My Bestie's Dad Likes Me Wet-Chapter 140 Trade

NALA POV

Okay so all the windows came in from the back of the chapel, one after the other like someone had made a list and was working through it methodically and I had maybe two seconds of sitting in my chair watching glass catch candlelight on its way to the floor before the whole room decided it was done being a wedding and became something else entirely.

The seated crowd went first, pews emptying faster than I have ever seen humans move voluntarily.

Some dropped flat on the floor in fear, some were running, I saw someone taking a full boot to the face in the stampede and honestly that was the least of anyone’s problems right now.

The priest hit the floor so fast I wasn’t sure if someone pushed him or if he made that decision independently and either way good for him, smart man, I wished I could join him except I was still tied to a chair in a wedding dress which remained the funniest and most humiliating situation I had ever been in and I had been in some situations.

I pulled at the ropes again. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Still no.

The ropes had a consistent personal rejection of everything I wanted and they were not changing their position just because men were coming through windows with guns.

I watched the chaos from my chair like the world’s most unwilling audience member, unable to do anything, unable to go anywhere, just sitting there in white lace while a gunfight organized itself around me and the candles threw shadows that made everything look like a horror film that had lost the plot.

Then Dante moved and my stomach did something unhelpful.

I’ll give him this, the man was fast. One moment he was standing at the altar like someone deciding how bad this actually was and the next minute he was right next to me and there was something in his hand that I had about half a second to register what it was before he used it.

The knife went in one clean motion through the rope on my wrists, and I was free and simultaneously not free at all because his hand closed around my arm the same second the rope fell and the knife stayed very close to my bare neck and I knew that wasn’t a good sign.

"Don’t make noise." He said it like we were having the most normal conversation.

Right so this man had just tried to marry me against my will, slapped me hard enough that I could still taste the earlier version of my own blood, had me tied to a chair in a dress someone put on me while I was unconscious, and now he was holding a knife and telling me not to make noise and somewhere in this building some men my gut told me were Ivin’s men were fighting his men and I was being used as a human shield and I want to be very clear that I was furious.

I was also terrified but the furious was louder so I went with that.

"You know what’s funny." I said it low because I wasn’t completely stupid. "You went through all of this. The dress, the unimpressed crowds, the priest, the chair, and you still don’t have a wife."

His hand tightened on my arm.

"That’s embarrassing for you personally." I said.

"I will put this knife somewhere inconvenient." He said it coldly and that was somehow worse than if he had shouted it so I decided to be quiet for approximately thirty seconds while I assessed my options.

My options were bad. Really bad. The chapel was full of bodies moving in every direction and the dull light was making it impossible to track who was his and who was the cavalry that had apparently arrived through the windows.

Also, I could hear gunshots from outside now too which meant this was bigger than just within the building and Dante was moving me toward a side door I hadn’t noticed before and my feet were going with him because the knife made a compelling argument.

I was going to end up somewhere worse than this room, and the thought of that had my heart skipping a beat.

So I made a decision, just like every decision I’ve made so far in my life —I bit him.

My teeth clamped in his hand with full force as I turned my head and got more of his forearm with everything I had and he made a sound that was deeply satisfying to be but definitely painful for him but fortunately his grip loosened just enough.

That was enough for me as I went in the opposite direction with everything my legs had.

I had no plan or solid destination in mind, I just wanted to get away from him and toward the middle of the chaos because chaos was at least unpredictable and I might be lucky.

But Dante was a very predictable type of danger I couldn’t afford to be around right now and I preferred my chances in the mess.

I made it about six steps before I ran into a solid broad chest that was covered in a black leather outfit and I bounced off it and grabbed the nearest thing to stay upright which turned out to be an arm.

Whose arm? I don’t know but I looked up and everything in my body stopped doing whatever it was doing and did something else entirely.

One blue eye. One brown one.

And they were looking down at me with an expression I didn’t have a name for yet but was going to need one for because it was doing things to my chest that I could honestly not afford right now in the middle of an active situation where there’s a man with a knife somewhere behind me.

"Hi." I said it because apparently that was what my mouth decided to spew to the same man me and my brother literally fled away from days ago.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "Hi."

"You came." I said it and immediately wished I had said literally anything else because it came out smaller than I meant it to and softer than I wanted it to.

"You’re bleeding." He said while his hand came up to my face, his thumb hovering gently next to my lip where Dante’s earlier reminder made me shiver in an uncomfortable feeling.

"I know, your friend with the fancy tattoos has a heavy hand and zero—"

Something shifted in his eyes and I stopped talking.

Then his head came up and he looked past me and the thing that had been in his expression when he was looking at me disappeared back behind the wall and he was back to being fully cold blooded Ivin,, the switch so fast I almost wondered if I had imagined the other version.

I turned around.

Dante was at the side door.

He had not actually left and now he was standing at the side door with two of his men and something in his hand that was not the knife anymore and he was looking at Ivin across the ruined chapel with the expression of a man making a fast calculation and landing on something he liked.

"I had a feeling someone would come for her." Dante said it conversationally across the wreckage of his own ceremony. "I just didn’t know who but now, I like what I’m seeing."

Ivin said nothing.

"That’s interesting." Dante looked between us and smiled in that creepy way I hated. "That’s very interesting."

Then he moved toward the far corner of the chapel where the priest was still flat on the floor trying to be invisible and I had maybe one second of thinking he was going to take the priest and then Dante walked straight past the priest and grabbed the one person in the room that made my stomach fall completely through the floor.

The boy.

The boy that ran inside earlier in town clothes to ask for water.

Dante now had the boy by the back of his torn collar and the gun at his head before I even processed what I was seeing.

The boy’s eyes were wide and white and he was looking at Ivin specifically.

Then realization dawned on me, it was then I had the faintest idea that Ivin might have dragged this innocent boy into this dirty game just so I can be free and that thought made me really sick.

I did this. I was the reason this boy was in this building.

"Trade." Dante said it simply. "Her for the boy or we walk out together and you get neither."