Page 10 of Her Dark Mafia Protector
“I'm sorry, brother,” I say, letting the guilt swallow me for a moment before pushing it so deep down within myself that it will be as if it has its own locked cabinet inside my chest. “I failed you tonight. But know that I willnotfail again. I will live the lessons that you taught me, and I will be the best now in order to be who you would have been.Iwill beThe Ghostnow.”
Adopting my brother’s title after witnessing his violent death is more than just a way to honor him and a coping mechanism for me to move past the night that has changed who I am forever. It’s also what now shapes me into assuming a cold, calculated, emotionless person. My brother’s infamous identity is nowmymantle to carry, and it will forever shape my detached life.
I leave his body there, knowing that my brother is no longer in it, and I walk back to the Bratva’s base of operations. As soon as I walk into the room where the leadership is meeting, and as soon as they see me covered in blood with my brother’s gun in my hand, they know what’s happened. No one asks questions, and no one will. It doesn’t matter how my brother died because they don’t care. All they care about is that I will take his place.
“Iam the Ghost now,” I say as I stand before them. “The mission tonight was completed.”
There are several silent nods, and then my trainer, who sits among them, is the only one to speak.
“You are no longer Nico Vitale,” he says with a somber, respectful voice. “You are nowThe Ghost, and you will act with swiftness, silence, and deadliness.”
I nod and turn to leave because there’s nothing else left to say. When I get back to the room that my brother and I shared, I pack away his things. Carefully, I separate the weapons and my brother’s only suit, to keep and use for myself. The rest I place in boxes to protect and move them from my sight. He’s gone; his things need to be too, so that I can now take his place. There is only one Ghost that is whispered on the tongues of our enemies, and beginning tonight, it’sme.
I stand for a moment in front of the mirror in the bathroom that we once shared, and I take a long look before I wash the blood off my face.
Tonight, I stole my brother’s name. But in doing so, I’ve lost myself.
CHAPTER 8
NICO
Elle Monroe is a fascinating woman. Her obsession with me makes her even more fascinating. What is it about the single thread that I've woven into her life that makes her soconsumedwith dissecting my identity? I need to find out.
So, while she watches me, I secretly watch her too. Except that my surveillance goes well beyond the usual practices. While Elle is talking to some people here in the city who went to Luciano’s wedding in Italy, trying to get them to cough up any information they have on the Ghost, I head to her apartment. I’m fully confident that neither Vincent, Isla, nor Luc will let any information about me leave their lips. They all know how this works—in order for me to help them as the Ghost, I need to remain an enigma. None of them are willing to risk severing a relationship with me because all will need my help and services at some point.
Valentina is a bit of a wild card, especially since I know that she and Elle used to be close friends. But as word would have it, they’ve been on the outs for a while now, and Valentina is now devoted to Luc and protecting all the secrecy that she is marrying into. So, I doubt that she’ll say anything either,although she probably doesn’t even know much to begin with. The men I deal with frequently don’t even tell their wives or families about me. My secrecy keeps me, and sometimesthem, alive.
Elle’s apartment is almosttooeasy to get into. You’d think that as a cop’s daughter, she’d put a better lock in or set up some security cameras. But then again, to call her father a cop, even though hetechnicallyis one, is making the word do a lot of heavy lifting. Detective Monroe is as corrupt as they come. Elle doesn’t know the half of it.
I slide the lock open and step inside, closing her apartment door behind me so that none of the neighbors see me in here. I’ll be fast, and I’ll be gone before she gets back.
Invading her private space feels wrong, even though snooping around in places that I shouldn’t be is something that I do quite often. There’s something different about Elle, something that makes this feel more personal.
I can hear my brother’s words echoing in the back of my head, reminding me not to take anything personal, not tofeel, just to stay detached and focus on getting the job done. The job here is to see how much Elle has found out about me, and to take a peek into whosheis, outside of what I already know of her.
I look around the apartment a bit, then walk into her small home office. This is her private space, the room where she keeps all of her secrets, all her off-the-books obsessions, to herself. I can see them all pinned up to the boards on the wall behind her desk, and they are all aboutme. Photographs, notes, printed out screenshots of news articles, including the one about the night her mother was murdered—the entire office is covered with evidentiary tidbits, pieces of the puzzle she is trying to solve. Hernotes and profiles of me are extensive, and if I’m not mistaken, it looks like they go well beyond a professional interest. She’s not just trying to solve a case or even just get closure on the crime that stole her mother from her. She’s trying to figure me out, not just as the man in the alleyway that night who fired the second shot, butme.
Why?
Why would she care to dig up this much stuff on me? I understand she feels like she needs closure and that she demands answers from that night. But some of the research she’s done on this profiling board of hers goes well beyond that. There is information here dating all the way back to the years when I was in the Bratva, information on my time in Moscow. She certainly doesn’t know everything. But that said, Elle has dug up more on me than I thought she would be capable of finding. It’s more than anyone else ever had.
I take some time to look at her things a bit closer and to rifle through some papers on her desk and the files on her computer. She really should be more careful about security. It’stooeasy to get into her laptop. Once inside her files, it’s a veritable candy land of profile notes. The professional notes that she’s been keeping are thorough but not surprising. Her attention to detail and the accuracy with which she has evaluated the information she’s collected are impressive. But when I sit down and read through some of her notations, it catches me off guard.
Cold, distant, and detached, which means that Nico likely struggles with vulnerability.
How could she possibly have garnered that just from what she’s learned about me from afar? I don’t care how good a profiler she is or how many psychology degrees she has; she still can’t see inside my head.
Isolated by choice, perhaps stemming from past trauma. Perhaps he’s haunted by something too. Maybe the Ghost has skeletons in his closet relating to past things he’s done—guilt over all the violence? I wonder if he has always been this way, or if Nico experienced a transformative moment that shaped his life.
I sit there stunned as I read through Elle’s profile notes and her personal remarks that are added into the footnotes. I want tohateher. And I want to hate the fact that she is poking around in my life. But it’s hard to hate a woman who seems just about as complicated and possibly evenbrokenas I am. Then there’s the matter of how we both seem to be simultaneously obsessed and suspicious of each other. I canfeela crack forming in my promise to myself of staying emotionally detached from everyone and everything. I should treat Elle as if she were one of my assignments. Protecting her and keeping her away from my life is what I should do. I should continue to throw a wrench in her way so that she drops this wild goose chase and moves on with her life. She’s spent too long already being mentally trapped inside that night. The best way to do that is to walk away from her and let this obsession die a natural death, no matter how long it takes or how frustrated it makes her. I stare at the computer screen and then at her wall of bits and pieces again. I’ve been trailing Elle for days now, studying her, and letting hersee glimpses of my presence, like dropping tiny breadcrumbs for her to find. I wanted to see how far she would go before giving up and throwing in the towel. But it’s feeling like she justwon’t.
And as much as I know I should walk away and let this all die down—I can’t.
This Elle still reminds me too much of the little girl from the alley—the one who watched her mother die. I’ve been justifying all of this time and energy I have put into watching Elle as a way to make sure she doesn’t get too close or find out too much about the Ghost. I’ve justified stalking her in my mind as just observation. Now I see that the only way to accomplish my goal is for me toleave. If I dropped off her radar and left no trace of myself behind for her to find, then perhapsbothof our obsessions would cease. But even sitting here, I know that’s not going to happen. I can’t seem to make myself walk away from this woman.
I stand up from her desk and take one last look around the room before leaving. While giving a quick look over the rest of the apartment, I formulate a new plan in my head, one that can give me the excuse masquerading as a reason to keep following her around. She needs my protection, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. Vegas is full of mafia criminals who want her to leave them alone. And her father is averydangerous man; she just doesn’t know it. That puts Elle in a position of being around both sides of the dangers in Las Vegas—the mafia criminals who don’t have any sort of moral code at all when it comes to killing innocent women and children, and the crooked cop father who would just as easily use his daughter as a human shield if it came down to that. There’s no atrocity that Hale Monroe won’t commit.
But the excuse of protecting her is just that—an excuse. It feels more like I’mclaiming her. And that would be one of those feelings that my brother warned me about. I can hear him scolding me in my head—no attachment, no personal involvement, no feelings.
