20. Ava
20
Ava
Do all secrets hurt like fire? I’ve never had a secret worth keeping before, and this one burns hot and constant, like a tiny star trapped inside my chest, trying to scorch its way through me. I still haven’t told Nico that I’m pregnant. I haven’t told anyone. I lie awake at night, running my hands over my belly and playing the conversation over and over again in my head, imagining all the awful ways it might go.
Before I can personally punish Nico for doing something so stupid and reckless as burning my car on the front lawn, Salvatore beats me to the punch. He gives Nico some grueling grunt work to do out in the city, the details of which I’m not privy to. All I know is that it keeps Nico busy and it keeps him away.
I don’t have a chance to confess the truth, even if I wanted to.
The house returns to normal. No cars smoking on the front lawn or spontaneous road trips, no creeping footsteps approaching my doorway in the late hours of the night. For the first time in weeks, I remember what peace feels like.
It’s boring .
I spend my days tending to Emma and tailing Tessa around the house. Tessa loves it. She doesn’t need me to help her coddle her daughter, who really doesn’t need it and is drowning in affection through all her waking hours. Tessa’s just happy that things feel like they did before. How they were supposed to feel before Vinny died.
I am the only one who knows the truth: I am not inching my way out of the dark of my own volition, I am being dragged there, kicking and arguing and kissing all the way. I am being good for Nico even when he isn’t here. He’s always blowing up my phone, telling me what to do. Even from a distance, Nico is in charge. From having breakfast in the morning to exactly how I should touch myself at night, his instructions are endless.
And without complaint, I do my best to obey.
Nico thinks it’s because I’m anxious for him to come home at night and reward me with his cock. I let him think that. In truth, I’m trying to get a taste for routine again. I’m finally fighting back against the waves of dark water, dragging myself back to the shore, because it is not only my life that I have to fight for.
With a baby, I won’t be able to fall apart on a whim. I can’t slink back into my room for a few weeks or go out late to do something stupid and reckless. Nico has already proven he might not be there to drag me up again and again, and Thaddeus—he would leave me to drown as long as I left a pretty corpse. I have to be ready, somehow, to do this on my own. A baby will anchor me to safety, to home, to all the things that have tormented me, everything that I have been trying so hard to escape for months.
So, I better get used to it.
Day after day, I am so, so good—but all good things come to an end.
By Friday, I am missing Nico in earnest, and all day, I think about seeing him. While having lunch with Tessa out in the gardens, I flirt with the idea of texting that little phrase to him: I miss you . I wrinkle my nose at myself before I can make that mistake.
His ego might explode and take out a few city blocks with it.
By the evening, my pointless daydreaming instead becomes a plan:
It’s my turn to do the stalking.
The fighting ring is open every Friday night, but Nico only fights, at most, twice a month. Anything more, he says, would be too disastrous on the body—as if it isn’t already. But every Friday since his release, Nico goes to the ring whether he’s scheduled or not. Maybe he just has a passion for the sport, or maybe he’s scouting out the competition. Or maybe it’s the people, all the old, familiar faces from before, that make him feel at home. I know he can’t possibly feel that way here.
The only thing I know for sure is that it’s Friday night, and I can find Nico there in the underground.
With ruby red lips, black heels, and fluffed hair, I descend deep beneath the crumbling skeleton of the vacant church, down and down into the winding underground stairway to hell, searching for my Hades.
This time, I am alone. There’s no Frankie to lead the way through the dark.
I haven’t been back to the fighting pit since that first night. I tell myself it’s not because I learned some important lesson or even because Marcel guilt-tripped me into behaving. I’ve just been too busy with getting stalked, deflowered, and knocked up. Anything else, and it’s going to sound a lot like healing. I don’t know how to deal with that. I don’t know if grief is something you should heal from.
The security at the door recognizes me. He frowns, but he waves me in anyway, with a grumpy: “Don’t make me regret it.”
“No promises.”
The crowd is thinner than it was when I was last here. Nico’s fight must have drawn an audience, and without that headliner effect, the room is more manageable. The cage rattles as two men playfully box it out. The event has the atmosphere of an intermission, no one paying much attention to what’s happening in the center of the ring as people talk and shout familiarly with each other across the room. A few people look my way, recognizing me from that night.
I meet their gaze and hold it, refusing to back down as I march through the room, heels snapping against the concrete.
Through the shadowy edges of the compound, I scan walls and tables, looking for a familiar face among the groups gathered. Suits and leather jackets mingle together, two very different branches of society merging down here in the dark.
I don’t see Nico.
The bookie isn’t the same as before. I wonder what happened to the old one, but I doubt it’s anything good. I make my way to the bar to wait for him, and I’m greeted by the bartender with California blonde hair and more tattoos than skin.
“Do you have anything non-alcoholic?” I ask.
She gives me a dumbfounded stare, as if she’s never heard those words in that order before.
“...You want tap?” she asks.
“No. Forget it,” I sigh, leaving the bar and my hopes of getting a drink behind. I make my way toward the cage instead.
The two fighters dance around each other. The bets are being put in for the real upcoming match, while the two behind the bars seem like friends, chatting and laughing while they mime hitting each other.
Someone slips up behind me, standing too close. I expect it to be Nico, but the sensation is all wrong. The height, the smell, the heat. My instincts revolt. I turn and am met with a face of ink and color, with two mismatched eyes and a strange smile. My eyes bolt around his face, looking for something normal to land on.
“I recognize you,” he says, with a sharp smile.
“I can’t say the same.” I turn my head away from him. He doesn’t take the hint.
“Marcel’s sister, right?” He holds out a hand. “Angelo. I’m a friend of Nico’s.”
Relief washes over me, and we shake hands.
“I don’t suppose you know where he is, then?” I ask.
“Ah, old Nico’s a stray dog, but he always shows up eventually. Do you want a drink? Or maybe something else? Powder your nose?”
“No,” I say immediately.
“Well, if you change your mind, it’s on the house. Courtesy of the family, of course.”
Of course.
“You must be related to Salvatore to make that kind of offer.”
“Oh, proudly.” He grins. “I bet you didn’t know Moris had gutter trash in their bloodline, did you?” I don’t know how to answer, feeling uncomfortable. Is he making a joke about himself? But he has a point. Angelo doesn’t look anything like the Moris that I know. More like he fell out of a Hot Topic clearance rack a couple decades too late, or he had a death metal band that never made it out of the garage. I’m not one to judge books by their covers, but I’d be lying to myself if I said he didn’t give me the creeps.
I’m trying to piece together why Nico hangs out with him, what business he would have with someone covered in ugly face tattoos and body modifications, when I realize that Angelo and I probably have one common denominator— crazy . Nico is collecting the mentally unstable like they’re his own personal trading card collection.
It annoys me, and I try to focus on the fight again.
“Are you waiting for him?” Angelo pries, refusing to leave it alone.
“Something like that.”
“He’ll show before the next fight. He doesn’t usually miss it. Give it a few minutes and I think it’ll start,” he assures me. “If you need anything—well, speak of the devil.”
He nods to the entrance, where a familiar figure marches through the doorway. Nico walks into the room, and the breath politely steps out of my lungs. Nico isn’t in the cage tonight, but he is still in his element. He walks in with the surety of a man who owns this building, commanding the entire space. It stirs something in me, maybe because I’ve seen him walk into a bedroom with that same burning confidence. With the cage between Nico and me, he doesn’t see me. I get to watch him for a few seconds, unimpeded, how he is out in the world, when it’s not the two of us.
But he doesn’t enter alone.
A woman walks alongside him, following on his heels. She’s gorgeous, with flowing black hair and a magazine foldout body, her breasts barely squeezed into a low-cut white crop top. She marches alongside him, and my heart sinks as he puts his hand on her back as they cut through the room. I can’t get a good look, but the sight of her steals my breath and sends my thoughts swirling.
I never thought I was the jealous type. If anyone asked, I would have said no, of course I’m not. I’m trusting, probably gullible, too shy to make a fuss. At least, those are the things I used to believe about myself. But standing here now in the underground with my heart on fire, I realize I just never had anything to be jealous of . It feels like someone tried to light a match in my chest, an abrasive stripe singed inside me, dragging over it until it lit. The room feels blisteringly hot suddenly, humid even this deep underground, the air too thick to breathe.
The next fight starts while my thoughts are still reeling. The announcer’s booming voice christens the event Yancey vs. Summers as the fighters circle the ring. The speaker system blares with interference, drowning the room in an uncomfortable squeal. It mimics the screech in my head, like train brakes.
The pair crosses the room without noticing me.
The lights lower. I keep to the shadows, holding the distance between us as they walk side by side. Nico takes the woman through the staff door—the same doorway he took me through that first night, where he hid me away from the rest of the world and checked to see if I was injured. My chest feels tangled up, knotted, the pain both exquisite and horrible.
I look to the overhead booths. Are they going up there into the shady VIP areas? Will he put her in his lap, touch her through the fight, just the way he likes to put me on his lap and touch me? Does he use all those same little lines on her? Does she drown in his same gruff commanding charm and control? Does he kiss her like she’s the only girl in the whole universe?
I can’t think straight.
Maybe he is just playing me like a wind-up toy in his little war with Marcel, and I am obediently marching along.
And I’m carrying his baby.
Hell, maybe she is, too .
The thought makes me wild.
I glance around furiously, wondering what the fuck I’m doing here.
“Do you know who that was? The woman who he was with?” I ask Angelo. Realizing how absolutely pathetic that sounds, I add, “I don’t want to interrupt him if he’s busy.” Fuck, maybe that sounds even more pathetic.
“That’s Mae. One of his girls.”
One of his girls .
Girls, plural .
“She’s Taiwanese or something, but her English is alright. She’s cool. She won’t mind if you go back there with them.”
The thought of walking in on Nico with another woman is terrifying. What would I do? What would I say? Would I scream at him? Would I cry?
Would I just shut down again?
“Thanks,” I say numbly.
I have a thousand other questions, none of them good. Luckily, I have too much pride to ask them of a stranger. I put enough distance between us again to be polite, facing the cage and the fighters dancing around each other.
I’m caught up in the crowd with a front-row view as I stare at the fight without really seeing it. My thoughts are a mangled wreck, like the aftermath of a car crash where time moves like syrup, slow and languid, every little detail enhanced in the surrealness of the moment. I watch as a man’s bare-knuckled fist rocks against his opponent’s cheek, sends it rippling, spit flying. Saliva catches the light in a thousand tiny particles. Right now, I know how he feels.
One of his girls .
Is that what I am, too? Just a name in a long list ?
The ring jostles as the fight swarms against the edge of the cage. The larger of the two, Yancey, throws a dozen punches into the smaller man’s ribs, dominating the fight one blow at a time until Summers rears back with all his strength and knocks Yancey back with a staggering headbutt. The big man reels like a top, feet floundering. Both men are left staggered, but Yancey wobbles, off-balance. The crowd roars as the tide turns. Summers gets his senses together first. He comes up swinging, taking the bigger man down to the ground. My devastated shock and bitterness and anger are mirrored right in front of me as the two fight with all the savagery of two people who want to kill each other and are trained to do so. My burning eyes follow the blows, watching the blurry scene as an indescribable hurt lashes inside me. Some part of me chooses the underdog, urges him to keep fighting back, not to let Yancey walk all over him.
“Come on!” I whisper with the crowd, urging Summers to stay in charge of him. Yancey flips them, gets the leverage on the smaller man—a dangerous position—but Summers is quick, flexible, and he gets his leg up between them and kicks the man right in the gut, sapping the air out of his lungs.
Anger burns in my eyes, the lights catching in the tears I refuse to shed. The crowd cheers Summers on as he takes Yancey down again and again, never letting him get that same advantage on him again. Yancey goes down and doesn’t get back up. The man is barely cognizant enough to tap his hand on the mat and surrender.
The crowd roars while I slip quietly from the room and into the backroom where Nico and “his girl” disappeared.
Angelo said Nico doesn’t miss the fights, which means he must have a view of them. My instincts tug toward the upper staircase, up toward the VIP balcony—but a strange, pained shout freezes me in my tracks. It echoes through the stairwell, seeming to come from every direction. But I sense its origin— down . I have no idea what the lower steps lead to, what lurks below hell itself. The barren stairwell gives no clues, peeling white paint on concrete and a lightbulb too dim to reach the lower depths. It offers no clues as to what lies beyond.
Whispery echoes drift up from the bottom floor. I steel myself and soften my footsteps, prowling down the stairs one cat-like step at a time. I’m grateful for the concrete, no creaking wood to give me away. I round the second flight, peeking down into the new stretch of stairwell. At the final landing, a doorway opens up into a shadowy room. I can only see some of the stained concrete floor at this angle.
The voices come clearer now, along with another groan.
“Please,” I hear a man say.
My heart hammers. I inch slowly down the stairs, trying to get a better look into the room. There’s a soft thump—the same sound I just heard in the ring—and that same voice chokes out a cry. He curses furiously, the last of the air in his lungs spent on rambling off expletives.
“You want any bones left, you better fucking stop me, Richie. You know how.”
Nico .
My heart pounds, making it hard to hear the muffled words from the back of the room.
“I don’t have anything,” the man spits back, desperate with rage. He cries out while the chaos of the room overhead drowns out the screams from the underground. The voices come from one side of the room, and very carefully, I inch my way down toward the main floor. The doorway is clear.
Nervousness bundles up in my stomach. I creep closer and dare a peek around the edge of the door. The room is vast, but mostly empty. Boxes are piled up along the walls. Chairs and an upended poker table look like they haven’t been touched in decades, and there are bullet holes scarred in the concrete walls. My eyes drift over the scene, trying to make sense of what happened down here, when the words start again:
“You breached my trust. Look at me, you fucking coward. If you insult her, you insult me. If you short her, you short me. In case you’re not good at context clues, Richie—you really, really fucked up.”
“That’s not how it went down,” he sobs.
I dare a glance into the room. Nico stands with his back to the door, with the shape of a man stretched out on the floor at his feet. Mae stands off to the side, her arms crossed and her expression flat. The man begs at their feet.
“Lie,” she says.
Nico stomps on the man’s knee in response. He screams again. He begs the woman to help him, trying to crawl toward her.
“Get the fuck away from her,” Nico snarls at him, kicking him back. “You know how fucking ironic your name is? Broke Richie. So what the fuck should I do with a broke, sniveling little pervert that puts his hands on things that he doesn’t have any rights to?”
He begs senselessly.
“I don’t know, man,” he says. “I don’t know! I can’t take it back.”
“You’re goddamn right you can’t.”
My breath is frozen in my throat. I stare at the scene, watching Nico beat the living hell out of another man—for another woman. The man on the ground is just another Thaddeus. And the woman…
Is she just another me ?
Nico kneels down, his voice softening. I can barely hear him.
“Now, that’s a woman who takes a lot of pride in her appearance, Richie,” Nico continues, too smoothly, too familiar in this role, as if he’s run the script a hundred times. “And I know you’re a narcissistic little fuck, even if you don’t have any right to be. So, for every one of her nails that you broke, I’m gonna take a tooth. One of these, right here in front.”
“Nico—” he begs.
My stomach clenches, and finally, I can’t look. I turn away, but that doesn’t stop me from hearing. I didn’t see pliers or tools nearby. I wonder if Nico is ripping out the man’s teeth with his bare hands. My head swims and my heart pounds. I don’t care what Nico does for the family. Not really. It’s no different than what Marcel has done, what I have done—I don’t take any moral high ground about that.
But that he’s doing it for her .
The yelling stops. The screams dissolve into pathetic, wheezy whimpers. Richie tries to talk and it comes out garbled, like baby-speak, through his tears. I can’t see the mangled mess left in his mouth, but I can hear it.
Nico and Mae talk, lower now, their voices mingling under Richie’s groans. I force myself to look again.
Nico reaches into his pocket, handing over cash to her. He tells her to get her nails fixed. She wads up the bills and slides them between her breasts.
“Thank you,” she says, stepping up to him. Her hands touch his chest.
“Get your hands off me,” Nico says, his voice cutting like steel through her intentions and my expectations. She lowers her hands, eyes shifting with derision.
“I have a wife,” he says.
The word is low and threatening, backing her off.
Mae looks offended, almost bitter in her confusion.
“Most of my men have wives,” she says, looking over him.
“Most of your men are fucking pathetic.”
The tight knot in my stomach untangles, the vise around my heart suddenly releasing like a clamp. A numb shock tingles through my system, emotional pins and needles as the blood rushes back into the numb parts of me. All the anger is sapped out of me with that one word.
A wife ?
Does that mean...?
The meaning of it all clicks: Nico’s girls vs. Nico’s wife . All at once, I realize what each category is, and which one he thinks I fall into. It isn’t the first. Mae is a prostitute for the family, and whatever else Nico might be to her, he isn’t her client.
I am so overwhelmed, so shocked, that I realize too late that I have nowhere to go as the pair head my way. They approach the stairwell where I am hidden against the doorframe. I back up against the wall, but I am painfully in plain sight, nowhere to run. I can barely see through the tears that well up, silent and bitter and angry at the misunderstanding.
Nico and Mae step into the doorway. They both see me at the same time. Nico’s gaze flashes from shock, to confusion, to anger. The colors of a dozen different emotions work across his face—but more than anything, he looks worried.
Mae just scoffs, “Who is that?”
“My wife,” Nico says quietly, his gaze boring into mine.
My heart skips a beat.
Before Mae can ask, he adds a sharp, steely, “Leave us alone, Mae.”
She looks offended by how he speaks to her, by the sheer iron in his voice, but she listens. Nico and I gaze at each other in silence until the click-clack of Mae’s stilettos fades out of earshot. He slams the door shut between us and the storage room, where the man inside still moans softly, before his whimpers are locked behind the heavy metal door. Nico rounds on me.
“Ava, what the fuck are you doing—”
It’s all he manages before I have my hands on either side of his face, kissing him desperately. We linger there in each other’s arms, Nico too blindsided to object.
He makes me look at him, his thumbs grazing against the tears on my cheeks. I pull back and wipe them away on my own, furious at myself for shedding them.
“What happened?” he demands, all protective and furious. “Talk to me, Ava. Why are you down here?”
It hurts to admit. This night was supposed to be something fun, something silly—a bad idea going wrong, just like they always do. I almost laugh with the irony of it.
“I wanted to stalk you for once,” I admit through a watery smile.
He looks me over, head to toe—the dress and heels, my makeup done.
“And you did—so why the hell are you crying?” he demands, still reading the tears on my face. “Was it one of those fucks up at the ring? Did one of them hurt you—hell, did they even so much as look at you? Tell me what they did.”
Nico is primed to march upstairs and murder the first person I point at.
It feels so stupid when I finally squeak out,
“No, Nico. Nobody hurt me, I just...I saw you with that woman, and I thought...” My words trail off into a soft silence. Nico reads it plainly, the truth written across my angry, tear-streaked expression as it finally makes sense to him.
“And you were jealous .”
The warmth in his voice comes so close to happiness—if it didn’t also sound dark as sin. I glare up into his face, forcing all that pain into a sharp, cutting point of indignation.
“What was I supposed to think about your girls —”
I yelp as Nico suddenly hefts me up into his arms, my legs wrapped around his waist and my arms around his neck. “ Nico !”
“Was my pretty girl afraid I was giving another woman my time?”
“ Shut up !”
He kisses my objections from my lips, hungry and sure of himself as I run my fingers through his hair as he holds me tight. Finally, he says, “If someone called you one of my girls , Ava, that’d be grounds for me to beat them to their last breath. Mae’s an escort, that’s all. If there’s one thing in the world you don’t have to worry about, Ava, it’s other women. You’re the only girl I’m addicted to. That’s just how I’m wired. I want what I want, and I don’t settle for less. Nothing else.”
I smile guiltily, and we kiss again, all my anxiety washing away in his heat. His mouth, his tongue, they all reassure me with sweet, hungry kisses that mirror everything I have felt this past week, saying one thing plainly— I missed you .
How long can this last? How long can Salvatore keep him away, keep us apart?
Nico’s possessiveness ties up my heart again, chases out that doubt. That dark, familiar control that I usually fight against—right now, it makes me feel safe. His hand cups my jaw, makes me look at him, eye to eye.
For only a moment, I can be sure of one thing in the universe: I am the only girl Nico Mori is interested in.
He leans in close to my ear and mutters,
“Now you know how it feels every time I think about you and Thaddeus.”
It devastates me.
I didn’t realize how much I really cared for him, how much Nico mattered to me, until now. Until I thought I might have lost him to someone else.
Richie starts to move around behind the closed door, staggering footsteps that hobble closer to us. “Come on,” Nico says, as the sound of his suffering cools the air between us. “You shouldn’t have seen any of this.”
He puts his hand on my back and draws me up the stairwell, away from the man on the floor.
“What did he do?” I ask, glancing over my shoulder before Nico pulls me along, not letting me get distracted.
“Think of Richie like a problem child. What he hasn’t done is a shorter list, and my patience is done. I’m over it. Tonight, he tried to fuck Mae. Everybody in New York knows he’s the brokest motherfucker alive. He’s down here every week blowing whatever cash he can scam out of somebody, on whatever vice he picks for the night. If you can get addicted to something, he’s addicted to it. It doesn’t matter what. He tried to feel up Mae and got handsy when she said she wouldn’t go further before she had cash on the table. Don’t worry about him. He had it coming.”
“So you’re her pimp?”
“I’m her employer,” he says, with no emotion. “The same as the rest of the family.”
“Sounds like something a pimp would say,” I accuse him. He grins, his mouth dark with guilt.
“Salvatore has to keep me busy somehow, and if there’s one business that doesn’t sleep, it’s sex. The family has escorts. High-end, the best of the best. And we employ them the same way we employ anybody else in the business. If they work for us, it’s because they want to. If they could make better, safer money on their OnlyFans, they’d do that. They have incentive to work for us.”
We are almost back to the fighting ring when I stop, peeking out into the crowd. I glance up at the man I’ve missed for the past few days.
“When you said wife...”
He interrupts me before I can even ask.
“Don’t play stupid, Ava. You know exactly what I meant.”
He puts his arm around my shoulders, making sure everyone in the room sees that we’re together, as we step back into the lively compound, where another savage fight is already underway, one of the competitors more blood than face.
Nico offers to buy me a drink, and when I tell him I don’t want any alcohol, he seems to have someone materialize a bottle of sparkling water for me from thin air. I feel the eyes on us as we walk together, the silent understanding that breaks across each group when they see me next to Nico.
As if suddenly, I am as untouchable as he is.
Nico shows me how to bet even though the betting is already over, and he gives me a quick and dirty rundown of who the fighters are and how to weigh the odds of each fight. Although the books should be closed—the bets always spread across all of the night’s fights in order to favor the house—he hands me some cash and tells me to bet it however I want on the last two fights. The bookie doesn’t blink at the oddity of it, not when it’s Nico giving the orders.
I try to use his advice, his insight, but the common theme is obvious—I always root for the underdog.
He takes me up to the VIP section. Mae poses on a seat, fixing her hair and making eyes at the men who only have their attention on the fight below. Behind the bulletproof glass, we have a good overhead view, and Nico puts me on his lap, just as I imagined he was going to do to her. I lean back into his arms.
“You know everything that happens down here makes it back to the family,” I point out softly as two men swap punches down below. Nico’s already been separated from the family once for his antics with me.
“Let it.”
I wish I could not care the way he does. His arm wraps around my middle, unknowingly cradling his own child as we watch the fight. I lean my head onto his shoulder, forgetting the family for just a little while, and let Nico tell me all the names of the fighters—their talents and their histories, and if he knew them before or not. Most men from his first days in the ring, he says, are either dead or retired.
The fighters from earlier lounge up here in the VIP balcony. They’ve changed clothes and now press fistfuls of ice to their wounds. Summers stares forward, his pale eyes on the match, hungry. His muscles twitch, as if he’s imagining himself right back in the ring again, living out someone else’s fight. I grin and lean into Nico’s ear, sliding my hand along his shoulders.
“I liked Summers,” I tell him teasingly. “He might be my favorite.”
“Oh yeah?” he asks, drawing my face to his, making me almost blush as I tease him.
“Mhm. He seems talented. He wins even when you don’t expect him to.”
And suddenly, Nico leans back, stretching one arm over the back of the couch.
“Summers,” he yells, drawing the man’s attention. “Me and you. Four weeks.”.
Summers looks surprised and a little doomed, but he grins a bloody smile and gives Nico an agreeable thumbs-up.
“We’ll see how much you like him after I get through with him,” Nico says, and draws me into a devastatingly blistering kiss. I spend the rest of the night in his arms. It feels like our first real date. The first time where I have spent time with him because I wanted to, and not because he forced it.
And at the end of the night, the city bright and the sky dark, Nico walks me out to my car.
“You know, it was really stupid what you did,” I tell him, leaning against the driver’s door. “Burning up the BMW like that. In front of everyone . I don’t know what the hell you were thinking. And that flimsy excuse you gave, as if anybody was going to fucking believe it—”
Nico cuts me off with a slow, gentle kiss, and whispers the only question he cares about,
“Do you like it?”
I bow my head under the seriousness of his gaze, sighing helplessly.
“I love it.”