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I shrug. “Yeah. I’d say that about sums it up.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” A.J. asks, yelling at the top of her lungs, and I wince. The sound is particularly startling in Nik’s locked up car.
I sigh wearily. “I won’t lie to you. I might be. But it doesn’t matter. I have to save him, A.J. I understand the odds are I will fail, but it doesn’t matter. I have to try.”
If I fail, Nik dies. So if I die, I die. A life without him hardly seems worth living, anyway.
A.J. gasps. “Who the hell are you, and what have you done to my best friend? You’re just going to storm into a meeting of the Seven Families and save your boyfriend, who is now a hostage of the boss of the Italian family, with barely an hour’s notice? Just like that? No planning, no scouting, no contingency plans, no nothing? You’re just going to wing it. You’d have no control over anything. Every single detail would just be left to chance.”
I nod. “Yep. Now, can you please track Nik’s phone?”
Eyes wide, A.J. shakes her head. “You’d be putting yourself and your life at unbelievable risk—more than ever. Stealing the Flame of Mir from The Metropolitan Museum is nothing compared to this. And for what? Even if you succeed, you’ll still lose everything you ever wanted and have been fighting for these past months. Scratch that—everything you’ve been fighting for your whole life! Even if you miraculously manage to save Nik and not kill yourself in the process, you’ll never be fully in charge of your life again. You’ll never be completely independent. I’ve met him, Kat. That man is too bossy, too possessive, too protective… He’s too much of a control freak to allow you to feel independent or exclusively in control again. And this time, if he gets his hands on you, he’s never letting you go. Of that, I have no doubts. You can bet on that.”
I sigh again. “God, I hope so. I’m counting on it. Now, can you please track him for me? I can’t afford to waste any more time.”
“Kat…” she says with a horrified groan.
Impatiently, I cut her off, raising my voice. “A.J.! If the choice is between my fear of losing control and my fear of losing him, please understand: it’s no choice at all. I can’t lose him. Nik is everything to me now. I love him. And if something happens to him, if he’s taken from me forever… I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t think—no, I know I will never be happy again. Now, please, scold me all you want, but do it while you find him for me.”
A.J. stares at me in shock for a second longer, and then, wordlessly, she reaches for her laptop. Blissfully silent, she powers it on and types away, shooting me sideways glances every thirty seconds.
I exhale in relief when she turns the laptop in my direction so I can view the screen.
“This is where he is,” she says with a sigh. “Or at least where his phone is.”
I stare at the blinking green dot on the map with a frown. It’s not stationary, seeming to be moving further and further away from the city. There isn’t much around where it is headed, so my guess is that Dmitri’s probably taking Nik to the old financial district, which sends a chill down my spine. That can’t be good, considering it’s mostly deserted and abandoned nowadays.
After turning the car on, I take a deep breath, steeling myself.
“Thank you, A.J. I’ll go get him now. If you don’t want to come with me, I won’t blame you. No hard feelings. I mean it.”
A.J. scoffs. “Bitch, you have really lost your mind if you think you’re doing this without me. Now, please tell me you have a plan. Or at least something that resembles it in the slightest.”
My heart warms. I don’t deserve her.
I smile at her with sympathy. “You’re not going to like it.”
A.J. sighs and closes her eyes before leaning her blonde head against her seat’s headrest. “Fuck my life,” she says through gritted teeth. After opening her eyes, she squares her shoulders.
With a final shake of her head, she turns to face me. “Just drive.”
22
NIK
Even under the faint light in the vast, dark chamber, I have no trouble recognizing Giuseppe Salvatore a stone’s throw away from where I stand.
While our peers gather around us in silence, I study him in his expertly tailored suit as the rage inside me begs me for release.
Never have I needed to kill as much as I do at this moment, knowing everything the man has done to Dmitri and Kat.
I’ve never wanted anything as much as I wanted to spend my life with Kat. But that will never come to be, thanks in no small part to Salvatore.
Even now, being kept from her makes me restless and uneasy. At least I have one consolation: in the end, Kat will be free and safe. After everything I’ve put her through, it’s no small comfort to know that this will be my parting gift to her. My death will not be in vain.
Still, I would have liked to try to earn Kat’s forgiveness. I would have cherished a long, happy life at her side.
Will she wonder about what could have been between us? About the life we could have had together? A selfish part of me hopes Kat won’t forget about me.
