Chapter 18
ELLE
Idon’t say another word for the rest of the car ride as Nico drives us back to his apartment.
This time, he doesn’t take me to his safe house out in the middle of the desert.
This time, he winds down a few city streets until he reaches an unassuming-looking building that could double as both an apartment building and an old factory.
It’s set off the Strip, out of plain sight, but not in the middle of the sandy stretch.
At some point on the drive, he tells me why he doesn’t want me to be alone in my apartment tonight.
It has something to do with my “stunt” at the nightclub and the chance that one of those men might still be a threat to me.
But I can read between the words that he is saying and what he really means—Nico is worried that my father is a threat to me now, just like he was to my mother.
The funny thing is, though, that I don’t think my father could possibly hurt me any more than he already has.
He took away my mom, and he set my life on a course of pure obsession for more than a decade after that.
I’m not sure there’s any physical damage that he can do to me that would hurt any worse.
“If my father wanted to hurt me, he’s had a million chances to do so already,” I say when Nico opens the car door to let me out.
He gives me his hand, but I refuse it because I just feel like sinking into my own self-despair right now as I follow him into the building. He doesn’t say anything until we get into the elevator and start to go up.
“Your father had no reason to hurt you before,” he says quietly.
“You didn’t know about his involvement until tonight.
Until his confession a few hours ago, everything has been speculation and hunches.
Now there is concrete proof that he was behind your mother’s murder.
This whole time up until now, you’ve mostly just been—”
“Chasing ghosts,” I interrupt as I finish his sentence for him.
“Yeah,” Nico says, taking my hand as the elevator doors open.
This time, I let him.
“He won’t hurt me,” I say as I step out.
Nico stays quiet while we walk into his modest place, and he flips on a light. I stand in the middle of the room and stare out the window at the Vegas Strip off in the distance. I haven’t been to this part of the city before; it’s more removed and quieter here, and it suits my mood.
He reaches into his fridge and takes out a beer.
“Do you want one?” he asks. “Sorry, I don’t have any fancy wine or top-shelf liquor. I’m not a fancy-pants higher-up like your friend’s husband is.”
“Do you mean Valentina?” I ask, nodding in response to accepting a cold beer. Anything to dull my senses a bit more after hearing that my father is a monster is something that I will gladly accept.
“Yeah, Luciano is a wealthy man, even though he’s essentially just a right-hand man still,” Nico says as he hands me a beer before going to sit down on the couch.
“I heard he was trying to take over Vincent’s whole crew for a while, but I guess Valentina cleared him of that idea.
It was for the best; leadership isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.
Heavy is the head that wears the crown.”
I take a swig from the beer bottle and join him on the couch. “Your head seems pretty heavy too, even without a crown to wear. Is it all worth it?” I ask.
“What?”
“All of it—being involved with the mafia, carrying the weight of regret over things you’ve done or not done,” I say as I sink back against the cushion.
“Never allowing yourself to trust anyone? I think that maybe you’re on to something there, actually.
Hell, if my own father has been lying to me my entire life, I guess there really isn’t hope of being able to ever trust anyone at all.
It’s like the whole world is out to trick me.
Maybe my old therapist was right. Maybe everything that I’ve done has just been one big, useless coping mechanism, and none of it changes anything. ”
The beer tastes good when I take another swig of it. I’m not even a beer drinker usually, but for some reason, it’s refreshing tonight. I guess I just don’t want to think or care about anything else right now. But sitting here next to Nico makes “not caring” hard to do.
“You both rescued me tonight from the goons at that nightclub and also delivered some of the worst news that I’ve ever heard,” I say as I turn to look at him.
“I don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel about that.
I can’t decide if you’re my enemy or my hero.
I think I’ve been vacillating between the two my entire adult life. ”
“Trust me,” he shrugs. “I’m no hero.”
“Perhaps not,” I shrug. “But it’s getting a hell of a lot harder to keep thinking of you as my enemy, especially when you keep saving my life. Although I’m not really sure that I want to be saved anymore. What kind of life is it when you’re all alone in the world?”
“You’re not all alone in this world, Elle,” Nico says as he sets his beer down on the nearby end table and reaches his hand up to sweep the hair out of my eyes. “You never have been.”
Before, we shared a kiss and then gave in to our most primal desires, it was passionate and reckless, filled with lust and fueled by an almost forbidden sense of heightened emotion.
But now, as Nico’s pale blue eyes stare back at me, I feel a connection to him like I’ve never felt before.
Instead of chasing after the sheer physical attraction that has been building between us this whole time, I feel tenderness in the way that his hand grazes my cheek as he moves a strand of my hair.
I feel a deep emotional intimacy that I thought I wasn’t capable of feeling.
It feels as if the man who has tried for years to close himself off to everyone else is finally letting himself be present and vulnerable with me.
Tonight, he isn’t a ghost at all. Tonight, he’s mine.
Confronted with the devastating truth about my own family, I wrestle with my own moral complexity.
Here I thought I wanted to uncover the truth, never realizing that the truth was even darker than I feared—and also infinitely more beautiful as I stare back at the man who hasn’t left my mind since the night this all began.
He leans forward, pressing his lips to mine in a way that is soft and slow, and a deliberate sensation of yearning passes between us as our mouths meet.
It’s strange how my life can crumble and resurrect so many times on a whim.
The night my mother was shot, my entire world changed, and the best parts of it ended.
I spent so much time rebuilding it after that.
I was driven by a purpose, a quest for truth, even if it was a misguided one.
Tonight, all of that came undone again. The man who was supposed to be my father and my protector turned out to be the monster I’ve been searching for this whole time.
And the man who was supposed to be my enemy is now the man with whom I feel the safest. It’s as if everything is upside down and the opposite of what it should be.
And yet, I feel more okay with it than I should.
Deep down in my psyche, it feels like a part of me was hoping the Ghost would turn out to be my savior all along.
Like in that fairytale where the princess kisses the toad, and the amphibian turns out to be a handsome prince.
Except this time, it’s a ghost instead of a frog, and I’m not a princess.
Nico’s tongue wraps around mine, and he tastes like everything I need tonight—comfort, affection, understanding.
He’s the only one who truly knows what I’ve been through, the obsession for justice that I feel, because he’s been through it too.
He’s the only one that I feel like I can trust, as insane as that sounds.
I lean against him, moving my body closer to his as I reach around his shoulder and pull him closer. My words spill softly into his mouth as I whisper to him.
“I wanted to hate you,” I say as his hands trail down the front of my body, loosening my clothes and making my skin erupt in a sensation of excited tingles.
“I know,” he says as he continues to kiss me. “I tried to let you hate me. I tried to keep you away.”
“You failed,” I say as passion overwhelms me.
I reach for his pants, dipping my hand down the front of them and wrapping my fingers around the stiff cock that presses into my palm.
Nico groans and pushes himself harder against me as we both race to remove the fabric between us. The urgency is there, but so is something more—a feeling that I don’t want to name yet until I’m certain.
This time, we don't stand a chance of making it into a bedroom.
By the time our feverish hands have peeled away the last of our clothing, we're tangled on the worn leather couch, the material cool against my heated skin.
Nico's weight shifts above me as he carefully guides my back down against the soft cushions, his olive skin gleaming in the half-light.
I bite my lower lip, fighting to keep my hips from bucking upward as his hardness slides against the sensitive skin of my inner thighs, leaving a trail of warmth.
For a moment, he hovers there, his dark eyes locked on mine, pupils dilated with desire, the muscles in his forearms tense as he holds himself just barely at my entrance, the promise of what's to come making my breath catch.
His thumb traces the outline of my collarbone, then slides lower, circling my nipple until it hardens beneath his touch.
I wonder what he's waiting for, but not for long before his lips part to speak.
“The last time we did this, I knew that something had irrevocably changed, not just between us but inside me,” he says, straining to keep himself physically contained until he finishes telling me what he needs to say.
“I felt all the walls that I’d carefully built around my heart come down, and I questioned whether this was just our mutual trauma driving us together or something more.
Now I know. Through this dance that you and I have been doing throughout the years, we’ve seen through each other.
I don’t know how, but trust has built gradually between us, and it’s opened up a place for emotional honesty and acceptance to bloom.
I don’t feel like the man I was before you came back into my life. ”
“You mean before I got serious about hunting you,” I tease playfully.
“That too,” Nico smirks. “Elle, we’ve overcome shared darkness and embraced the cracks within each other.
Even as we’ve kept the rest of the world away from us, we’ve let each other in.
I don’t know if I can ever help you truly find closure or heal the emotional scars that you carry with you, but I find myself trying to do that for you. ”
The way Nico speaks is so raw and laid bare.
It’s enough to make me think that maybe this is all the closure that I need.
Maybe having him—the Ghost—is my way to heal from that night and move on from my past. This whole time, I’ve been trying to “solve” it so that I can put it behind me.
But maybe I’m not supposed to put it behind me at all.
Maybe Nico and I are supposed to move forward together.
I open my mouth and say something that I never thought in a million years I would say.
“I think I might be falling in love with you,” I gasp as I hear my own words aloud. “Is that crazy?”
Nico’s blue eyes light up as if he’s looking directly at the sun, reflecting off his pupils and emanating a pure bluish light in the night.
“It might be,” he says with a sultry smile as he slowly pushes himself into my waiting body. “But if it is, then I might be crazy too.”
I moan with pleasure as I feel him enter me, and Nico puts his mouth over mine to catch the sound as if he wants to share it.
Tonight, I found out that my father killed my mother.
I discovered the answer to the question that I have been asking for what feels like forever.
And tonight, instead of continuing my relentless pursuit of the Ghost who crouched in the alley and watched, I embrace him as if he’s the only thing in the world that can make things right for me again.
And in the middle of the night, after we’ve had each other not once but twice, Nico wraps me in his arms and holds me as I close my eyes and fall asleep.
It’s the first night in a very long time that I don’t dream about the Ghost, but instead I dream about Nico Vitale, the man who saved me from death that night and who now watches over me like my own, personal protective shadow.