6. ~Nico~
6
~Nico~
“She was in no state to make that fucking decision!” Julian yelled, kicking the couch. “She was reeling from the crash, from losing our baby. You saw it, right? The guilty look in her eyes? She’s blaming herself. The despair, too? She’s beaten down, Nico. She wasn’t thinking like the Caterina we know. She was compromised.”
“Did you not see me try to stop her?” I ground out, as I paced back and forth smoking up a storm while I eyed my new phone, where I’d been waiting on another text from her for going on two hours.
Caterina: Safe. Evaded hostiles.
That was all she’d sent.
Nothing since.
Yes, there’d been a whole lot of relief for all of us when I’d reported it to the guys, but it wasn’t fucking enough. It just wasn’t.
She wasn’t here.
“You mean, did I see you snatch my gun, barrel through smoke grenade resistance and nearly choke yourself to death, where you then took aim at Stover, about to take him out until Levi stopped you when he noticed the mercenaries headed for them, recognizing that if you’d killed him, Cat would’ve been done for, that she wouldn’t have been able to fight them off in her barely mobile state? Yeah, I saw all that insanity .”
“Well, then.”
“I meant beforehand when it was being discussed. We should have talked her down. We should have—”
I spun back to him. “It’s done, J! It’s fucking done!”
He stilled at my outburst. “I’m not blaming you. That’s not what I’m saying. It’s that manipulative bastard, Stover. He got in her head when she was compromised.”
“You should be blaming me.”
“What?”
I pocketed my phone. I couldn’t fucking look at it anymore, waiting on another message from her, for her to make contact. It was making me fucking crazy. As if that needed any assistance with what had already happened in the last forty-eight hours.
I had a lot of other texts, emails, and missed calls that I needed to return. To my men, to Carlo, to a lot of people. But I couldn’t, while my head wasn’t clear. I needed to take a beat. I needed to find some semblance of rationality, to calm the hell down.
Somehow.
I pulled Caterina’s ring from my pocket, thinking that could help.
But it did the opposite.
Knowing she wasn’t wearing it, what had become a symbol of the love between the four of us… it wasn’t right. It was all fucking wrong. Everything!
“Nico, what did you mean by that?” Julian pushed, coming to me over by the windows that looked out over the Manor grounds.
I shoved my hand through my hair. “I made the call to keep her here in spite of everything, to keep her in the thick of the fucking fight. Milo was adamant about sending her away to a safehouse. But I didn’t listen. And now our baby is gone and our woman is in the wind.”
“You were respecting her choices, her agency,” he said, his eyes darting to the ring and a forlorn look taking him over.
“But I didn’t even try to strike a compromise with her. Because I was so afraid of losing her, if I pushed it even a little.”
“And you were right.”
“Right about what?” Milo’s voice came as he strode into the room. “Chain smoking after ingesting all that smoke earlier? Nah, definitely not that, right, Nico?” he groused, sarcasm dripping. “Dropping ash all over the place when you hate mess, serving to demonstrate just how out of it you currently are? Maybe because you’ve been pacing up and down and, before that, raging, while suffering from a head injury and a dislocated shoulder because you almost died in a brutal car crash?”
I glared at him as I pocketed the ring and took another harsh drag of my smoke. “I can’t worry about that right now.”
He was there in the next second, ripping the cigarette from my lips and stomping it out on the floor.
He frowned when he saw that I didn’t have a reaction to it.
“All right, you’re going to bed. Right now.”
“I can’t just—”
“Things are stable. Stover’s plan worked. Angelo and the militia are focused on tracking Caterina. Levi has assured me that won’t even be possible with Stover’s skills in play. Leo hasn’t made another move. You’re in control of the Marchetti Syndicate soldiers—aside from Leo’s one hundred or so—and most of its business operations. The rest we’re working on. You can afford to get some sleep. You need to. You’re being looked to as Boss now, even with it not being put in place officially while Leo is still at the mansion and bolstering his soldiers with these black ops shitheads. It’s you they’re looking to.”
“We need to find Angelo. That motherfucker killed our child, almost killed me and Caterina, tortured—”
“We will. In fact, it’s already in progress. Levi is setting everything up now, all his equipment he brought with him.”
“And Cat?” Julian asked.
“We already discussed it on the drive home from the hospital. She’s safer off the grid with Stover until we take out Angelo and nullify the hit,” Milo told him. “So you raging about it to Nico really isn’t helping.”
“I can’t just be okay with her not being here. Can you honestly say that you are?”
“No. Of course not. But she is safer right now. That’s what we need to focus on. And it’s also not such a bad idea for her to have some time away from being in the thick of everything.”
“Now she’s at a safe house,” I muttered. “Too little, too late, though.”
“What?” Milo asked.
I slumped down onto the couch. “I made a mistake.”
“What mistake?”
“I shouldn’t have shut it down when you were pushing for us to sequester her away.”
He perched on the coffee table in front of me. “Well, there’s nothing to discuss there. You were right, Nico.”
I shook my head. “Come on.”
“You were. If we’d done that, we would have lost her trust. It would have broken us apart.”
“Instead, we lost our child. And her.”
“First off, Caterina’s not lost. She’ll return. That’s the plan and no matter what happens, Stover won’t be fucking deviating from it. I know it and I also know that if worse comes to worst, you’ll move heaven and fucking earth to make it so. It’s what you always do—protect us at all costs. You always find a way.”
“Why do you think I’ve been telling Cat that whenever I’ve needed to comfort her?” Julian said, coming over and perching on the arm of the couch beside me. “It’s because of you. That’s what you do, what you bring about.”
Milo nodded in agreement, then told me, “What happened with the crash, losing our baby, that was all on Angelo. He’s responsible for that. Not you and not Caterina.”
It was easy to say that, but a whole other thing to accept.
I was the one who’d been driving.
I’d missed that shot that I’d fired at Angelo.
I wasn’t… I wasn’t used to guilt.
As I’d told Caterina, I did experience it sometimes. When the pressure became too much, I had to let myself feel it.
But it wasn’t often.
And I could always shove it back down again at my will.
That was how practiced I’d become with it over the years.
But this was different.
The fact that I was exhausted physically as well as mentally right now really wasn’t helping.
Fuck.
I pushed off the couch. “You’re right. I do need to get some sleep.” I looked out at the two of them as they rose with me. “You should as well. I’ll go tell Levi the same thing.”
“I already have,” Milo stated. “He wants to finish setting up his equipment, which he says should take another hour, and then he’s going to crash in the spare room next to Julian’s.”
“All right, good.” I staggered in my step. Yeah, I really had overdone it since the crash.
So much physicality, so much rage, the fucking grief.
And now being separated from Caterina.
All of it was a mammoth strain on keeping my feral side leashed.
I’d already been holding it at bay for so long as it was.
My outbursts at the hospital had been just that—bursts. The grief and upset of it all had made it so, limited to only that. But the way things were going, and with having our foursome currently fractured without Caterina here, and with what we still needed to go up against to end this nightmare, I feared that it wouldn’t be able to remain checked.
So many people were counting on me.
I was stepping into the role of Boss of the Marchetti Syndicate.
Unleashing like a monstrous entity geared toward utter destruction and brutal bloodshed was off the table.
If I couldn’t get a handle on it, I’d become no better than Santino and Marco.
Me taking power was supposed to be different, to bring about a new era.
One of honor.
The days of unhinged men who mistakenly thought themselves gods would die with our enemies.
And I had to ensure I kept it that way.
I had to be better.
I fucking had to be.