Chapter 8
NICO
Elle Monroe is a fascinating woman. Her obsession with me makes her even more fascinating. What is it about the single thread that I've woven into her life that makes her so consumed with dissecting my identity? I need to find out.
So, while she watches me, I secretly watch her too.
Except that my surveillance goes well beyond the usual practices.
While Elle is talking to some people here in the city who went to Luciano’s wedding in Italy, trying to get them to cough up any information they have on the Ghost, I head to her apartment.
I’m fully confident that neither Vincent, Isla, nor Luc will let any information about me leave their lips.
They all know how this works—in order for me to help them as the Ghost, I need to remain an enigma.
None of them are willing to risk severing a relationship with me because all will need my help and services at some point.
Valentina is a bit of a wild card, especially since I know that she and Elle used to be close friends.
But as word would have it, they’ve been on the outs for a while now, and Valentina is now devoted to Luc and protecting all the secrecy that she is marrying into.
So, I doubt that she’ll say anything either, although she probably doesn’t even know much to begin with.
The men I deal with frequently don’t even tell their wives or families about me.
My secrecy keeps me, and sometimes them, alive.
Elle’s apartment is almost too easy to get into.
You’d think that as a cop’s daughter, she’d put a better lock in or set up some security cameras.
But then again, to call her father a cop, even though he technically is one, is making the word do a lot of heavy lifting.
Detective Monroe is as corrupt as they come. Elle doesn’t know the half of it.
I slide the lock open and step inside, closing her apartment door behind me so that none of the neighbors see me in here. I’ll be fast, and I’ll be gone before she gets back.
Invading her private space feels wrong, even though snooping around in places that I shouldn’t be is something that I do quite often. There’s something different about Elle, something that makes this feel more personal.
I can hear my brother’s words echoing in the back of my head, reminding me not to take anything personal, not to feel, just to stay detached and focus on getting the job done.
The job here is to see how much Elle has found out about me, and to take a peek into who she is, outside of what I already know of her.
I look around the apartment a bit, then walk into her small home office.
This is her private space, the room where she keeps all of her secrets, all her off-the-books obsessions, to herself.
I can see them all pinned up to the boards on the wall behind her desk, and they are all about me.
Photographs, notes, printed out screenshots of news articles, including the one about the night her mother was murdered—the entire office is covered with evidentiary tidbits, pieces of the puzzle she is trying to solve.
Her notes and profiles of me are extensive, and if I’m not mistaken, it looks like they go well beyond a professional interest. She’s not just trying to solve a case or even just get closure on the crime that stole her mother from her.
She’s trying to figure me out, not just as the man in the alleyway that night who fired the second shot, but me.
Why?
Why would she care to dig up this much stuff on me?
I understand she feels like she needs closure and that she demands answers from that night.
But some of the research she’s done on this profiling board of hers goes well beyond that.
There is information here dating all the way back to the years when I was in the Bratva, information on my time in Moscow.
She certainly doesn’t know everything. But that said, Elle has dug up more on me than I thought she would be capable of finding. It’s more than anyone else ever had.
I take some time to look at her things a bit closer and to rifle through some papers on her desk and the files on her computer.
She really should be more careful about security.
It’s too easy to get into her laptop. Once inside her files, it’s a veritable candy land of profile notes.
The professional notes that she’s been keeping are thorough but not surprising.
Her attention to detail and the accuracy with which she has evaluated the information she’s collected are impressive.
But when I sit down and read through some of her notations, it catches me off guard.
Cold, distant, and detached, which means that Nico likely struggles with vulnerability.
How could she possibly have garnered that just from what she’s learned about me from afar? I don’t care how good a profiler she is or how many psychology degrees she has; she still can’t see inside my head.
Isolated by choice, perhaps stemming from past trauma.
Perhaps he’s haunted by something too. Maybe the Ghost has skeletons in his closet relating to past things he’s done—guilt over all the violence?
I wonder if he has always been this way, or if Nico experienced a transformative moment that shaped his life.
I sit there stunned as I read through Elle’s profile notes and her personal remarks that are added into the footnotes.
I want to hate her. And I want to hate the fact that she is poking around in my life.
But it’s hard to hate a woman who seems just about as complicated and possibly even broken as I am.
Then there’s the matter of how we both seem to be simultaneously obsessed and suspicious of each other.
I can feel a crack forming in my promise to myself of staying emotionally detached from everyone and everything.
I should treat Elle as if she were one of my assignments.
Protecting her and keeping her away from my life is what I should do.
I should continue to throw a wrench in her way so that she drops this wild goose chase and moves on with her life.
She’s spent too long already being mentally trapped inside that night.
The best way to do that is to walk away from her and let this obsession die a natural death, no matter how long it takes or how frustrated it makes her.
I stare at the computer screen and then at her wall of bits and pieces again.
I’ve been trailing Elle for days now, studying her, and letting her see glimpses of my presence, like dropping tiny breadcrumbs for her to find.
I wanted to see how far she would go before giving up and throwing in the towel. But it’s feeling like she just won’t.
And as much as I know I should walk away and let this all die down—I can’t.
This Elle still reminds me too much of the little girl from the alley—the one who watched her mother die.
I’ve been justifying all of this time and energy I have put into watching Elle as a way to make sure she doesn’t get too close or find out too much about the Ghost. I’ve justified stalking her in my mind as just observation.
Now I see that the only way to accomplish my goal is for me to leave.
If I dropped off her radar and left no trace of myself behind for her to find, then perhaps both of our obsessions would cease.
But even sitting here, I know that’s not going to happen.
I can’t seem to make myself walk away from this woman.
I stand up from her desk and take one last look around the room before leaving.
While giving a quick look over the rest of the apartment, I formulate a new plan in my head, one that can give me the excuse masquerading as a reason to keep following her around.
She needs my protection, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.
Vegas is full of mafia criminals who want her to leave them alone.
And her father is a very dangerous man; she just doesn’t know it.
That puts Elle in a position of being around both sides of the dangers in Las Vegas—the mafia criminals who don’t have any sort of moral code at all when it comes to killing innocent women and children, and the crooked cop father who would just as easily use his daughter as a human shield if it came down to that.
There’s no atrocity that Hale Monroe won’t commit.
But the excuse of protecting her is just that—an excuse. It feels more like I’m claiming her. And that would be one of those feelings that my brother warned me about. I can hear him scolding me in my head—no attachment, no personal involvement, no feelings.
Even though I know his dying lesson is one that I should be listening to, I know that these conflicted emotions I’m having about Elle Monroe are the first cracks in the armor of emotional isolation that I’ve built.
Once I’ve seen all that I can see, and more than I ever intended to find, I slip back out of the apartment, securing the lock again as if no one had been here in her absence.
Elle could be my undoing; she knows too much, and she’s not going to stop digging around until I either disappear or she finds the answers she’s looking for—answers that she thinks she wants but that I can assure her she doesn’t. But can I stop myself from getting even closer to her?
The answer to that question has already been decided, and anything else would just be a lie.
As I walk down the city streets, keenly attuned to the constant thrum of motion around me, I think about the best way to handle this. Even if I continue to watch over her, and that entangles our lives even further together, how do I handle it in a way that doesn’t compromise who I am as the Ghost?
If I continue to keep her on the outside, as I’ve done with everyone since the day my brother died, Elle will continue to push further and find out more about me.
Letting her do that means risking that she might put together the profile of a ruthless killer, one that she thinks she might need to expose or go up against. As I see it, the only way to prevent that from happening if I intend to stay around is for me to let her in.
Just a little, of course. The mere thought of letting anyone into my life stirs up many past traumas that I don’t care to revisit.
Being the Ghost is almost like a mask that can hide who I used to be, even from myself.
I’ll choose only a few things to tell her about, a few morsels of truth that will keep her appetite for answers at bay.
If she can understand me and understand where I’ve come from, then maybe that will be the start of her path toward true closure.
Instead of spending her days chasing me, she can focus on rooting out corruption of the likes of which her father brings to this city.
The Mafia has its fair share of wicked people doing wicked things, but going up against the powerful families, especially on these sorts of solo reckless ventures that Elle has a reputation for pursuing, is a slow walk toward a death sentence.
Going up against people like her father, who corrupts the system from within and pulls the strings for crimes to go unseen and unpunished, is a much safer bet for her.
I can protect her, as long as she stops trying to unravel my life.
The feelings rising within me are formidable.
It’s as if a protective, possessive match has been lit, and I can’t snuff it out.
I’ve been isolated for so long that I didn’t know that I could even feel this way, so fiercely protective of anyone else.
This is going to force me into a state of emotional vulnerability that I have long since avoided, and for what?
For years, I’ve chosen withdrawal rather than confrontation or personal relationships.
And now, I shake my head as I realize that I’m about to risk all of it for the girl from the alley.
After thinking it through, I come up with a plan. I always have a plan, another lesson that I learned the night my brother died. Plans keep things from going sideways.
I have a safe house outside the city, a few miles out into the desert.
It’s remote, secluded, and the only place that I know I can talk freely without worrying that anyone could overhear.
I had the whole place outfitted with security monitoring thanks to my very tech-savvy friend, so I can be completely confident that no listening device or surveillance intrusion of any kind can get inside.
That is the place where I’ll have Elle come so that I can tell her a few things and try to get her to understand what she’s been poking her nose into.
She and I have been at odds since this all began years ago in that alleyway, and the more she’s tried to poke into my life, the more trouble it’s caused me. But yet, for reasons that I can’t yet explain, I find myself becoming gradually drawn to her with an intensity that I just can’t shake.
I expect that she’ll bombard me with questions, but thankfully, I’m adept at thinking strategically and able to make quick decisions under pressure. Whatever she throws at me, I’ll be able to come up with a response to it.
I decide to leave a series of clues to guide Elle to the location.
That way, there’s no message or paper trail, and no in-person meeting in public that could fall into the wrong hands or be watched by others.
Elle is smart enough to follow the clues I set, and unless she proves me wrong this time, she’s brave enough to follow them too.
If she wants answers that badly, bad enough to spend years trying to sniff them out, then she’ll come.
And when she does, I’ll be ready with at least a few portions of the truth to satiate her appetite and hopefully keep things from escalating to where she puts herself in danger or compromises my movements throughout the city.
I’ll give her the hook and see if she bites.
Of course, while I go about setting up this little plan of mine, I forget about the one thing that I probably should have thought about a bit more.
What if she’s not the only one walking into the little trap I’m setting for her to settle this game of evasion that we’re both playing?
What if I’m leading myself into a trap, too?
I usually like to think that I’m the cleverest person in the room, but I might have met my match with Elle Monroe, and my convoluted feelings about her might blind me. I guess I’m about to find out.