Chapter 10
NICO
Where do I even begin?
Now that Elle is here, all of my carefully thought-out plans seem to fall by the wayside.
I brought her here to tell her just enough to get her to understand and to back off her relentless pursuit of me.
I’d already decided which things I was going to tell her and which things I wasn’t.
I had responses planned for her questions, and diversions masquerading as answers to give in response to the questions I don’t want to answer.
But now that Elle is here, standing in the dark room not more than a few feet from me, I seem to have trouble sticking to my plan.
She looks so beautiful, so strong, and so innocent. And something inside of me feels an overwhelming need to protect her from all the things that threaten to ruin her life—some closer to her than she thinks.
When she asks me questions, my premeditated, well-laid answers falter. And I find myself in a position that I haven’t been in, not since the night my brother was killed — a position of reacting recklessly.
“Why did you bring me here?” She asks as she stands there in the dimly lit room with the moonlight streaming through the window reflecting off her wide, hazel eyes.
She’s mesmerizing, and I hate it. Her mere presence next to me makes me want to reach out and sweep the waves of chestnut hair away from her face so that I can do something else reckless, something that I promised myself I would never allow—an intimate connection with someone.
My brother’s warning flashes through my brain like a red alert. Don’t get involved. Stay detached. Do the job.
“I brought you here to talk,” I say plainly. “I want to answer some of your questions, so you will stop your obsessive pursuit of me.”
I motion toward the kitchen table for us to sit down and reach toward the wall to turn on the light. Elle pulls out a chair and sits.
“I’m all ears,” she says as she pulls a small notepad and pen out of her pocket.
“No notes,” I say.
“Fine,” she frowns. “But then after you’re finished, I have some questions to ask that I want answers to.”
I nod, unsure whether I’ll oblige her request. We’ll see where this goes, I suppose.
I’m already breaking all of my usual rules, so I might as well allow her to stay for a while and play this through.
I take a seat across the table from her, keenly aware that even the wide, wooden tabletop doesn’t seem to put enough physical space between us.
Then, I take a moment to think and breathe before I speak.
“You want to create a criminal profile of me,” I say, remembering all the tidbits of character evidence she has on her apartment wall, all of it about me and my life.
“It’s what I do,” she says.
“Do you normally spend years profiling each criminal?”
“No,” she says with narrowed eyes. “You’re different. You’re personal.”
“I see,” I nod. “And you want to find out what makes me tick?”
“I want to find out everything about you. I want to know how you became the Ghost, what role you play in the mafia, and what you did that night in the alley when my mother was killed. I want to know why it seems like you’ve been following me for years, too. And I want to know why you—”
“Wait,” I interrupt, already knowing what her last question will be. She wants to know why I didn’t pull the trigger sooner that night. “One thing at a time.”
I think about her questions, wondering to myself how far I want to go with this.
But I didn’t bring her out here for nothing.
It’s hard for me to trust anyone, especially after what happened back in Moscow.
I haven’t ever trusted anyone since that night.
Walking into a trap and having your brother tortured and killed in front of your eyes will do that to a person and leave trust issues that are nearly impossible to overcome.
But in order to get Elle to tamp down her hot pursuit of answers, I’m going to need to reveal a few glimpses of my past to her.
I take the first question head-on and give an honest answer.
“My older brother was the Ghost,” I say. “He was two years older than me, and when we were in our late teens back in Russia, we were both part of the Bratva.”
“The Bratva?” Elle’s innocence makes her seem softer, less like a criminal profiler and more like a woman caught up in something over her head.
“The Brothers’ Circle, a brotherhood of Russian organized crime,” I explain. “Surely you’re aware that many of the people you have dealings with, and even friendships with, are associated with the Russian mafia here in Las Vegas.”
“Yes, of course,” she stammers, not wanting to appear na?ve. “I just didn’t realize that it was also called something else. And Valentina and I haven’t spoken in years.”
I raise an eyebrow at her unsolicited remark. I never specifically mentioned Valentina. Clearly, being at Luc and Valentina’s wedding has stirred up some past unresolved feelings about their friendship.
“When I was in the Bratva with my brother,” I continue, glossing over her remark. “We were trained to be the best at what we did.”
“You mean kill people.”
“Yes. I see no point in sugarcoating any of this for you now. You’ve already seen me kill once before, Elle. But the extent to which my ledger runs red with the blood of others I’ve killed is a lot worse than you and your research have uncovered.”
She sits back in her chair, and her chest heaves with a weighty sigh as if she’s bracing herself. “Tell me.”
“My brother and I were young prodigies. He was the best at what he did in those days. I was still in training,” I explain as I paint the picture for her.
“He was silent, stealthy, and above all deadly. The leadership used to say that he could kill so quickly that no one ever saw him coming or going, that he was like an apparition. I used to tease him about being a ghost until finally the nickname stuck.” I pause not to remember the details of those years but to forget them instead.
“We were raised in isolation, apart from the rest of the boys our age. My brother was my best and only friend for much of my life. He was the only one who knew what it was like to be groomed as a Bratva prodigy, and I had much to learn from him still.”
“You speak of him as if he’s gone,” she says, picking up on both my words and my tone.
Even after all these years, it’s difficult to hide the psychological scars and the deep feeling of loss.
“The night that I could shadow my brother on what was supposed to be an easy, uneventful hit job, there was an unexpected target at the scene—another man who wasn’t supposed to be there and who trained a gun on my brother before he was able to carry out the hit,” I continue as I relive the worst night of my entire life.
“I was supposed to stay quiet and hidden. But they, the Bratva leadership, were supposed to be correct in their intel gathering and assessment that there would be no one else there. They were wrong, and it caused me to make the wrong choice. I sprang out of hiding and alerted my brother to the other man’s presence, and because of that choice, he was tortured and killed in front of my eyes. ”
“Surely, you know you can’t blame yourself for your brother’s death,” Elle says as she tries to dig into my psyche. “You were trying to save him.”
“I blame the Bravta leadership, mostly,” I say, pushing down the swelling guilt and regret that haunts me to this day.
“And I blame the fact that I trusted them. That being said, I acted too quickly and recklessly. If I had waited and stayed hidden, my brother might still have been able to handle it. He still finished the job and killed our target, and he may have even averted the shot from the other man. My brother could hear everything around him, and it’s quite possible that he already knew there was a gun on him.
If I’d given it more time, things might have ended differently. ”
“Is that why you waited and watched as the man in the alley shot my mother?” She asks, cutting straight to the meat of her questioning.
“Is it because you didn’t want to act too soon, like you did with your brother?
I can understand that the event left you with a paralyzing trauma response, but sometimes inaction can be just as deadly as violence, Nico.
You can’t hide in the shadows of your past forever. ”
Her words shoot a painful truth through my chest that cuts as deep as any bullet ever would.
It makes me angry that she can see inside me the way she does.
It disarms me and threatens to tear down the walls that I’ve carefully erected around my heart so that I would never have to endure anything like the night my brother died again.
“I wasn't paralyzed,” I remind her. “I pulled the trigger that saved your life. One might be grateful for such an act.”
“Of course,” she apologizes. It feels like her apology is more done because she thinks it’s expected, versus genuinely meaning it. “It’s just that I miss my mom. You have no idea what it was like growing up alone without a mother and with only a father who—”
Her voice trails off as her eyes peer across the table at me. She stopped herself short of saying something about her father, but she didn’t need to. I already know what a terrible person he is, even greater than she does.
“Actually, I know exactly what it’s like to grow up alone.
My brother was all that I had. Our parents were gone, and the Bratva leadership was less than familial in all that mattered.
” Which is why, I circle back around to finally answer her first question.
“When he died, I took over his identity as the Ghost. It was a way for me to embody him, to carry on his legacy, and to avenge his death. It was a way for me to step into my place as a lethal assassin and to finally embody the lesson that he was still trying to teach me through his last, dying words.”
“What was the lesson?” she asks curiously.