32. Nico
32
Nico
I am supposed to be 800 miles away. I barely made it eight. Eight miles, eight hours, eight days—any measure of time or distance between me and Ava, I couldn’t do it. Fuck Chicago and fuck a life without her. If the family catches me in New York, then they catch me. Maybe she’ll be the one to turn me in. Maybe she’ll be the one to pull the trigger. I could make my peace with that; I just need them to bury me close enough to haunt her.
Larry Rossum collapses face down on cold concrete, courtesy of a close-range 9mm bullet that bounces around his skull and turns his brains into scrambled eggs. He was forty-nine years old. Twenty or so of those years were spent in loyal service to the family. His two sons work for us, too. I don’t know them, but if they get any ideas over this, maybe the graveyard will give the family a discount on a three-wide plot.
Rossum spent his last year in disloyal service to the family, or at least disloyal to Sal, peddling money and favors behind his back and trying to push me to the head of the food chain along with the rest of them. That’s the risk you take when you decide to become a snake handler. Sometimes, the snake twists back and strikes the wrong way.
It’s not business, but it doesn’t feel personal either. It’s just cleaning up the wilds. One predator taking out its competition. We’re in the last-ditch effort stage of things now. Men like Rossum will do anything to put me in power, and I know that means cutting through Ava St. Clair to get me there. It’s what I would do.
One down, six members of my own family to go.
I wish I was a real certified psychopath. The kind they make those overdone documentaries about. Men who chop up people in the backwoods, hiding bodies under the floorboards or cooking somebody up and serving them at the neighborhood bake sale. One of those people who just don’t feel anything about it. But some people just get all the luck.
I pocket the gun and keep moving.
I’ve spent my last days living out of musty hotels, stomping out the embers I sparked before they can catch fire. Even if I went to Chicago, I wouldn’t last long there with these men on my heels. Salvatore isn’t the only one gunning for my life now. I’m just running out the last of my time, trying to steal whatever glances of Ava that I can, and take out the men that might cause problems for her before one of them catches up to me first.
Angel says Marcel’s recovering. He’s going to make it, the crazy bastard, and if rumors are true, he’s already back home. I shouldn’t be relieved to hear it, but I am. For her. I never doubted that Marcel was good for the position that he holds. He’s annoyingly talented and a good asset—and I still underestimated him when I tried to go toe to toe with him. I can win a knockdown, drag-out bareknuckle fight, but put me on a chessboard with a man like him, and I lose every time.
I’m almost back at my car when I get the call. My first instinct says Salvatore, like he’s omniscient and already wondering why I just shot his government-employed Chief Investment Risk Officer through the ear. Guess I could start with the fact that he clearly wasn’t that good at his job—
Ava.
Her name on the screen stops me in my tracks.
She’s never called me before, and I don’t know why she would now. Could be a trap. They could use her number to track my cellphone and make sure I’m really out of the city. Salvatore has the kind of connections that would do that for him, but it doesn’t matter if it’s a trap or not. There’s a chance Ava is on the other end of the line, and that’s all it takes.
I answer, but I don’t know what to say. What the hell can I say? I didn’t do it comes to mind, but it’s not even technically the truth. I did it. I just didn’t want to. A soft, panicked breathing and muffled rustling fills the speaker.
“…Nico?” Ava asks, out of breath, whispery, afraid .
Her tone makes my hair bristle like a static charge. I am running to my car before my name is fully off her lips, discretion be damned.
“What’s wrong?” I demand, throwing open the door.
“Nico—”
She chokes back half a sob.
“Talk to me, baby,” I say over the roar of the engine starting up.
“It’s Thaddeus, he’s trying to—he attacked me, Nico, I don’t know what to do.”
“Where are you?”
“The house. I made it into the backyard, but he knows—Nico, where are you? Are you in Chicago?”
I veer sharply into the street, pointing the car toward home .
“No. Find Sal until I get there. Scream, Ava. Just start screaming, wake up the whole neighborhood if you have to—”
“I can’t do that,” she sobs. “Nico, I can’t, I—”
Before I can ask why she can’t, Ava lets out a pitched, breathy yelp. I hear rustling and running, wind whipping against the phone speaker. The sound of voices comes in muffled, faint audio slipping through in bits and pieces.
“Ava!” I call for her. Something thumps on the other end of the line. Her voice gets farther away, fading, while the phone stays stationary and the line quiet. They’re distant now. There’s a man’s far-off voice, the crunch of footsteps, leaves or grass.
Ava dropped her phone.
My heart pounds, my vision red, my knuckles white on the steering wheel. I’ve never really seen what this car can do before outside of a closed track, but tonight, I find out. I cut through the streets, through traffic, pushing the limits of what the roads will even allow, veering recklessly toward home and stopping for nothing. The kind of driving that will even make a New Yorker glance twice and say, “What the fuck is that moron doing?” which is a real badge of honor in this city.
I weave through red lights and barrel down turning lanes, hugging the tight shoulder of the road at over a hundred miles per hour.
This is a death sentence. Setting foot on that property again will be the last thing I do. For all I know, it’s another ploy—Marcel’s last move on the board. The final checkmate to send me somewhere that I can’t come back from.
It doesn’t matter. I just have to get to her.
The call stays connected, the numbers ticking up in silence.
I pass over the bridge, so damn close now. The speedometer dial flickers on the dash, up into the red. A dozen speed cameras light up the night overhead, like paparazzi.
The engine revs furiously as I line up on the private road to the house, tires spinning until they hit traction. I slam on the gas, rocketing the car up toward the gate as fast as I can accelerate. The guard has no time to react. The nose of the car crashes through the first gate, knocking the whole thing wide open. The gate rends and sparks as I barrel through it and take it down with an ugly scream of metal-on-metal. I lose speed, but I break through.
The front of the car is mangled, but the engine is built into the rear, and she’s still going strong down the dark street. Shouts rise up behind me and I slam on the gas again. One more gate. Just one between me and her and that bastard. Bullets ping off the back of the car. The back windshield cracks open. I keep my eyes ahead, ignoring the rain of rapid-fire bullets peppering the air around me.
I duck low as I reach the second gate, another barrage of bullets flying in from the guard posted up there, ripping the windshield to pieces. I keep my foot on the gas pedal. The car shudders sharply, but it takes the barrier down. Twisted metal gets caught up under the wheels and in the grill. I drag the goddamn thing across the yard with a shower of white-hot sparks. I get as close as I can to the back of the house before the wheels lock up.
I leap out of the car, engine still running, one headlight still burning and casting light across the yard.
“Ava!”
I run, gun in hand.
She doesn’t call back, but I see her half illuminated in the headlights— alive . She bows her head, her hair now some ghostly color that matches how pale she is in this moment. She stares down at the white ring of flowers at her feet—the tiny memorial planted where Vincent Mori was shot and killed. A few feet away, in the bubbling water fountain, Thaddeus Mori slumps over into the fountain basin, face down in the water and bent at the waist. He isn’t moving. In the glint of the light, the water ripples red.
Ava shakes from head to toe, breathing hard, her arms wrapped tight around her middle. I was too late. Too far away. Goddammit . I march right to her and pull her into my arms. She collapses against my chest, as if waiting for me was the only thing keeping her on her feet. She wasn’t making so much as a sound until now, but she suddenly sobs heavy and hard into my chest.
“I got you. I got you, baby. Let me look at you,” I urge her, kissing the top of her head and trying to ease her back. “Let me see.”
But she clings to me, sobbing, speaking against my chest so that I can barely hear her.
“You’re here,” she sobs. “You’re actually here.”
“Did you really think I’d ever fucking leave you?” I ask her. “I’m strong, Ava, but I’m not that strong.” She cries harder as I clutch her in my arms, holding her tight and kissing her temple over and over. “I should have been here sooner. I should have…”
There are a lot of should haves , and right now, I’m ignoring another one.
“I need you to listen to me,” I try again, trying to ease Ava back. We don’t have a lot of time. “Let me see what the fuck he did. Let me look.” She could be stabbed for all I know, bleeding out right here in my arms. She’s been holding her stomach the whole time. I finally manage to kneel in front of her and look her over, pulling her shaking hands aside and off her belly. I expect to see blood, at least some kind of wound, but there’s nothing—not even a cut in her dress.
She clutches her belly again, puts her hands right back where they were, as if she can’t stop guarding it. I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong, what he did, when the truth comes shaking out of Ava’s lips.
“Nico, I’m pregnant,” she finally sobs.
The confession rattles me. I can barely think through the rush of instincts, emotions, the twist of blinding protective rage that bubbles up inside of me as my eyes drop from her blood-spattered, tear-stained face to the soft, subtle swell of her belly. Stunned, I press my hand to her stomach, and she lets me, her hands shaking as they move aside to let me feel.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do. He wouldn’t raise it, and I didn’t know how Marcel would react, or if Sal would let me keep it, and I know you don’t want it, and I just—I just—”
I interrupt her shocked, trembling rambling.
“You thought I wouldn’t want our baby?”
Her breath just hitches in response.
“Ava,” I whisper, my voice half steel as I put my hands around her waist. “Why the fuck—why would I ever not want our baby ?”
“Because I heard you. I heard you with Sal. You said kids weren’t in your future, that you were never going to have any, that you weren’t even going to marry, so…”
The words cut me deeper and more devastatingly than anything she could have done to Thaddeus.
“I told Sal I didn’t want kids because I didn’t want them with whatever woman he was going to try to pawn me off to! I want kids, Ava! I want kids so goddamn badly. I just only want them with you.”
The dogs in the backyard go wild. The lights in the house have all turned on after the gunshots and the clamor from the gates. Voices get closer as flashlights sweep near the edges of the house, coming this way.
I realize, staring up into Ava’s stunned face—I’m not going to get to have kids with her. Not even this one, the one already in her belly. I’m a dead man. The rush of emotion, all frustration and rage, swells up as I pull Ava to me, kissing her belly and resting my head against it for a moment, indulging for just one second in everything that maybe could have been.
How long has she known? How long has she just been dealing with it, alone and terrified?
I sweep her up, kissing her desperately, deeply, in case this is the last time. The way I should have kissed her from that first night.
“I love you. Ava, I love you, and the baby. If I’m not there—”
“Nico, don’t—”
“ If I’m not there ,” I repeat firmly, taking her face in my hands and forcing her to listen, “you love them for the both of us, okay? And be patient with them, because they’re half me, and God knows they’re going to get into a lot of really stupid shit.”
“Nico, I can’t do this without you, please don’t,” she begs me, desperately. The chaos inches closer. I drag her back into the shadows behind the fountain.
“Bullshit, Ava. You’re already fighting for this baby, and you’re going to keep fighting. You’re going to be just fine. Give me the knife. Give me the knife, baby girl, and wash the blood off in the fountain. Hurry.”
“What? Why?” she sobs.
When she’s too paralyzed to hand it to me, I pry the knife from her hands and look them over. Her palms are mostly clean, a few nicks and cuts, but I doubt enough for anyone to suspect anything.
“Because you didn’t do this. You didn’t kill him.”
She watches, mortified, as I cut the little telltale notches of self-defense wounds into my hands.
“Stop! What are you doing?”
“I’m taking the fall for this. Not you.”
“He attacked me,” she argues. “He was going to kill me, or the baby, or, I don’t know, whatever he was going to do! He was drunk and he deserved it, Nico! You don’t have to do this, please stop,” she begs, putting her hands on mine, trying to get in my way.
“I know what he deserves, and when I get to hell with him, I’m going to give him the rest of it.” But until I get there, I have to protect her. Protect both of them. “I started this goddamn feud between my family and you and your brother. And now you just killed one of their side. Do you understand? Salvatore and Marcel, of course they won’t blame you.” Pain blossoms across my palm and flowers into blood as I drag the blade across it. “But everyone else, they need to blame me.”
Ava pushes into my arms again. She holds me tight, like I’m taking the whole world away from her. She cries so hard it cuts deep in my core. I try to soothe her, put my hands on her—her hair, her face, her body—holding her while smearing blood in my wake, until nobody will know what might’ve bled from me and what might’ve bled from him.
I kiss the top of her head.
“Nico,” Salvatore calls out, gun at his side. Wavering flashlight beams fall over us and linger on the body just a couple steps away. The sand in the hourglass trickles down to the last grains.
Fuck.
I kiss Ava again, desperately.
“I love you,” I say, the same little phrase I have been texting her every day since I left, watching the message fail to send again and again. “I love both of you.” She doesn’t let go, making it so much harder than it has to be, her fingers curled into my shirt.
“No,” she sobs, broken-hearted. “Don’t go. Please don’t. I love you, too. I can’t —”
“Yes, you can,” I interrupt.
Salvatore and the men from the gate approach, pistols and rifles aimed our way. I dropped my gun somewhere in the yard around us, not that it would help even if I had it. Not against this.
“What the hell did you do now? You can’t be fucking serious!”
Christ, Salvatore almost sounds like our father these days, if he was just a little more pissed off. He’s still half-bewildered. The man who probably thinks the lowest of me, even he doesn’t understand why I would waste my so-called last chance like this, not even trying to get away with it. We both stare at Thaddeus’s spindly, limp legs as he waits for me to answer.
“I did what I always do, Sal.”
Salvatore’s wrath lashes out like a whip.
“I gave you every chance! More than I would have given anyone else—even those who deserved it more than you. I allowed you to live once, by my wife’s sheer grace. And this is what you do with it? Has it even been a week, Nico?”
I hold my silence, let him rail on about what I’ve supposedly done. I always smile in those moments when you’re not supposed to. Just can’t help myself. And I smile now, grinning in the face of his outage as Salvatore storms up to us.
“Marcel was right. Maybe I couldn’t see it, but you really are a stupid, suicidal bastard.”
Actually, I’m in love, but I don’t know if there’s a difference.
My grin fades when Ava wedges herself between the two of us—just like always, trying to be the barrier between me and all the consequences that I’ve been dodging since I got out.
“Don’t you dare point those fucking guns at her,” I snap at him, trying to get Ava out of the way. “Ava, move .”
“No,” she seethes, staring down Sal and digging her feet in against the ground when I try to pull her aside. “He was protecting me! He didn’t do anything wrong—I called him here! I made him come here, and he saved me!”
Marcel rounds the corner a minute late, slow to catch up. Usually, he’s nipping on Sal’s heels, but tonight the loyal lapdog walks gingerly—until Ava screams for him. The sight of her out here in the middle of this chaos makes him forget his stitches, and Marcel comes jogging straight to Sal’s side.
“What happened?” he asks, reaching out for his bloodstained sister.
“What do you think?” Sal mutters darkly, nodding toward the fountain. Someone has dragged Thaddeus out of the pool and left the limp body on the ground. His empty eyes stare up at the sky, his lips blue and skin already faded to that sickly, signature gray of the newly dead. His white undershirt has turned a washed-out, transparent pink, and through the sheerness, he must have over a dozen stab wounds poked into his chest, the wet shirt sucked deep into the wounds.
“Marcel, please ,” Ava begs, but she doesn’t find any sympathy in his expression. The half-circle of gunmen closes in, ready to drag us apart at Salvatore’s command. “Thaddeus attacked me,” she sniffles. “He did, I swear—someone must have heard something, they’ll tell you—Nico was just protecting me.” She can barely speak through her breathlessness, trying so hard to convince him through her tears.
Marcel looks over Ava carefully. He tilts her face, looking at the blue bruises starting to ring around her eye and swell in her jaw. “Thaddeus did this?”
“ Yes .”
His gaze slides to the body.
“Well, it looks like he’s already been handled. Good. That only leaves one more.”
All Salvatore has to do is nod. It’s not even an order.
Hands tighten on my arms and curl into my shirt as Salvatore’s men haul me away. Marcel and Sal pry Ava off. They pull us apart, but just like that first night, Ava keeps fighting. She drags her tiny weight against the two men that tower over her, trying uselessly to pull away and get back to me. She screams like she’s the one dying. Tonight, I’m the one who doesn’t fight it. I’m dragged under my arms and forced to my knees in the grass.
Ava wails as Salvatore steps my way, while her brother hauls her back around the waist.
No more trials. No more deals.
“Marcus Taylor, Zachary Mori, Allan Mori, and Elias White,” I say to Salvatore, forcing the names out rapid-fire before Salvatore’s bullet can interrupt me. “Those are the men that you’re going to have to finish off after you’re done with me. Larry Rossum and Harry Mori, I’ve already taken care of. Rossum, you’ll probably hear about him by morning, but Harry’s in his apartment, and nobody lives with him. You’ll have to send somebody out.”
Salvatore’s silence is a loud question he doesn’t want to ask as he stares me down.
“You think I’m going to spare you because you’re giving up your co-conspirators?”
“I know you’re not. But you need to clean house once I’m gone.”
The unspoken why? lingers between us. Why give up the men that tried to help me?
“They’re not going to stop with me, Sal. Maybe they’d give it all up once I’m gone, or maybe they’d find some other way—I don’t really care. But they threatened the wrong person, and if I can’t finish it, you’re going to. Marcus, Zach, Allan, Elias.”
And God only knows what that will cause—the ripple effect of one traitor being snuffed out and spawning three in his wake. But that’s the business. The ugly hydra of betrayal that never stops regenerating, until whole branches of the family tree are pruned back.
“I know we’re past the point of deals, so just consider this a last wish—take care of her for me.” I face the barrel when Salvatore raises it, and I don’t flinch—I just try to look past it, toward her, one last look—but the ring of onlookers keeping me pointlessly pinned to the ground gets in the way.
“Sal!”
Marcel yells suddenly, coming across the yard at a pained jog. Marcel’s voice stops Salvatore in his tracks, but Marcel doesn’t slow down to talk or explain once he reaches us. He comes right at me, taking me by the collar and punching me hard across the face, twice. The entourage of men falls back in surprise, getting out of the way as Marcel swings on me.
Somewhere in those milliseconds between the first and second hits, it registers— she told him what happened, and she told him why . I keep my hands down at my side, eating the hits like I’ve earned them. Marcel can still hit damn hard for a man who spent the last week bedridden—or maybe he’s just that pissed off, and there’s no medicine quite like rage.
He throws me down onto the grass, and I don’t fight it, letting him sling me around as much as he likes.
“Marcel?” Sal finally asks, when it seems like he isn’t going to hit me again. Marcel straightens his shirt and his sleeves, trying to shrug on that calm, indifferent demeanor like a coat that he’s grown out of.
“She’s pregnant,” he says tightly.
The barrel of the gun lowers, inch by inch. Salvatore and Marcel look at each other, trying to read each other’s expressions. A tense silence settles. Salvatore’s demeanor stays dark and annoyed, like this just another splinter I’ve wedged under his fingernails.
“And that’s why…?” Salvatore nods to the corpse.
“She told Thaddeus, and he…” The distaste curls under his tongue as he refuses to say it. He doesn’t need to. All the little pieces have fallen into place for them.
And for a single moment, I think maybe I’ve been spared again, that I have defied the odds for the dozenth time in a row, when Salvatore passes the gun to Marcel instead. My mouth quirks, a dry, bitter irony sickening my stomach. Maybe I should have let him bleed out.
“It’s your sister,” Salvatore tells him, “your position he’s been after, and your life he almost took.” Marcel and I both glance at each other, knowing the truth that we both know I haven’t confessed to anyone. “So it’s up to you. You decide what to do with him. All I’ve done is make the wrong fucking choice.”
Marcel and I stare each other down as he makes up his mind, trying to think it through. I watch his expression bounce endlessly between what he wants to do to me, and what he should do to me. If he keeps going like this, I think he might just punch me again.
I know he wants me dead. He probably should, and it was only Tessa’s mercy that spared me from him once. It should be the easiest decision in the world, what he wants right there in his grasp. But the seconds tick on and on, crickets singing in the dead of night.
“My only priority is Ava,” he finally says, “and it always has been. I always thought I had done everything exactly right. That we had a good relationship, that I had toed the line between guardian and brother just right.” His smile turns dry and bitter. “And we still ended up here. In the middle of all this secrecy and shady deals and arranged marriages. I knew you were obsessed with her. At first, I thought it was just another ploy. And then…I realized you were genuine. It wasn’t some act, you were actually just that fucking insane. You really felt something for her. I just never imagined that she…” he sighs, as if it hurts him just to admit, “…that she would feel anything for you. That she’d…” He doesn’t want to picture it, forcing his way past the words.
“I need Ava to be able to trust me again. If I kill you here and now, she never will. And the stress of that…she might lose more than just you, if she hasn’t already.”
My stomach sickens at the thought, but I force myself to listen to the furious roar of denial in my head. That can’t happen, after all this. I want to wrap the girl in bubble wrap, hide her away from everyone and everything, where it’s just us and none of the bullshit that always follows me around.
He turns to Sal.
“I suggest we have a formal trial of the family, but only after the baby is born. Until then, Nico can be on a probationary period, while I make up my mind on how I am going to vote in that trial. And under no circumstances is Ava to know about it.”
“I won’t tell her,” I rasp immediately, my heart pounding. “I swear.”
Salvatore nods to Marcel’s wishes.
Marcel steps forward and offers a hand to help me up. I reach up and take it.
It feels like a trap, all this frantic optimism pumping through my veins, this hope, how I’ve been running out my last life for so goddamn long. I always thought I was more of a dog person, but I’m starting to think I’ve got nine lives.
Immediately, I look to Ava. She sits on the ground and sobs into her hands. But she glances up, sees me coming toward her, and she claws her way to her feet and comes running. I meet her halfway, hoisting her up into my arms. She kisses me deeply, desperately, and when she can’t kiss me anymore through the tears, she buries her head against my neck and just lets me wrap her up in my arms and hold her.
“You’re okay?” she asks.
“I’m okay, baby. I’m okay. I’m right here.”
“They didn’t—?”
“No. It’s fine. It’s fine. I’m gonna be right here to raise this baby with you.”
She wraps me up tight in those arms, her sob so painful it’s almost a scream.
I rub my hand over her back, desperate to calm her down. I stand between her and the others when I see them moving the body in the corner of my eye, but she notices anyway, watching with those cold, emotionless eyes as they haul his limp corpse off. I can’t believe she managed to overpower him, to even be able to stab him that many times.
“I told you I’d use a knife,” she says quietly. They shut off the house lights one by one and drag the body away under the cover of darkness.
I kiss the top of her head. “Goddamn little psycho.”