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)
“Be with me,” she says as she draws my face back down to her.
My cock pulses inside her, throbbing against her slick walls with each heartbeat. Heat radiates between us as I watch her lips part, her eyes half-lidded with desire as I thrust inside her. I don’t know what she means. I couldn’t possibly be more “with her” than I am in this moment.
“Your eyes are far away,” she says through heady breaths. “They betray you, as they always do. Be with me in this moment, Nico.”
Elle’s ability to see inside me goes far beyond her capabilities as a profiler. She sees me in ways that no one else has ever been able to do, not even my brother. She touches places in my heart that no one has touched before.
I do as she asks, letting her pull me under like a riptide. My hips snap against hers with renewed urgency, her wetness coating my thighs as I drive deeper. When I finally break, the pleasure rips through me like lightning—my vision whites out, muscles seizing as I empty myself inside her with a primal growl against her neck. Her body trembles beneath mine, her inner walls pulsing and milking every last drop as she cries out my name. In this raw, unguarded moment—sweat-slicked and breathless—I feel exposed in ways no weapon has ever managed. For years, I've been the Ghost, untouchable, but Elle's nails digging into my back have carved through my armor, marking me as flesh and blood. Real. Seen.
CHAPTER 15
ELLE
It’s too late to go back to how things were before now. And even if I could, would I change anything about what led me to this moment as I lay beside Nico in his bed? Probably not. Even though I've questioned and mistrusted him every step of the way, and even hated him, there’s something about the connection that keeps drawing us both toward each other that has sunk into my blood like ink through skin. Neither of us asked for the nights that changed us to happen, and perhaps neither of us has changed for the better. But regardless of how each of our traumas has shaped us, or how broken we may have become because of it, our pasts and our fates have been intertwined. Nico has been hiding in the shadows as the Ghost for his entire adult life, and I’ve built my life around chasing shadows in search of the truth. Now, our paths have intersected in a very physical way, too.
I lay there beside him with my head resting in the crook of his arm. This feels more real than anything else I think I’ve ever experienced. It also feels morally questionable. I still don’t even know if I can trust him, not really. Nico has kept secrets from me for years, and I have a strong feeling that he still is.
“You didn’t hold back from that,” I tease as I tip my head to look up at his face beside me.
It feels like the mood between us has changed completely. What had been hostile before has now been replaced with raw vulnerability. We both pulled our walls down just now so that we could let each other in. Whether they will stay down depends on how things go from here.
“I want to trust you, Nico,” I say from a place that is more honest desire now than it is accusatory. “But how can I trust you if you’re still hiding things from me?”
I don’t expect him to answer my rhetorical question or to suddenly decide to open up to me and hand over answers that he wasn’t willing to before we had sex. I also don’t expect him to toss me a breadcrumb of a clue. But to my surprise, he does.
“There is a man, a mafia kingpin, who spends a lot of time at the nightclub on the boulevard—the one right near the strip club with all the drag shows and the purple swan statues out front. It’s a very dangerous nightclub, and it’s also where the Bratva in Las Vegas go to meet.” He pauses for a second before he continues. “If I tell you more, you must promise me you won’t go to the club. You’re good at sleuthing things out from afar. The nightclub is too dangerous for someone like you to show your face around.”
“I promise,” I say, eagerly wanting to hear more.
“I believe that the killer who shot your mother was associated with the mafia boss who frequents that nightclub.”
“But I thought you said that there were no leads about her murder in the mafia circles,” I say, not wanting to feel as if I’m getting the runaround again. “I thought you said that it wasn’t a mafia hit job and that no mafia boss would have wanted to kill her since she didn’t do anything to cross anyone.”