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 wake before she does and watch her sleep for a few minutes before deciding to get up. There’s something that I need to do, something that I don’t want her to hear. So, even though I could stay lying here with her forever, I slide out from beneath her and get up, stretching out my stiff shoulders and reaching for my pants on the floor to put on. Then, I walk toward my office, close the door quietly behind me, and make a call.
“It’s awfully early for you to be up, isn’t it?” Zara’s voice chides me through the phone. “I thought you were primarily nocturnal.”
“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it was you at the nightclub last night, hovering over your laptop, who turned the ire of the Bratva’s attention onto Elle,” I say with as much audible severity as I can muster for this early in the morning.
“What was I supposed to do? I was trying to remain low profile, and she kept staring at me,” Zara protests as if that’s any excuse to nearly have had Elle mauled by a rival mafia family. “It was me or her, Nico, and I was on a mission. I had work to do. Besides, you swooped in and got her out of there with only a few of her feathers ruffled, so no harm done.”
If she could see my face through the phone, she would be able to see the stiff frown and scolding brow I can feel on my face right now.
“You nearly got her killed,” I scold. “Just because you’re a hacker prodigy doesn’t mean that you can go around doing whatever the hell you want to.”
I have rarely, if ever, argued with Zara Vega before. She and I have not just a friendship but a loyalty between us that has spanned more years than I have kept anyone as a friend.
“She’s no good for you anyway,” she argues instead of backing down. “Elle Monroe is a cop’s daughter—a dirty cop’s daughter. You should stay away from her and find someone else to get horny with.”
Her crassness isn’t surprising. Zara likes to hide her true emotions under several layers of sarcasm and bravado, but her warning is. She doesn’t usually share her opinion on the personal matters of others.
“I can look after myself,” I say, still angry. “But the next time you think about throwing Elle to the dogs—don’t.”
I give her a second to squeeze in an apology, but when she doesn’t, I hang up the call.
Then, I hear some movement in the other room and go out to see Elle tinkering with the coffee pot.
“Here, let me help with that,” I say as I see her wearing my shirt and nothing else as she stands barefoot in my kitchen. “Like practically everything in my life, it’s flawed.”
She laughs, and the sight of her smile in the morning lights up my whole apartment.
“Let me guess, it’s got a cracked pot?” she giggles. “I’m starting to think that a few scars here and there are more like badges of honor.”
She reaches out with both hands as I walk closer and touches the scars running down my forearms.
“You never told me how you got these,” she says as her fingers trace along the lines of the scars that mingle with my veins.
“Trust me, it’s not something that you’d want to know. You already know too many unsavory things about me as it is.”
“It would be impossible for me to think of you as unsavory now,” she says as she stands on her toes to kiss my lips. “Just like it’s getting harder for me to see you as the Ghost.”
“Oh? Who do you see me as then?” I ask.
“Just Nico,” she says. “A man, flaws and scars and all. Not a hero, not a ghost, not a monster. Just a man who has done his best to do the right thing.”
Everything about Elle makes me melt on the inside.
While I stand in front of the coffeemaker waiting for it to brew, I start to think about that night in the alley. I want to make up for it. I want to make up for my inaction and for not stepping in to stop things before her mother was killed. I feel now like I need to make it up to Elle.
When the coffee is done, I hand her a cup and watch as she sips it while looking out my apartment window at the Strip in the distance. That’s when an idea comes to me. There is still one thing that I can do to atone for the role that I played that night, and for the consequences that my inaction led to. I can still try to give Elle closure by bringing her the men responsible for the actual act of murder that stole her mother from her. I can bring her father to stand judgment before her, and I can find and deliver the killer who pulled the trigger that night, too, because while I might have shot him, I didn’t shoot to kill that night. All I need to do is find out who that man is. I’ll go back to the nightclub and shake down the Bratva in ways that only the Ghost knows how to do. I’ll get his name and then bring him to her so that she can decide how to claim her closure over what these two terrible men did.