17. Ava
17
Ava
Where are you?
I stare at the blurry words in the text box, then delete them slowly, one letter at a time. In the few months that Nico and I have known each other, I have never texted him first. Not once. He’ll know something’s off, and he’ll never let me rest until I confess the truth.
I don’t know if I’m going to tell him. I don’t know if I’m going to tell anyone or everyone. My instincts pull in a hundred different directions: run to Nico and confess. Run to Cecilia and beg for help. Take my brand-new car and run across the country, evading everyone who ever knew me for the rest of my life.
All I’ve managed to do is pace around my room like an animal in a cage, fighting off tears and panic attacks and scolding myself over and over and over. You don’t get to flirt with danger and then cry over the consequences. I wanted this. I wanted the worst of the worst, back against the wall, no coming back—
Ruin .
I didn’t make bad choices expecting good outcomes , and there is a part of me that revels in the damage done, warming itself by the dazzling fire that is my future going up in flames.
When pacing my room becomes too tight, I start to walk up and down the dark hallways of the house. I peer through every passing window and out into the road. It’s late, and Nico still isn’t home. He hasn’t texted me, didn’t tease me through dinner with Thaddeus…
It’s not like him.
My hand skirts thoughtlessly over my belly as I wonder if he’s alright.
I camp out in his bedroom, waiting, counting the seconds between each minute, and the minutes between each hour. My panic is a low-grade fever, constant and just prevalent enough to be always on my mind, sneaking its way back into the forefront of my thoughts over and over.
I know what the easiest decision is. I could make this all quietly go away.
But looking around me, at this sprawling house and my cozy life, I know I have no right to act like I can’t do this. My hands aren’t tied. My choices weren’t oblivious. I knew every step of the way that I could end up here, sweating over this choice. I know why I did it.
But Nico—I have doubts about why he did it.
Every time I imagine Marcel finding out, I know exactly how he will see it. Nico wanted me trapped and desperate with his baby, wanted to ruin my arrangement with Thaddeus and Sal. This is Nico’s opening into the family.
I wander to Nico’s empty bedroom and sink down on the bed, breathing in the scent of him again. It twists up my heart. He’s been so good to me, even when all I wanted was to push him away and tell him to leave me alone. He never did. I thought maybe, somehow, Nico just knew that I needed him.
But what if I had it all backward? What if he needed me ?
What if everything he did, he did only for himself?
I lie in the dark and wonder—did I play into Nico’s fantasy or into his game? I curl up, my arms tightening around my middle. Am I carrying the baby of a misunderstood man, or a manipulative murderer?
Can a man be both?
If I think about it too long, it makes me want to puke. I might have a lot of that in my future, though, and I don’t want to start now.
Contessa walks the floors tonight. Sometimes I hear her, or maybe Sal, their footsteps moving through the house above me over and over as Emma has a bad, sleepless night. She’s not the only one. I close my eyes and listen to the crying, imagining for a brief moment that it’s my baby. My eyes well up.
I press my hands over my face and wonder if I should just blurt it out when Nico walks through the door. Put the truth in his face and see how he reacts to it. No warning, no buildup, no time to prepare what he’s going to say. It makes me shaky inside to even think about.
Like Cecilia said—once I confess to someone else, there is no un-confessing.
Footsteps creak on this floor. I sit up in Nico’s bed, staring at the doorway. My heart hammers in my ribs. I swipe at my eyes just in case, but my face feels dry. The decision circles in on me. To tell or not to tell? Nervousness turns my stomach to static, makes my limbs numb and my thoughts frantic. I want to tell him. I don’t know how not to tell him.
Nico steps into the doorway and turns on the overhead light.
The words wither on my lips, my proclamation of, “I’m pregnant” turning into a short, breathless, “ Nico !”
He’s bloodied, bruised, and favoring one leg. He has blood on his mouth and dripping from his nose, his left cheek split open dangerously close to his eye. That strong, confident posture I’m used to is hunched and careful. He tries to ask me what I’m doing in here, but even speaking seems to hurt him, like he can’t draw a deep breath. He leans against the doorway and growls at his own pain like an animal.
I fly to him, all my intentions briefly forgotten as I cup his face and look at the damage. Nico has never come back like this. Even on his harder fights, he might come back looking beat up. But he’s never looked beat down . Without needing to ask, I already know—Nico lost.
“Come here,” I say, drawing him toward the bathroom. He tries to put on that same brave, painless mask, but I can see it spelled out in the way he moves, the way he breathes. Vinny always kept a first aid kit in the kitchen, but before I can rush off to grab it, Nico’s hand closes around my wrist.
“What were you doing in here?” he asks.
My throat wobbles around the words, unable to find them suddenly.
“There something wrong with the room?”
All at once, I realize what he thinks, that this is somehow about his little project. I almost laugh, as if my problems could be as simple as a bad shade of paint or a burnt-out LED. Tears sting in my eyes, and a quiet part of me decides, for now, I choose to believe that Nico is good .
“It’s perfect,” I tell him. It’s only half a lie. “I just…I wanted to thank you for it when you got home.”
His hand slips off my wrist, and he nods, relieved.
With a first aid kit opened up on the bathroom floor, I give Nico the strongest painkillers I can find in the house and start the process of cleaning him up. Blood seeps from the back of his head, too, and purple stains his ribs as bruises pool under the skin. He plays the tough guy well, even when I know just taking his shirt off is its own small agony.
“I can tell you’re hurt,” I mumble, dabbing at the cut on his cheek with an alcohol pad. “You’re being too quiet.”
“I’m fine,” he says, like the words are his default setting, the only thing he can parrot without any effort. He’s not fine, he’s dazed, and I think the cut on the back of his head might need stitches.
“How did you get home?”
“Drove.”
I smack him uselessly on the shoulder. “Why the hell wouldn’t you call me?”
“Would you have come?” he asks, as if he doubts it for some reason.
“ Of course ,” I answer, furious that he would doubt it.
He starts to laugh, low and painful. “Ava, you don’t even have a car. You want us to rideshare together, get blood all over the back of some stranger’s Civic?”
“It’d be better than this,” I mutter bitterly. “And for your information, I do have a car now. Thaddeus bought me one. He surprised me with it today.”
Nico’s eyes go dark and wild, more alert than he’s been since he stepped in here.
“That fucker,” he snarls. I don’t really know why it upsets him, and his complaints are cut short—or at least redirected—when I dab alcohol against the cut on the back of his head.
“How did you even get this?” I mutter, skirting my fingers over the split skin. It doesn’t look like something from a fight. Nico tries to get up suddenly, but I block him in and push him back down. He really is pathetic when he sits back and growls, eyes flashing darkly. “I’m not done with you,” I say firmly, parroting his usual tone with me back at him. But it shuts him up and keeps him still as I dig into the first aid kit.
“This is the one thing I might be a little good at, so you’re going to sit there and let me do it,” I tell him.
“You a Girl Scout or something?”
“Wannabe nurse. That was the plan out of high school. As you can imagine, I didn’t make it very far.”
“Why not?”
I smile, the question silly if Nico could only think straight for a few seconds. I push myself between his legs, cleaning the cut on his cheek. It doesn’t take a degree to handle the kind of wounds Nico has.
“Blood. Needles. High-intensity situations. None of those were exactly my strong suit back then, as you were so fond of reminding me. I didn’t have the stomach for it, and I never got used to it. I gave up.”
“You’re not doing so bad now,” he says.
I shrug away his praise, avoiding it.
“Being concussed just makes you polite.”
My diagnosis is confirmed when he doesn’t find something clever or cruel to say back. I try to wipe him off with a washcloth, but Nico takes offense to being “treated like a vegetable,” so I chase the grumpy man into bed, at least freshly bandaged and medicated.
I lie in bed next to him, tracing the dark and bloodied patterns on his side. Something about them bothers me. My fingers skirt an abrasion, follow the textured wound that bunches the skin up under my fingers, like working a puzzle. Fists don’t make marks like this and shoes aren’t allowed in the ring.
Maybe I’m just looking for something to keep my attention so I can keep myself distracted, keep my secret sitting safe and neglected at the back of my thoughts.
“You need anything?” I ask.
His hand reaches out and he skirts his thumb across my thigh.
“I got it,” he answers, so sweetly it hurts in my chest.
“You really are brain-damaged,” I whisper, angry at how flustered he makes me.
“Probably,” he agrees, too easily. His words may be a little slow, his thoughts delayed, but those eyes are sharp—and they don’t leave me. I crawl over him, straddling myself carefully on his waist.
“What are you doing?” he asks, tense, as my hands go to his jeans.
“Distracting you.”
He tenses as I undress him the rest of the way, bringing down those designer boxers. His cock is telltale, already half-hard at just the prospect of me undressing him. I take him in my hand, stroking him slowly. He breathes raggedly, wincing as his hand twitches over his side.
“Ava,” he warns me thickly.
“What’s the matter?” I ask lowly, mimicking him. “Afraid it’s going to hurt?”
His response twitches in my hand, his cock hard and straining. He curses me lowly, throwing his head back into the pillow as our roles reverse. I lick my palm and work him up with the slow, soft pump of my hand, no sudden movements. He swallows hard, struggling to breathe through the pain.
“Is this the part where I call you a good boy?” I ask.
Nico winces harder than he laughs, and he’s still trying not to laugh when he calls me a bitch. I kiss the insult out of his mouth. He takes me by the hips, trying to take charge as he guides me over him, but I take his hands and gently pin them back to the bed, the way he would do for me.
“Fuck,” Nico breathes, his eyes dark, his cock throbbing as it hangs heavy and swollen between us. I ease down, taking him between my legs as I slide onto him. His eyes stare through the pain, the sweat glistening on his temple as I test his limits.
I take him deep, moving slowly, knowing that the slightest sudden movement will do more harm than good. The pace burns so, so slow—slower than we’ve ever done it, every motion dragged out for everything it’s worth. His teeth grit, pain tensing in his expression even as his hips roll slowly up into me.
I ride him like the gentle waves on the ocean, the pleasure a counterpoint to his pain.
“Fuck,” he gasps. “I thought—I thought you fucking hated it slow.”
I gaze down at him, unable to tell him that there really is no more damage either of us can do to me now. He’s done it. It’s inside me now, and I can’t undo it. All I want is the one thing I can’t get anywhere else—a tiny sliver of control over this. Over him . He snarls with wanting, needing more, tossing his head back into the pillow as I torture him with pleasure.
Even when it hurts him, Nico can’t resist. I gasp, stunned, as Nico takes my hips in his hands and rolls up into my body. He’s usually quiet, everything he feels translated into breaths and growls, but now he cries out with his own pain as he rolls his hips up into me, bouncing me on that huge cock until my thighs shake.
He really is insane.
I don’t know if Nico is playing me. I don’t know if I’m his pawn in a bigger game. But I do know one thing with full, simple certainty— this is real. Nico will take the pain if it means getting his hands on my body and his cock between my legs. That knife pressing into his chest wasn’t him just showing off and making a show of it. He means it.
He warned me, over and over, that I would eventually learn who he was. That one day, I would believe that nothing would stop him from having me. I thought he meant I couldn’t stop him, or the family, or the world. But with Nico sweating and groaning under me, gasping as he rockets pain through his chest just to fuck my cunt, I realize maybe Nico even meant himself. Maybe he can’t stop either, even if he wants to.
It burns me up inside.
All this, and he still won’t choose me over his place in the family.
I take him by the throat and ride him hard, our eyes meeting, my hips twisting until the burn aches in my muscles. We both curse as Nico finally pushes up hard and finishes with a ragged, broken sound.
It feels karmic in a way, running my hand over Nico’s chest and watching him come down from the pain, cursing with every other breath as his chest shudders. The only difference is, I don’t think Nico needs to be coddled through the aftermath the way he did for me.
“I changed my mind,” he rasps into the quiet. “You would have been a shitty nurse.”
“You and I both know this is the best medicine for you.”
I bend over him and kiss him, a slow, languid kiss that never seems to end, like a long summer day. My belly flutters softly as I think about having this man’s baby inside me. If the world wasn’t so complicated, full of guilt and remorse and rules—there’s a sheer, animal pleasure to giving a man a child, especially a man like him. He is everything my lizard brain says that I should want.
Nico sighs into the quiet, his eyes closing. The painkillers are starting to do their job. This time, I don’t curl up next to him and put my head on his shoulder, keeping a careful distance. But Nico still wraps his hand around my arm, like he can’t stand the thought of me slipping away from him.
The silence settles heavily into the room.
“What if I really do get pregnant, Nico?” I ask into the sudden quiet. Drugged up and post-sex high, I don’t think I have a better chance to ask him about it and get away with it. “What would you do?”
“We’re not two teenagers fucking in the back of a car,” he says. “The way the universe works, that means it probably won’t happen.”
Right.
“But if it did,” I insist.
For a long time, it seems like Nico is just thinking, studying the shadows on the ceiling overhead. Anxiety creeps up in my chest, threatening to close over my mouth and nose and fill up my lungs. He sighs.
“If you get pregnant, Ava, it’ll be a goddamn bloodbath,” he says. And then, less lucid, his voice drifting into the haze of the painkillers, he mutters as if to himself, “Hell, maybe it already is.”
I don’t know what he means, and before I can find out, the exhaustion has already stolen him away.