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“Sure. We can go to that skating rink you wanted to try out,” I suggest.
“That sounds nice, but I don’t think I can. My ankles are a little swollen.”
My eyebrows rise. “Why? What happened?”
She shrugs. I crouch down to look at her ankles, which are definitely swollen. It’s not really noticeable, though.
“I don’t know. I just woke up and found them like this. It doesn’t hurt, though. And I think it’s because I was on my feet for a long time yesterday,” she explains.
I apply a little pressure to one of her ankles. She doesn’t flinch, which means she’s really not in pain. But I’m still a little worried.
“You sure you don’t need to see a doctor?”
She grins. “Over a swollen ankle? Don’t be dramatic, Nicky.”
I roll my eyes before rising to my feet.
“If you start to feel sick, just call me and I’ll come get you, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. I got it.”
She slips her feet into the Converse alongside the mirror and gets on her toes to place a kiss against my lips. My hands go around her waist to deepen the kiss. I’m considering taking her to the bed and making her even later to work. But she pulls away before I can, her eyes narrowed like she can read my thoughts.
“I’m leaving, Nico. Be safe,” she says with a smile.
For a second, just one second, I want to say the words. They’re right on the tip of my tongue. I want to tell her I love her, but I hold back. Just as I have been for the past couple of months. We’re nearing the end of her four-month trial period. And while I have faith that we’re finally in a good place, there are still some issues that remain unresolved.
“See you later, mi vida,” I tell her, watching as she walks out of the room.
Once she’s gone, I start getting ready for my brunch meeting at eleven a.m. When the time comes, I’m standing on the roof of a four-story building in downtown Chicago waiting for a ghost to show up. A minute or two after I arrive, the double doors of the roof open and a man walks through them.
He’s about six-foot-two with short, dirty blonde hair and a chiseled jawline. As I suspected, he’s also pretty young. He’s probably in his late twenties or early thirties. He walks toward me with calculated precision. The Shadow looks like any other normal man. For some reason, thanks to all the secrets shrouding his existence, I thought he wouldn’t be. He offers me a short nod as he stands before me, placing one hand in the pocket of his pants.
“It’s good to finally meet you, Don. Although I asked you to come alone.”
His grey eyes land on the man behind me, who is waiting for any sign of trouble.
“Sure you did. But Vlad’s pretty much my Shadow, as I’m sure you’re aware. Also, you got in touch with me after months of being incognito. It’s normal to be a little suspicious. I’m going to need you to prove you’re actually The Shadow.”
He nods like that’s understandable, before bringing out his phone and showing me a video.
“That’s me and Valerio at a meeting a couple months before he died. He asked me to look into Sebastian’s daughter. he wanted me to find her. Apparently, Sebastian had kept her existence hidden from him. He didn’t like that, so he needed to gather information about the girl.”
And Valerio then passed that information to me before he died. He knew Sebastian would have issues with me becoming Don, so he gave me collateral.
“I couldn’t find her though,” The Shadow states, and he looks bothered by this, a frown resting on his features. “All I could get was a birth certificate and evidence that the girl and her mother moved away when she was little. After that, the trail went cold. Valerio told me he’d try to investigate further, but we never met up again after that. Do you know if he had any luck?”
I shake my head. “He only told me she existed.”
And then I bluffed my way through the conversation with Sebastian when I threatened to expose his secret and reveal it to his daughter. He’s a proud man, and the threat of people finding out that he abandoned his child and her mother would have always been enough to get him to do what I wanted. I only told him I knew her location to see if it would trigger him going in search of her. I had one of my men tail him for weeks, but he never made a move. Which means he has no idea where she is either.
“I’m going to find her,” The Shadow says, a hard look in his eyes.
“Why?”
The true identity of Sebastian’s daughter is frankly none of my business. It would be nice to know, but it’s not a priority. I also think the better thing to do would be to leave her out of all this. If she’s lived her entire life without a clue where she’s from, then she’s probably better off not knowing.
“Because it’s what I do. And no one is impossible to find,” he replies simply.
