28. Nico
28
Nico
My next fight is with Summers, and Ava won’t even be there to watch me beat her favorite underdog into the dirt. It’s a damn shame. I like Summers, too. I like the way he fights. Some people get into the ring for the money or the notoriety, the street cred that comes with a cage like this. Summers gets into the ring because he has a real talent for blood sport. If he wasn’t making enough off the ring, he’d make a good hitman.
When Summers and I go toe to toe, I’m not fully healed off that last fight, the unfair beatdown I got at the hands of a bunch of masked thugs before I even stepped into the ring with a 250-pound goliath. That doesn’t stop me from beating him within an inch of his life.
The kid knows how to fight, but like me, he doesn’t know how to give up until he’s clenching his soul between his teeth. The crowd is mad for it. It’s closer than it should be when I’m still off my game, but once I get the upper hand, it’s over. He doesn’t twist his way out of this one, not this time. I stand over him, blood smeared at my feet. When he won’t do it himself, even when he can’t get up, even when the last of his strength trembles in his arms and his knees, I take his hand and force him to tap.
The organizers accept it.
Anything else, and I’m gonna have to bash his head in to get him to go down.
I take my victory, hit the target that Ava painted on the man’s back like a bullet. Maybe she’ll change her mind now about who her favorite fighter is. Or maybe I’ll have to work my way through every one of these sorry sons of bitches, until she gets to me. I wouldn’t mind. If she wants me to fight for her, I will.
The voices in the main room are muffled as I make my way to the back, stepping into a room where I expect to be greeted by familiar faces and the usual gruff celebration. There’s no one here. The silence of the empty room feels loud, the humming from the shoddy electrical filling up my head and my chest. My instincts bristle.
At my locker, the lock’s been cut with a bolt cutter, the metal door left open. My clothes are still inside, but there’s one item missing from the top shelf: my pistol. A quiet dread grows heavy in the pit of my stomach. They took the gun, but they left Ava’s knife in my pants pocket. Dammit . I take it out and switch the blade open, prowling the room with deadened steps. I circle the lockers and the showers and pop open the storage closet, all while bracing for a bullet to come slinging out of the dark.
There’s no one here.
I shut the only door in or out of the room and change fast. Something’s happening, but I don’t know what. I keep the knife on me as I inch into the staircase, on high alert. I listen for footsteps and check corners every step of the way. But I’m alone, stalked by my own shadow and the echo of my own steps.
I push out through the church, past the broken stained-glass windows and blobs of dense graffiti. The shadows seem long and human-like, a hundred unseen eyes watching me from the dark, just out of the corner of my eye. Shining my phone’s light over the black room reveals no one. Just the shadows, and just the dark.
Fuck.
It feels like prison all over again, when tension was high or a riot was on the horizon, that heavy weight of expectation , knowing the jump was going to come but not knowing when. I ignore my car, leaving it, not trusting that it hasn’t been tampered with. I lose myself in the New York streets, always checking over my shoulder, checking faces, watching my back, until I am close enough to the public. I call a cab.
The night feels more normal than it should. Music thumps from passing cars. Someone talks overly loud on a phone, some foreign language running a mile a minute as he paces at the crosswalk.
Maybe something went wrong. Maybe the timing was off, maybe it was just a message—but I’m still down a gun, and I don’t like that. I catch a ride straight back to the shitty stash house apartment, where I have the semi stashed in the closet. Overkill is better than underperforming.
When I make it back to the apartment in one piece, I throw open the door and head straight to the closet—where the gun is gone, the door left wide open. I realize the mistake too late, hearing the footsteps behind me just as the bedroom door smoothly swings closed. I flip Ava’s knife open and slowly turn around.
It’s not another group of thugs tonight.
It’s just one.
Marcel stands between me and the only exit out of this room. He clasps his empty hands in front of him, as if I couldn’t get through him if I wanted to. Even fresh off a fight and barely on my feet, just hand to hand, I could tear him apart. I wouldn’t even need the knife. I sigh, my shoulders slumping. All that fucking tension, just for this.
“What the fuck do you want, Marcel?”
“I told you what I wanted, Nico. I told you weeks ago. And you ignored it. I thought a little corrective punishment—a good beating and a lost fight—might be enough to make you change your ways and send a message to those foolish enough to take your side. But it seems you just can’t grasp context clues.”
Him? He was the one who sent them?
It suddenly makes sense. Angel’s vehement denial of knowing anything about me getting jumped, all of the family playing stupid and accusing each other, pointing fingers and tossing blame. And all along, I didn’t expect the one person who actually had a real motive to fuck up my life—Marcel.
I guess fair’s fair.
“You coming here for tips on how to intimidate a man?” I ask him. “I can give you some pointers.”
His smile is tight and cold, and he pulls his pistol from the inside of his jacket.
“No, I’m done with intimidation and warnings, Nico. You and I both know what the right choice is for the family, and it isn’t you. You see, there is something that you and I agree on, as much as it pains me to admit, something you said that really resonated and stuck with me these past couple of weeks. Sometimes, you do have to take charge. Sometimes you have to make a decision, even when that decision isn’t asked of you. I know what Salvatore wants, and I know that it’s an order he can’t allow himself to give. But if I were to act on my own, without his blessing—”
“Then half the family would come crawling out of the woodwork, saying exactly the same shit I’ve been preaching all along. That people outside the family can’t be trusted. If you could’ve killed me all nice and tidy, Marcel, you would’ve done it weeks ago.”
Marcel smiles, as if he’s just patiently waiting for me to finish wasting my breath.
“This isn’t about the family, Nico. This is about Ava. For me, it’s always been about Ava. I told you to leave her alone, and you didn’t. You went and made her a part of this, wrapped her up in all your bullshit. I warned you, and you didn’t listen.”
The silence stretches as we regard each other. I try to think my way out of this.
Marcel’s mouth quirks.
He presses the gun up between my eyes, putting me right back where we were in Contessa Mori’s living room, except now there’s no nice antique velvet sofa and Persian rug to spill my blood all over, and no woman to sweep in and talk him down. We’re alone in a shitty trap house, and Marcel’s emotions are volcanic—a fast current running wild and deadly under that cold, stony exterior, no hint of the danger until the moment it erupts, but now the smoke is pouring into the sky, and the danger is clear as day.
I try to remember the last thing I said to Ava.
Good girl .
It should have been something else. Something worthwhile. I’ve told her that all along, just a part of the little game between us. But it’s not just a game anymore. Fuck, there was a lot that I didn’t tell her. I guess as far as regrets go, that’s about all I’ve got.
“Ava made her own choices. You can shoot me if you want, Marcel. But you better pray somebody like me comes along for her again.”
The muzzle of the gun bites into my skin, and I lean into it, glaring him down, eye to eye. I’m not fucking afraid of the bullet in that gun; I don’t give a damn about anything or nothing that comes after it.
“Because you’re such a good, stand-up guy. If you were a good man, Nico, you wouldn’t have even landed on her radar. My sister is sick , and you sensed it, and you took advantage of it. Unlike her, I can see you clearly.”
“You can see whatever the fuck you want,” I say, “but if I’m gone, then what happens to your little sister, Marcel? Who’s going to take care of her? You gave up when it got too difficult—” My mouth and my anger run away with me, even at gunpoint.
“I never gave up on her,” Marcel interjects softly.
“—and now you’re going to walk her down the aisle and shove all her baggage off onto Thaddeus, that worthless fuck, when you can see plain as day that all he wants is to get close to the top of the food chain!”
“That’s rich, coming from the man gunning for that position himself,” Marcel says, as if I’m just some worthless hypocrite, angry that someone else is playing my own game better than me. Christ, I wish that was all this was, but it never was. From the very beginning, the fact that Ava was Marcel’s sister—that wasn’t an angle, it wasn’t an asset. It was just a fucking tragedy.
I’m veering off the ledge now, furious at just how fucking wrong he is, that I’m going to die because he can’t see the worth of his own sister that he claims to love so goddamn much. As if I could spend all that time with her and not fall for her.
“If somebody tried to sell off my little sister like she was a piece of fucking livestock, nobody could stop me from getting in between that! Not you, not Sal. I wouldn’t let a man do that to her!”
“It was Ava’s choice!”
The metal body of the pistol hits hard across my face, snapping against my jawbone as Marcel pistol whips me. It barely staggers me, but it gives me an opportunity. A single second. I try to get my hands around the loaded gun, to try to twist it out of his grip. We struggle, the gun wavering between us, his teeth white and bared in a snarl as that violence inside him finally flashes to the surface.
The knife in my grip snaps open, and with one motion, I plunge the blade up into Marcel’s stomach.
The man makes a sound. Something I’ve never heard from him before, somewhere between pain and shock. He staggers back, eyes staring forward, as if he’s trying to get away from something unseen. His back hits the wall. He closes one hand around the knife buried in his stomach, then gazes down at it, the handle buried down to his gut. His legs give out. He slides down the wall. His throat works, no words coming out as he works through the pain.
“You stupid fuck!” I snap at him, furious, kicking the gun away from his grip. He doesn’t even try to pull the gun on me. My hands are empty, my expression numb as I stare him down. My anger is bleeding out with him, cold clarity suddenly creeping into the corners of my vision as I finally look down and see Ava’s brother on the ground.
Fuck . Oh, fuck .
“You stupid, stupid bastard,” I snap at him, tempted to punch an already dying man, his breathing elevated with pain. “You killed us both. You killed us both, for nothing! Do you get that? I love your sister! I’m not using her, I fucking love her!”
“I know,” Marcel rasps, his stare piercing—coherent and sharp suddenly, calculating , even with a knife stuck in his belly. “I’m counting on it.” He’s gotten a grip on the pain now and has come back around to his senses. There’s no shock or confusion in his eyes as we stare at each other, his mouth curved into a small, knowing smile. “You love Ava, which is why you’re not going to let me die.”
Marcel pulls the knife free. Dark blood comes in a gush, instantly coloring the bottom of his shirt in a dark, seeping stain.
I stand frozen over the scene, staring down at him, his smug certainty even as he starts freely bleeding out. I’m piecing it together slowly, like a fish that just felt the first tug of the hook. Marcel clamps his hand over the gushing wound.
“You better hurry, Nico,” he gasps. “Clock’s ticking for us.”
I walk to the gun on the ground. I can tell just from the weight of it— it’s empty .
Marcel never came here to kill me.
He came here to make me try to kill him.
Salvatore won’t believe me. Contessa can’t save me.
And Ava…she’ll never forgive me.