Chapter 20
ELLE
“You don’t understand, Elle,” my father sputters as he and his accomplice sit at the table in front of me. “It would have ruined everything—me, my career, your upbringing. Our entire lives would have been destroyed—she was going to destroy them.”
I’m still in shock that Nico did this, that he brought my father and my mother’s killer back to his apartment and to me.
At first, I was horrified, terrified, and furious.
Hell, I was pretty much every emotion in the book all at once.
But then, a sort of strange calm came over me when I realized he did this for me.
Nico is giving me the closure that I’ve spent my whole life searching for.
“You don’t have to listen to him, Elle,” Nico says as he stands behind both men, ready to smack the butt of his gun against their skulls if they make any sort of move toward me. “Just because he’s your father doesn’t mean that you need to listen to him spout lies and bullshit.”
“I know,” I nod. “And it’s okay, I want to hear what he has to say. I want to hear his story.”
I turn back toward my father and can’t hide the look of disgust that I feel. “You destroyed us, Dad. You destroyed my childhood, my whole world. The only thing that you protected was yourself, and the corruption that you were trying so hard to hide.”
“She was going to leave us, Elle,” he whines like the broken man that he is.
Funny, I’m finally seeing now that my father was always a broken man, and I just never wanted to believe it. But as he sits here now looking pathetic as he tries to make up excuses for having done the unthinkable, I see him for what he is—a weak monster.
“She wasn’t going to leave us,” I correct him. “She was going to leave you. And if I’d known all that she knew about you back then, I would have done the exact same thing.”
I listen as my father rattles on about all the reasons that he “did what he did”.
He has a laundry list of excuses, all of which are paper-thin, ranging from needing to make more money to support his family to being “disillusioned” by the promises the mafia made to him, and finally landing on at least a partial truth of just being a flawed and greedy man overpowered by his selfish ambitions.
When he’s finished, he dares to ask for my forgiveness.
I can hear Nico take in a sharp breath, as if he’s angered that my father would even think he is deserving of any mercy or redemption.
Nico and I have grown closer in a way that I’m unable to describe.
It’s as if this joint, depraved quest of ours has allowed us access into each other’s innermost thoughts.
He reaches across the table to hand me his gun, knowing that I know how to handle one already and trusting me enough to call the shots of how things go from here.
I take it from him and wrap my finger around the trigger, aiming it down at the table for now.
“Whatever you choose to do here, Elle,” Nico says quietly. “I’ll take care of any consequences or mess that ensues. You don’t need to worry about anything other than claiming the closure that you need. I’ll make the rest disappear.”
My father squirms in his seat. He knows exactly what the Ghost means by that. I could kill my dad right now, shoot him right in the chest, the same way that he had my mother killed, and no one would ever come knocking on my door about it. Nico would make sure of that.
It’s tempting to want to avenge my mother, and to meet the violence she endured with more violence.
I don’t feel at all sorry for my father.
In fact, I hate him more than I have ever hated anyone, except for the man sitting next to him who pulled the trigger that night.
But I still don’t want to kill him. It wouldn’t bring my mom back to do so, and it would only make me feel worse and feel more like him.
“Please, Elle,” he begs. “If I could go back and do things differently, I would. I’ve learned my lesson.”
“No, you haven’t,” I frown at him. “And killing you won’t teach it to you either. Here’s what you’re going to do, Dad. You’re going to quit the police force for starters.”
“What? I can’t,” he protests. “Being a cop is my whole life. It’s all that I know how to do. If I’m not on the force, then I’m nothing.”
“You are nothing,” Nico growls from behind him.
“You’re going to quit the force immediately,” I repeat. “And then you’re going to leave Las Vegas. I don’t care where in the world you go, but it better be far away from here, and you’d better stay far away from me. I never want to see or speak to you again. Do you understand me?”
My father stares at me in silence as if he’s testing to see how much I mean what I say.
“Elle, sweetheart,” he says finally. “You can’t really mean that you—”
Before he can finish his sentence, I lift the gun in my hand and shoot the man sitting beside him in the head. It happens so fast that I think it even surprises Nico. The Ghost doesn’t flinch, but his moon-blue pupils flicker momentarily in response.
My father’s mouth hangs open after watching what I’ve just done.
His face is now splattered with the blood and brain bits of the mafia shooter that he hired to kill my mom when I was a child.
Behind the spray of crimson red blood, my father’s face turns a pale white.
His hands start to involuntarily shake as the shooter’s body slumps forward onto the table with only some of his head left intact.
Without reservation, I glance back at my father and use my sleeve to wipe the blood spray off my face.
I’d be lying if I said that killing the man who shot my mother didn’t feel good in ways that I wish it didn’t.
It feels like I brought things back full circle, an eye-for-an-eye kind of justice.
I’ve worked alongside the justice department and the police for way too long to think that the man would have ever faced the punishment he deserved.
Thankfully, he just did now. I made sure of it.
“That is what I’ll do to you if you don’t do as I say,” I tell my father with an unwavering voice. "If I ever see you after today, I will kill you. And if I ever hear from you again, or catch word that you’re anywhere around, I will send Nico to kill you.”
My father’s eyes dart to the side as he tries to see Nico out of his peripheral vision behind him.
“You’ve sided with an assassin,” he whispers, no longer arguing with me about what my demands are if he wants to keep his head attached to his shoulders. "You’ve aligned yourself with the Ghost, a mafia monster. Your mother would be ashamed.”
Perhaps it’s all the adrenaline that makes me feel as wild and unhinged as I currently do in this moment, or maybe it’s the feeling that I’ve just lifted a weight that I’ve been carrying around on my shoulders for years, but I can’t help but let out a laugh at his insane remark.
“The Ghost isn’t the monster here, Dad,” I hiss at him. “You are.”
With that, I look up and lock eyes with Nico.
And as if on cue, he reads my mind and reaches to take the gun from my hand.
As he lifts it back across the table, he jerks his wrist to smack the barrel of the gun sharply against my father’s head, knocking him unconscious and causing him to slump back in his chair.
“What happens now?” I ask, finally starting to feel my hands shake as I come down from the heightened moment.
“Now, I take care of all of this,” he says as he sweeps his hand over the table. “I’ll dispose of the shooter’s body and tie up all the loose ends at the nightclub. No one will question his disappearance. The bartender there owes me a favor and an alibi.”
“And what about my father?” I ask. “I meant what I said. I don’t ever want to see or hear from him again, Nico.”
“I know,” he nods as he walks around the table and stuffs his gun back into his holster.
He reaches up to tuck my blood-matted hair behind my ear.
“I’ll get him out of the city on a private plane and have him taken far from here.
I’ll make sure that when he wakes up, he’s roughed up and scared straight enough to know that you’re not bluffing.
Although after what you just did, I doubt he’d question you again. ”
“And after that, this will all be over?”
“Do you feel like you’ve been able to get the closure you’ve sought for so long?” he asks.
I nod, and then, without warning, I start to cry.
“Then yes,” he says as he wraps his arms around me. “This is all over now.”
I don’t even know why I’m crying right now as I bury my face against Nico’s chest while he holds me.
It’s as if everything is flooding over me at once—the death of my mom, losing the father that I thought I knew, the end of an obsession that I just violently terminated.
But even as I stand here crying and letting out all the emotions that I’ve bottled up so tightly for so long, there is something else even more powerful that sinks in.
I can hear it in the sound of Nico’s voice as he whispers to me that everything is going to be okay now and feel it in the easing up of my heart as the beating starts to slow and steady itself.
I lift my head and look up into Nico’s eyes, and that is where I see it.
In his eyes, I’m not the only one who has changed now.
This wasn’t just my closure to have—it belonged to both of us.
And through our journey, even though it started off with Nico and me on opposing sides, we have both broken through to each other and have been changed for the better.
In his eyes, I see the end of his darkness—and the start of our future.
Nico places a soft kiss on the side of my forehead before letting me go.
“Why don’t you go take a hot shower to get cleaned up and try to relax and breathe now?” he says. “While I get this mess cleaned up and handle a few things. Will you be okay for a couple of hours?”
I nod. I could use some time to think and let the hot water wash over me.
When I step into the bathroom, I take a moment to look at my reflection in the mirror before starting the water for the shower.
I look like a ghost myself, pale, wide-eyed, and with the matted blood in my hair making it look even darker than it should be.
I’m reminded of when I first saw Nico, up close and in the light.
When I first got a good look at him, it scared me a little, just like looking at my reflection is doing now.
But then, out of the shadows, the truth was revealed. One small shimmer of it at a time.
I turn the water on and undress, letting thoughts and memories swirl around in my head as I wait for the water to grow hot.
As soon as I step in and let the water rush over me, it feels like it’s washing away more than just the blood of the man who murdered my mom.
It feels as if some of that trauma is being washed away as well.
It will never be completely gone. I realize that.
I will never be completely healed. I will always be a bit broken, just like the Ghost. But for the first time since that night, I’ve realized that I didn’t just lose my mom that night. I gained Nico.
He’s been my constant shadow, my protective nemesis who turned out to be my hero after all.
He wasn’t just a watcher or an observer that night; he was the key to not only keeping me alive but keeping me strong.
If I hadn’t had Nico to pursue, and an obsession to drive my focus and energy, then I might not have been able to do what I just did today—take back my life from the hands of the men who destroyed it.
Now, I feel stronger, and I feel like I can finally let things move on from the night that trapped me mentally for a very long time.
I think Nico has changed, too. I no longer see the weary shadows at the corners of his eyes.
Now, I see cracks of light there—light that hints at Nico Vitale shining through the mantle of the Ghost that he’s been behind this whole time.