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)
I can empathize with what she’s going through, even though I don’t want to give in to feelings like empathy at all. But just this once, I’m going to have to pause my brother’s warning so that I can give Elle a piece of learned advice.
“Your mother will always be a part of you, Elle, just like my brother will always be a part of me,” I say. “And you don’t need to take up a mantle or a new identity in order for that to happen. You just need to make peace with it and carry on with your life without carrying the burden of her death on your shoulders. You feel like you need answers, but you’re looking in the wrong place. I’m not the one who pulled those strings.”
“But you do have strings that you can pull, don’t you?” she asks. “You have many connections in the mafia, with all the big players.”
“If any of them were involved, I would have known about it. The families have small circles where rumors and whispers abound.”
“How can you be so sure?” she asks as she gets ready to use my own words against me. “You told me yourself that you don’t work for anyone and that you don’t trust anyone. Maybe they’re just not telling you because they know you let me live.”
“No one knows what happened in that alley besides you and me,” I say with certainty. “And like I’ve said already, I’d be much more suspicious of the lead detective on that case, your father, than I would be of a handful of mafia bosses who couldn’t care less about an innocent woman whose sole focus in life was on raising her daughter to be a good woman in a city full of terrors.”
Elle’s face sours with continued disappointment. “I’m not going to stop looking into you,” she says as if she’s challenging me to make her. “You’re the only piece of that puzzle that I have.”
“No, I’m not.”
We’re at a standstill. She refuses to open her mind to the possibility that her father was involved in her mother’s murder, and I refuse to admit to myself that this is all turning into so much more than just protecting her. We both came here for answers. She wanted to know why I didn’t shoot first that night, and I wanted to know what kept driving her to chase after me. Yet here we are, both dancing around the answers to our most important questions, and neither of us is ready for the truth.
CHAPTER 13
ELLE
“If you’re trying to get me to say that my father is a difficult man, then yes, I agree,” I say as I get more and more frustrated with Nico’s verbal evasion.
“Difficult is not the word I would choose,” he says. “Corrupt is.”
My father and I might not get along, and I’ll be the first in line to admit how much he absolutely sucked at providing me the emotional support that I needed after my mom died. I’d even go so far as to admit that there have been some questionable things that my father has gotten himself involved in down at the police station. But I chalk most of that up to the “boys in blue” being a bit of a misogynistic club that the cops and detectives, and even some in the judicial circuit, take part in. As much as that doesn’t make it right, and as much as I’m frequently disappointed in my father’s behavior, it’s still a far cry from accusing him of corruption or being directly involved in covering up the investigation surrounding my mother’s death.
“What reason would my father have for interfering with the investigation of his own wife’s murder?” I ask. “You make it sound like my father is the bad guy here, but he’s not the one who pulled the trigger that night, or who sat and watched my mom get shot and killed.”
“I know you want to make me the villain in your story, Elle,” Nico says as the tension escalates between us again. “And trust me, I could be the villain in many people’s stories—but I am not one in yours. I did my best to save you that night, and I had nothing to do with your mother’s murder. I don’t know who the shooter that night was, and I haven’t been able to uncover anything about it since.”
“Hang on a second, do you mean that you’ve looked?” I don’t know why, but I’m surprised to hear that he would have delved into what happened to my mom any further than his own involvement in the alley.
“Yes.”
“Why? Was it because you knew I was tracking you and digging for answers?”
“No,” he shakes his head. “It was because I wanted an answer to that night myself. I don’t like it when there are unresolved loose ends. I wanted to find out who would want to kill an innocent woman and the wife of a detective, and why. But the only thing I was able to uncover was that the case surrounding her death was closed very quickly and lacked any substantive resolution.”