My Bestie's Dad Likes Me Wet-Chapter 141 Who Is The Boy To You?

NALA POV 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

Here is the thing about me that has gotten me into trouble my entire life.

I do not think before I move — or even talk.

I have been told this repeatedly by multiple people who care about me and several who don’t and I have never once successfully corrected it and I was not going to start correcting it now with a gun pointed at a child who was in this building because of me.

"Okay." I said it and stepped forward. "Take me. Let him go."

Two things happened simultaneously. Dante smiled and Ivin’s hand closed around my wrist from behind with a grip that communicated very clearly that I was not taking another step in that direction regardless of what my feet thought about it.

"Let go." I said it to Ivin without turning around.

"No." He said it to the back of my head.

"Ivin that child is not even fifteen years old and he is here because of me so let go of my wrist right now and let me—"

"No."

"I am not asking I am telling you, let go of my—"

"Nala." He said my name low and close to my ear and something about the specific way he said it made me stop pulling against his grip for approximately three seconds which was probably his intention. "Stop talking."

"I will not stop talking there is a child—"

"I can see the child."

"Then why are you—"

"Because you walking over there does not help the child it just gives him two hostages instead of one and I need you to use the brain I know you have for the next sixty seconds and stop moving."

I stopped moving.

I hated that he was right. I hated it genuinely and deeply and I was going to be angry about it later when there was time to be angry about things properly but right now he was right and the child was looking at me from across the chapel with eyes that were too wide and too scared.

Let’s not forget that Dante had the gun at his head with the same pleasant patience he put on everything and the whole room was waiting.

"Well this is sweet." Dante looked at Ivin’s hand on my wrist and then at Ivin’s face and I watched him file whatever he found there away with visible satisfaction. "I had you pegged as a man who didn’t get attached to his playthings."

"I don’t." Ivin said it flat.

"No?" Dante tilted his head. "Let her go then."

Ivin did not let go.

"I don’t get attached and she is not a plaything"

I could hear the steel coldness in his words, this was the head of security emotionless Ivin. I did not say anything about that.

"Thought so." Dante smiled. "So. We can do this simply. She comes with me, boy goes free, everyone moves on with their evening. Or I walk out this door with both of them and you spend the next week trying to find out where I’ve put them and I spend the next week enjoying the company." He paused. "Your choice. You have about thirty seconds to make it."

Ivin was quiet and I could feel him thinking behind me, feel the quality of the silence he was doing it in, that specific processing stillness that I had learned to recognize over weeks of being in his orbit.

I wanted to turn around and look at his face and I didn’t because looking at his face right now felt like something I couldn’t afford to do in front of Dante who was apparently collecting information about us with the enthusiasm of someone who had just found a very useful tool.

"You’re a long way from your territory Dante." Ivin said it like they were having a normal conversation. "Your backers in Monterrey know you’re up here?"

Something moved through Dante’s expression. It was very small and I could have missed the flicker, but I caught it and from the slight shift in Ivin’s tone behind me I knew he caught it too.

"Because the last I heard." Ivin continued in the same conversational tone. "The arrangement you had with them required you to stay south of the border. Something about the Vega situation and the terms of your reinstatement." He paused. "Did they change those terms or are you up here freelancing?"

Dante’s pleasant expression was doing something more complicated now, reorganizing itself around something he hadn’t expected to be dealing with tonight and the gun at the boy’s head was still there but the certainty behind it had shifted slightly.

"Thirty seconds." Ivin said it back to him. "Your choice."

The two of them looked at each other across the wrecked chapel and I stood between them holding my breath and trying to be the one thing I was biologically not built to be which was still and quiet and patient.

Dante moved.

But his movement wasn’t towards us, instead he took two steps back toward the side door, kept the boy with him, and looked at me one last time with that smile that was going to frequent my nightmares for a while.

"Another time." He said it to me specifically.

Then the door closed, I heard a car start outside and several others and just like that they were gone with an innocent teenager.

Now the chapel was suddenly just a room full of broken glass and overturned chairs and I stood there and felt the sick weight of what had just happened settle into my chest uncomfortably.

The boy was gone.

The boy who had been in this building because Ivin had probably threatened or persuaded him with money and sent him through those doors as a distraction and I had been the reason he was standing in front of those doors in the first place and now Dante had him and I didn’t know his name.

Ivin let go of my wrist.

I turned around and looked at his face and his face was doing the nothing it usually did except there was something softer and almost guilty about this, there was something working behind his eyes that he was not letting out.

"We need to find him." I said it.

"I know."

"He’s a child Ivin, he has nothing to do with any of this and Dante is going to—"

"I know." He said it again and this time I heard something underneath it that stopped me from finishing my sentence. Ivin sounded almost like it was personal.

I looked at him.

"How do you know Dante?" I said it carefully.

He looked at me for a moment and then he looked at his men who were already moving, already pulling out phones and regrouping and doing the organized efficient work of people who had been trained for the morning after chaos.

"Find the boy." He said it to the room, in a clear authoritative tone. "Everything else waits. Find him first."

His men moved without a word.

I watched Ivin watch them go and I thought about the way he had said find him first and the way it had come out and the way he still hadn’t answered my question and I filed all of it away next to everything else I was collecting about this man that didn’t fit the version of him I had decided on when this all started.

"Ivin."

He looked at me.

"Who is the boy to you?"