Pain comes at me in punishing waves.
Fuck, ithurts.
“Nico.” The mattress sinks slightly. Sofia’s soft scent wraps around me, making me feel even worse.
Soon she’ll be gone. And I’ll be alone.
She’s quiet for several long seconds.
I wait for her to say something about leaving. How she can’t stay here any longer.
My heart shrivels.
But then she wraps her arms around me and rests her head on my shoulder.
She doesn’t say anything. She just hugs me.
So I hug her back.
And that’s how we stay. Holding each other.
Even after she falls asleep, her body sagging against mine, I keep holding her. Memorizing every moment to relive later.
Because if this is the last time I get to hold Sofia in my arms, I’m not wasting any of it.
Chapter Seventeen
SOFIA
I know he’s hurting, and I hate it.
And it’s not just seeing his pain, it’s feeling it—my heart wrenching with every slump of his shoulders and the glimpses of the unhappiness he can’t quite manage to hide.
That’s something you don’t read about in romance novels or see in the movies. How, when you care deeply about someone, their pain becomes your own.
I wish I could take it away from him, but I’m not sure how.
How do you make it better for a man who discovered everything about his father was a lie? That his father was complicit in dozens of crimes stretching back for decades, all in the interest of money and power? And on top of that, Nico was the one who turned him in to the police. He had to stand there, watching his father being read his rights and taken into custody, listening to his father call him a traitor to the family.
Of course, I’m still shaken about the revelations of Elio Parisi’s role in my attacks. Not surprised, but shaken. After all, it’s not every day that someone hires hitmen to kill you not once, or twice, butthreetimes.
It’s kind of ironic when I think about it—Elio paying close to one hundred K to have me killed, and his own son foiling two of the attacks. And if Nico had been there for the first, I know he would have protected me. He would have used the martial arts skills I’ve watched him practice in the condo—andwhew, is he sexy when he does it—and kicked those two assholes’ asses, no doubt.
When I finally came clean to Brian and my aunt, they were horrified. My aunt wanted me to fly to Arizona that night to come stay with her. Brian cursed and muttered insults about Nico, insisting I’d be better off coming to Florida for a visit than to stay with a man whose father tried to kill me.
“The apple never falls far from the tree,” Brian said when we spoke yesterday. “How do you really know that this Nico won’t pull something similar? How do you knowhiscompany is on the up and up?”
“I just know,” I told Brian. “Nico’s nothing like his father. Nico’s tough on the outside because he had to be. But inside, he’s the same person I fell in love with.” Before Brian could debate it, I added, “Nico collected the evidence against his father. He called the cops on him. And Nico turned over all his financials—both personal and for his company—to help prove he wasn’t involved. He told his employees to speak freely to the police. He’s done everything he could to prove he had nothing to do with it.
“And,” I concluded, “Iknowhim. Nico would never,everbe a part of something so terrible. Nico’s spent half his life protecting people. He would never hurt them.”
Unless someone tries to hurt someone he cares about. But I didn’t add that part.
Not that Nico said it outright. But as I was falling asleep in his arms two nights ago, after he’d returned from his parents’house, I heard him murmur against my hair, “I’ll never let anyone hurt you, Soph. I’ll kill them first.”
Is it weird to find that romantic?
Maybe some people would think the Parisi family dynamic would be a deal breaker. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t wondered the same thing in the two days since Elio was arrested. Will it be too much for us to overcome? Will Nico end up resenting me for the part I played in his family’s destruction? Will I really be able to separate Elio’s actions from his son’s?
