Page 122 of The Cost of Silence

32.Nico

Sleep doesn’t stick.

It brushes over me in thin, useless waves, never enough to drag me under. Every time my eyes close, I see the coffee table. The blood. The rat. The way Isabella’s face went white in my doorway when she told me, like she was trying not to let the fear win.

Her breathing is slow and even against my chest now, warm and soft and steady. She’s tucked half on top of me, one hand fisted in the fabric of my t-shirt like she doesn’t trust me not to vanish if she lets go.

As if I could go anywhere.

I lie there for another stretch of minutes, staring at the ceiling, waiting for something in me to unclench.

It doesn’t.

Careful not to jostle her ribs, I slide out from under her, easing her hand free. She makes a soft sound, a small protest, but settles again when I pull the quilt higher around her shoulders.

“I’m just in the next room, Bella,” I whisper, brushing a kiss across her temple. “I’ve got you.”

She doesn’t answer. Sleep has her completely, which is a relief. She needs it. Tomorrow will be worse.

I grab a hoodie off the chair and tug it on as I step into the hallway, leaving the bedroom door cracked, that sliver of light an old habit I can’t shake. My father used to do that for us when we were kids, door ajar, lamp left on in the hallway, his shadow moving past at odd hours on his way between his office and the kitchen.

People sleep better when they know someone is standing watch.

He was right.

The penthouse is quiet now. My men are posted in the hallway outside. I can sense them more than hear them, that particular stillness a good guard has when he’s listening to more than one thing at once.

The living room is clean. Table wiped down, no evidence of what sat there earlier except in my head. The tree glows steadily in the corner, a ridiculous, twinkling thing that has no business existing in the same world as rats and the Bratva.

I should go back to bed.

Instead, my feet take me to my office.

The door clicks shut behind me with a soft, final sound. The monitors on my desk throw a blue wash across the room, cycles of security feeds playing on mute. Hallway. Elevator. Lobby. Exterior. A dozen angles of a building that’s supposed to be a fortress.

I drop into the chair, stare at the screens for a minute, then scrub a hand over my face. My skin feels too tight.

Something glints near the edge of my desk.

For a second my brain can’t place it. Then I remember.

The ornament she bought me.

It’s ridiculous. A Santa ornament, all red suit and beard. Except, instead of holding a sack of presents, he’s got a tinytoy gun in his gloved hands, pointed at nothing in particular. Someone, somewhere, thought that was charming.

Isabella saw it in the shop, argued with Rossi over it, and I think that was the moment I fell in love with her.

“Tell me that is not the moston-brandChristmas decoration you’ve ever seen,” she’d said later, grinning, holding it up to my face.

“It’s a felony in three states,” I’d replied.

She’d laughed and ignored me and bought it anyway, insisting it needed to go on the tree “near but not at the top,” because “you’re not fully reformed but you’re trying.”

Now it’s sitting on my desk, where she left it this afternoon when she was “organizing” the decorations we didn’t use.

I pick it up, turning it between my fingers.

It’s stupid and cheap and a little ugly.