Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 52592 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 263(@200wpm)___ 210(@250wpm)___ 175(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 52592 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 263(@200wpm)___ 210(@250wpm)___ 175(@300wpm)
“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.
“To remain detached and not allow myself to get personally involved with anything or anyone. To do the jobs that I need to do and not let any of it linger in my soul. And so, I became a silent, soulless ghost.”
For a few long moments, the kitchen is silent as we both sit there staring at each other. I don’t answer any of her other questions yet, and Elle doesn’t press me further. I almost feel like this has done the trick to satisfy her burning curiosity and let things rest. But Elle Monroe always seems to be full of surprises.
“I don’t think you’re soulless.”
My breathing hitches in my chest. I wasn’t expecting her to say something like that. I’m the monster that watched her mother die and did nothing to stop it. I’m the compulsion that she’s been obsessed with hunting her whole adult life. She should hate me. I thought she hated me. She should think that I’m the devil incarnate, and yet she goes and says something like that. I don’t know how to feel, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that her presence challenges my lifelong, well-practiced withdrawal.