”

Amara watched him standing there in the middle of the day, the boy who had been her dream, the man who had become her reality, the one who had carried her into the light every single day when her body couldn’t move, the one who had made her smile through her nightmare time and time again, the one who had kissed her scar and looked at her like she was a treasure. Amara looked at him, waiting for her, and she knew. She was in love with Dante Maroni.

“You’re the beat to my heart, Amara,” he whispered against her mouth, pressing his forehead to hers, and something that had been wilted inside Amara unfurled, opening, soaking, blooming in the emotion she could see in his eyes. She was the beat to his heart and he was the beat to hers, both of them pulsing together. Maybe, they were both the same beats. Maybe, theirs was the same heart.

Dante had dragged her close and kissed her hard, reassuring her that she was it for him.

“He always had a bit of my heart, but I’m not that girl anymore. My heart isn’t the same anymore. This new heart, it doesn’t just love him, Ma. It beats for him.” Tears streamed down her face. “He came into this new heart to help me rebuild it, day after day, and he just never left.”

Dante didn’t know when he fell in love with Amara. He just did.

He didn’t think she knew how much he loved her voice. In his world of gunshots and screams, her voice was a gentle prayer, evidence that there was life after the endless noise.

“I fight for you every fucking day, Amara.” God, she hated him for meaning it. She loved him too, even after all this time.

He pressed his forehead against hers. “You’re in my blood, beating in my fucking heart. The only way you go is when the heart stops.”

“You’re the queen on the board, Amara. You’re my most powerful piece, but my most vulnerable. They get you, they get me, and the game is over. So, I’ll do whatever I need to make sure they never get you. Even if that means hiding you like my dirty little secret for the time being.”

They were lovers and friends, strangers and acquaintances, all those things, none of those things. They just were. Waiting.

“I’ll follow you and make a heaven out of hell, and I’ll die by your hand, which I love so well.” William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A man who ate his girl out solely for his pleasure was a different breed of dangerous, and Dante Maroni was the most dangerous of all.

Dirty-talking Dante was her kryptonite. She went crazy when he talked like that.

Amara. A decade ago, Dante had loved the girl she’d been. Now, he was awed by the woman she had become. He had seen her, every time he saw her, growing into her skin, glowing with her scars, becoming a woman who would one day rule by his side.

The most generous of hearts, the most steely of spines, Amara was a woman of beauty, a warrior of blood, a queen of scars.

Although, she still didn’t know Lulu had been Dante’s gift to her. She said Lulu was her miracle at a time she’d needed it the most, and Dante let her believe that. One of them needed to keep believing in miracles.

“You’re a far way from home, Amara. Any particular reason?” She took in a deep breath, walking to the window, looking out at the city line and the forest beyond it, so similar to Tenebrae except on the other side of the hemisphere. “I’m pregnant.” The man stayed silent on the chair for a long minute. “And the father?” She simply shook her head.

“He and I, we are doomed to bleed from a wound that will never heal.”

Amara patted down her stomach, shaking her head. “Your Daddy is a bastard,” she told the baby, chuckling at herself. “But we still love him, don’t we?”

“You’re coming home with me, baby,” he told her. She’d love that. She missed the compound, the woods, the hills, the people. It had been so long since she’d seen it. She wanted to go home.

That was one of the things she’d always loved about Dante—he never shied from his emotions.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

But they’d made a baby, their baby. Fuck, that did things to him, knowing the queen of his heart was going to be the mother of his child. And what an amazing mother she would be.

The fact that she had packed up and moved thousands of miles away to protect their child filled him with pride and warmth. She was a tigress with her cubs.

“Dante Maroni,” the man said in a singsong tone, the hint of an accent in his voice on the ‘t’. “In the flesh.” “Oh, you’re a fan?” Dante chuckled easily. “You’ll have to free my hands for an autograph.” Let him think he had the power.

“I can’t wait to fuck you.” Amara paused, looking up at him with bewildered eyes. “Are you serious?! This is not the time for dirty talk, Dante Maroni.”