3. Ava
3
Ava
I went looking for danger, but I didn’t know danger would follow me home like a stray dog. I didn’t think it would shadow my steps, keeping its eyes and hands always on me. Nico presses in too close, towering over me. This whole time we have been revolving around each other like two satellites caught in each other’s orbits, circling and circling, doomed to crash.
The distance whittles down between us again, one breath at a time.
Nico has a way of crowding in on me, on taking up all the air and space between us until there’s nothing left. I veer away from his pull again, launching off of that collision course a second time.
“I already have a ride home—”
Nico’s arm comes up fast as he slams his hand into the locker door right next to my head. The metal rattles loudly as he leans in, pinning me there under him and cutting off my escape route.
It stirs the heat in my belly, and I hate him for it.
“Look at those nerves of steel,” he mutters lowly, staring back into my death glare. “Didn’t even jump.”
In those eyes, I see seven years of hunger, all keen and sinister. Pitiful. Seven years has nothing on me. Heat pours through my belly, pools between my legs as he holds us hip to hip, but unlike him, I can pretend it doesn’t. Unlike him, I know how to do without.
I shove past him a second time, off to find Frankie, when his hand curls around my wrist and slings me back into his arms. He holds me like a kitten, his fist clutched into the hair at the base of my skull.
“What’s the matter, Ava? You too good for me now? I can’t even drive you home? Or maybe there is something you’re still afraid of—”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I say through gritted teeth.
“No?”
His broad, calloused hand slides down my belly, his fingertips nudging their way under my jeans. His touch lingers on the band of my panties, toying with the silky barrier between us.
I hold my ground and my silence.
A low, satisfied growl rumbles in Nico’s chest when I still don’t flinch. “They say people can change. I never really believed it, but here you are. Exhibit A.”
“Can I go now?”
His words are hot and possessive against my ear, his hand inching lower.
“I’m not letting you go anywhere,” he says darkly. His gaze is dark and serious, and though he smiles, it’s not because he’s joking. “I like you like this.” He grins, tapping me under the chin when I try to look away. “And you owe me.” His words drop to a low, intimate whisper, all but kissing them against my ear. “ Mafia rules .”
With two little words, Nico binds my hands.
Oh, I should have known his favors wouldn’t come for free. Not from an ex-don. I feel stupid for not seeing it coming, for thinking Nico capable of a simple good deed. His true nature lashes out from the dark and gets me in its grasp.
“What do you want?” I force myself to ask.
His eyes answer for him, taking their time as they roam up and down my body. Nico quirks his finger, bids me to follow him.
This time, my feet obey.
“Not such a little rebel now, are you?”
I don’t give him the satisfaction of an answer.
A church sits on top of the fighting ring. An ironic front, heaven above and hell below. I’m surprised Nico doesn’t burst into flames as we exit through the back, out into the night. Lines of cars are parked parallel along the street, and one of them is familiar—Nico Mori’s signature McLaren, an exotic one-of-one that was his calling card in his youth. The last time I saw the custom car, it was brand new. It still gleams with that same fresh-off-the-lot shine. Time hasn’t done any work on it. Someone must have had it in storage for him, but who would bother storing it?
Nico holds the door open for me like he’s a proper gentleman. I roll my eyes and throw myself into the low seat. The door slams, shutting me away in his cage.
I watch as his shadow circles the car, coming to join me.
Nico was the head of the family, the don himself, for only six months before his arrest. It was a short, blazing career as the top dog. Some people said he was always reckless and wild; others said his father dying sent him off the deep end. The only fact I’m sure of is that Nico killed a man in the middle of the day, in front of witnesses, on camera. A crime of passion.
Maybe it’s just another bad rumor, but I heard the murder happened over a girl.
The night is frigid, but Nico doesn’t seem to notice. He drives wild with the windows rolled down. The cold air feels good on my busted lip, the careless speed lifting my belly into my throat. The flickering dots on the road become a single, steady line. Streetlights zip past. The snarl of the engine rumbles up my spine, the speedometer inching farther to the right.
“So, you’re a little psychopath these days, huh?” Nico says over the rush of the wind. “How far does that go? Should we find out?” He smoothly weaves the speeding car around the road, the gear shifting. One wrong move at this speed and we’ll become a ball of twisted wreckage.
“This is what you wanted me to come with you for?” I ask in turn. “So you can get both of us killed?”
He grins wider, pushes the speed up little by little.
“They call it a tragedy if you die alone.”
With the way Nico drives, I think they’d call it a Darwin Award.
The road is moving too fast, the cold wind becoming a sharp, painful bite against my bare skin. I can barely hear myself over the roar of the engine, and Nico’s attention keeps drifting from the road, his eyes wandering to me .
He’s looking for a reaction, but I look right back at him.
“Don’t be a pussy, Nico. I know this thing can go faster than this.”
The car jolts forward so aggressively, my heart flies up into my throat. I’m deafened by the engine, the violent boost launching us forward. My skin bristles, stomach turning, my hair standing on end; my body reacts viscerally. I’m pressed back into the seat, fingers curling around the raised edges.
I fly in that blinding rush as he tears down the road. I’m suspended in the moment. It feels both like a few seconds and a small eternity before he eases his foot off the gas. My breaths are heavy in my chest, my heart hammering like an angry little hummingbird trapped in my ribs.
I feel alive. Head-to-toe, buzzing, electric.
He shares a look with me, neither one of us afraid. My stomach clenches at how much I like that, how reckless Nico is with me. For months, everyone has handled me with kid gloves. Like I’m fine china. Nico looks at me like he wants to throw me against the wall, just to see how I break.
It’s a dangerous line of thinking to follow with his eyes on me like that, all deep and hungry.
“Well, alright. Psychopath it is,” Nico decides.
“What do you want, Nico?” I ask again, once the engine quiets down. I know this isn’t going to end with just him driving me home. He’s the sort of man who will squeeze this favor for everything that it’s worth. He used to have the power to back up that kind of threat. I don’t know if he still does.
“I want you to tell me what I’ve missed.”
“In seven years ?” I scoff. “It’s not that long of a trip. Not with the way you drive. We won’t have the time.”
“Hit me with the highlights. What about my brother?”
“Are you asking how he’s doing?”
His jaw tightens, his eyes finally sticking to the road.
“…I’m just asking.”
I’ve heard there’s no love between Nico and Salvatore Mori. They didn’t like each other even before Nico went to prison. Salvatore took over as don, holding the position once promised to the man next to me. I know Nico doesn’t want to hear it, but the truth is, Salvatore has thrived as the head of the family.
“You answer my questions, maybe I’ll answer yours. Tell me how you got out of prison.”
“Man, that’s really stuck in your teeth, isn’t it? Like a goddamn pit bull. You just can’t let it go.”
I shrug and hold my silence. If he’s not going to tell me what I want to know, I’ll just return the favor. Before either of us can break our stalemate, my phone cracks the silence for us. It buzzes angrily in my lap.
There’s only one person in the world I know who still insists on making phone calls: my brother, the second-in-command of the Mori crime family. Marcel. His name lights up the screen, illuminates the interior of the car as the call continues to ring.
Word would have traveled back to the house by now. Everything that happened tonight will be burning its way through the rumor mill, spreading faster than wildfire. And now my name is attached to it. I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near that fighting ring. Not tonight, not ever. And if Marcel has the whole, strange tale fed to him…
I swipe the notification away.
“Damn, I have missed a lot.” Nico laughs. “Last time I was around, you worshipped the ground your brother walked on. He could do no wrong. Now you don’t even take his calls? Did your teenage rebellion come as late as your puberty?”
“Are you making a point, or do you just get hard to the sound of your own voice?”
“Baby girl, if I’m hard right now, it’s got nothing to do with me and everything to do with you.”
My phone rings again. I swear to God, Marcel has a sixth sense. I wonder if he had me microchipped when I was a kid. I swipe the notification away and scowl out the window, away from Nico’s Cheshire Cat grin.
“Brothers, am I right?”
As if Nico’s relationship with his brother is anything like mine.
Marcel practically raised me. He’s been my guardian from the time I was six, and he’s made more sacrifices for me than I can count. The kind of sacrifices you can’t pay back. He will work for the Mori crime family until he dies, and although I think he likes the work and has climbed far above his expected position, his future has been set in stone from the time he was sixteen. He gave up all of his choices just so he could take care of me.
And this is how I spend my time repaying him.
But isn’t that how it works?
He did his part. He got me to adulthood alive. Twenty-one years isn’t bad. Now he needs to step back and let me fuck it all up. That’s what you’re supposed to do with kids, isn’t it? In only a handful of seconds, the phone rings again.
Maybe not letting things go is a genetic trait.
“You gonna deal with that or what?” Nico asks.
“I only have the patience for one overbearing man at a time,” I tell him.
“Well, then someone’s just gonna have to wait,” Nico says, spontaneously snatching the phone out of my hand.
“Hey!”
Before I can stop him, Nico chucks my phone out the open window. It shatters into a hundred pieces on the road behind us. By the time I whip around, it’s already long gone in the darkness.
“Are you crazy ?” I scream at him.
“What’s crazy is you not seeing the irony in that question,” Nico says.
I punch him in the shoulder, to absolutely zero effect.
“Why would you even do that?! You absolute idiot !”
The car jolts violently, sending me lurching back against the door away from him and bumping my head off the glass. Nico is unfazed, his steady eyes on the road as he effortlessly slings us around just to keep me off him.
“If you only have time for me or Marcel, then it’s going to be me. I don’t share.”
I gawk at him, too astonished to answer.
“I wasn’t even answering him!”
“And now you don’t have to worry about it at all. You’re all mine.” He glances at me out of the corner of his eye, smirking devilishly. “You can glare all you like, pretty girl. As long as it’s at me.”
“…I don’t understand you.”
“You will,” he says, like it’s a promise.
My stomach twists into a knot.
That dangerous, tilted smirk never really seems to leave his face. Like the world is one big joke and he’s the only one in on the punchline. I have nothing to do but sink down into the seat and cross my arms, glaring out at the distant taillights ahead of us.
When my angry silence stretches too long, Nico’s voice finally fills up the cabin of the car.
“You want to know why I got out of prison, Ava?”
He claws my attention back to him even when I try to hold it away. I’m desperate to know, and I can’t help myself but play into his game.
“…Why?”
“When you bring civilization to a place, the first thing people do is take out all the predators. They kill them off or drive them out, because they know what a carnivore is capable of. But they leave the prey behind. Deer, rabbits. Real fucking nuisances, overbreeding, nothing to wipe them out. It takes time for people to realize how devastating they can be, running rampant, chewing through everything. Eventually, you gotta bring back the predator. You gotta set the balance again. That’s all it is. I’m just out because this city is a wilderness, and I’m good for the ecosystem.”
I gaze into the passing night, silently trying to figure it out.
Nico has given me something else to chew over, something that isn’t how pissed off I am at him.
Who benefits from setting Nico free? What needs to be set in balance? I look at the man in the driver’s seat, wondering who’s in his crosshairs and who’s giving him the gun. I don’t have any easy answers.
Nico and I coast through the late-night streets of New York City for too long. We should have been home by now, but I’ve been too busy stewing over the loss of my phone and Nico’s miraculous reappearance. I didn’t notice the strange, leisurely routes he’s been taking through the city. I ask where we’re going, and when he doesn’t answer, I tell him it better be to get me a new phone.
It isn’t.
We stop instead at a late-night diner. I insist that I’m too pissed off at him to eat, but he says I’m too skinny and pays for mine, parting with a hundred-dollar bill and not bothering with change.
We take the boxes to-go.
We end up sitting on a bench, side by side, with a full view of the Brooklyn Bridge. The city is all lit up, its lights blazing across the water lapping only a few feet away.
Nico sits too close, even when I scoot right to the edge of the bench. His body heat runs up my side. He runs hot, just like his temper and his looks. The reflection of the city burns in his eyes like fire. I wonder what he must be feeling—in a cage for seven years, and then released back into all this .
“You just don’t want to go home,” I accuse him, stealing one of his french fries.
“You know I’ve shanked men for less.”
I shrug and pop the fry into my mouth.
“Good thing I’m not a man.”
Nico tears through his food like he’s never tasted anything better than a greasy, overpriced burger. He probably hasn’t for a long time.
“So, was it worth it?” I ask him. “Prison and all that. Missing out on this for all those years?”
“It was worth it.”
“So you’d do it again?”
“In a heartbeat,” he says, no hesitation. I scoff at such a stupid answer.
“Yeah? The same way? Security cameras and all?”
Nico laughs darkly, his words soft and sure. “Security cameras aren’t what landed me in prison.”
I feel the wind for the first time tonight, the way it ripples across the water and carries the chill up the bank.
I always wondered if Salvatore’s hands were really tied like he said or if he chose to let his own brother rot in prison. Everyone has their theories. Typically, the family doesn’t just abandon its high-ranking members behind bars. But with Nico, the man who should have been untouchable, they said there was nothing to be done.
The evidence was too damning, the trial too clear-cut.
“Not like it fucking matters,” he says. “The past is always gonna be the past. All you can do is pick your future, pick what it is you want, and do anything to get it. And once you get your hands on it, you don’t let it go.”
The way he looks at me when he says that makes me shiver feverishly, indistinguishable from cold or hot.
We watch the boats drifting across the water even after we finish eating. I wonder how many times Marcel has tried to call while I’ve been stuck here. If he’s going to have people out looking for me in a panic. Guilt forms a tiny knot in my stomach.
“At what point is my debt repaid, Nico?” I ask into the listless silence.
“When I say it is.”
I roll my eyes, feeling the agonizing tick of every second.
“If this is some roundabout way of getting in my panties, you’re wasting your time...”
The man huffs out a laugh, his white teeth glinting in the night.
“Yeah? Is that what you’re sitting there wondering about? When I’m finally gonna spread you out on the hood of my car and get it over with?”
My imagination works too fast. It lets me imagine, for one blinding, hot second, what it would be like to have Nico make good on that threat. To be laid bare with my legs up, my arms pinned, his teeth on my skin. To be really at his mercy.
Or lack thereof.
I shouldn’t be able to feel that kind of longing for another man. Not after Vinny. Not for anyone, no matter how primal and biological. Nico is so close. My breaths feel shallow, as if there’s not enough air left in New York.
“I wouldn’t let you.”
“That’s cute.” He grins dangerously.
My thighs clench, the wild animal under my skin scratching toward the surface, howling for him like a called dog. Please, please, that hungry monster in me sings, begging him to make good on that quiet threat. I stand up just to get away from him, but he just pulls me back into his lap. I gasp as his hand curls between my legs, rubs hard and rough against the denim of my jeans.
“I bet I could take your fucking pulse between your legs, you want me so badly,” he whispers.
I pull myself off him and whip around, only to find him already on his feet, crowding me back against the metal fencing between us and the water.
“Why is this the one thing that still makes you run?”
“Who says I’m running?”
I linger in the moment, my breath locked in my chest. Finally, I step forward, closing in on the distance between us little by little. I run my hand over his shirt, feeling the strong outline of his chest beneath that thin cotton. We close in on each other, caught in this constant push-and-pull.
“You think you can scare me?” I ask, trailing my fingers lower, down the tight slope of his belly. My fingers brush against his belt. Nico’s gaze burns, a constant challenge. He doesn’t notice anything amiss until my other hand is already clutched around the keys in his pocket, our eyes meeting in one moment of realization. This time, it’s my turn to smile.
I snatch his keys right out of his pocket and push past him.
He reels around with a dangerous grin of realization.
“You better come on, Nico,” I call after him, twirling his car keys around my finger. “Or you’re walking home.”