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 suppose if I had thought harder on it, I would have entertained the possibility that maybe he was being threatened to cover it up, or that he simply couldn’t deal with the loss himself and wasn’t as strong as he liked to portray himself as being. Or maybe even he knew there was corruption in the force and chose to look the other way for a paycheck. Honestly, I’m not sure which sin my father can lay claim to, but I know which one Nico can—his inaction that night cost my mother her life.
“My head?” I shoot back at him. “Where was your head that night, Nico? Or sorry, should I call you The Ghost? Because you were doing an excellent job at pretending, you weren’t even there when my mom took a bullet to the chest and bled out on the street. Perhaps you were so traumatized by your own past that you froze and couldn’t bring yourself to act fast enough to save her. That sucks, but at least there’s a psychological reason to blame for it. But you ran away from the alley. I tried to run after you, and you just left me there.”
“I didn’t just leave you there,” he argues. “I saved your life. And I wasn’t running away from anything, I was—”
Nico cuts his sentence short.
“You were what?” I press.
He shakes his head, suddenly tight-lipped. “I’ve already said too much.”
“Fuck that,” I growl. “Finish your goddamn sentence. You were what?”
“I was chasing after someone else.”
For a moment, I’m stunned. There were only four people in that alley that night—me, my mom, the Ghost, and the killer who shot my mother.
“Never mind,” Nico says quickly, pivoting once he realizes he opened Pandora’s box. “What I’m trying to say is that your father has been implicated in many, many scandals involving corruption. I think you’d be wise to question why an investigation into your mother’s murder wasn’t pushed for.”
“You’re just trying to change the topic and take the focus of all of this off yourself.”
“No, I’m trying to expose the fact that your father isn’t who you think he is, Elle.”
“This entire conversation is about you, and the night my mom was murdered. This has nothing to do with my father,” I argue, even though I’ve been carrying these exact questions around in my chest for years. My father and I have never been close, more so since my mother’s death.
I can see the anger flare in Nico’s eyes as he looks back at me.
“I wasn’t the one who shot and killed your mother,” he says through gritted teeth. “And I also wasn’t the one who covered up whatever happened that night.”
“True,” I say, feeling angry enough to misdirect all of my rage even though I know he’s finally trying to communicate with me after all this time. “You were just the one who failed to save her and then ran away.”
We both sit there locked in a stare. Both angry and frustrated, and both unsure what to say next. I came here for answers, and I thought that he would have them. But what if he doesn’t? What if Nico is telling the truth, and he doesn’t know who killed my mom? What if he did his best, and his best meant that he was only able to save me and not her? And what if my father did have something to do with the cover-up?
As tensions rise between us to the point of boiling over, and the two of us emotionally spar back and forth, I start to wonder what Nico’s actual goal is in bringing me here. Is it to open lines of communication between us, or is it to expose something else?
“Why am I here?” I ask, blurting out the desperate frustration that I feel. I still haven’t gotten answers relating to why he didn’t shoot my mother’s killer before he killed her. Instead, I’m being baited into talking about why my father may have failed to investigate it well enough.
“You’re here to learn the truth,” Nico says. “About me, about what happened that night, and maybe even about yourself and those who are closest to you.”
“You still haven’t told me the one thing that I want to know,” I scoff. “I’ve asked you repeatedly why you didn’t shoot before that man killed my mom. And from what I can gather based on your very vague explanations, you don’t know who he was and don’t know why you didn’t shoot him earlier. Am I missing anything? Because if that’s the truth, then consider me underwhelmed. It certainly does not live up to the reputation of the notorious Ghost Assassin. It makes you sound like any other of my criminal profiles—desperate, damaged, and deranged.”
“You know what your problem is?” he asks combatively.
“No, please tell me,” I say as I roll my eyes at him.