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LEO SAT OPPOSITE ME, rolling the unlit cigarette between his fingers, waiting for me to respond.
“Under arrest?” I asked, and he nodded.
“That’s the best I can offer,” he replied. “That doesn’t involve sticking you in the back of a van and taking you away right now.”
I winced. I knew I had been taking a risk coming out here, but this was a bigger one than I had been prepared for. I couldn’t go to prison, not now – there was too much on the line, too many pieces in the air to even think about it.
“So why aren’t you doing that?” I asked.
“Because we need you to help us stop Nikita,” Leo explained. “Mauro’s led me to believe that you’re trustworthy, at least as far as your rivalry with the Serbians is concerned. And I need you to prove that to me, right now.”
“Doing what?” I asked, shaking my head. I had no idea what he was going to ask of me. But I had to be willing to play along with them. It was strange to think of Mauro working with these people, making it so they knew everything about me, but I had to accept it was the truth. There was no way they could have made this up.
“Okay, let me tell you what we have on the Nikita situation,” he told me, leaning back in his seat. He glanced around us, making sure that nobody was listening in, before he continued.
“He’s planning to marry Nadia tomorrow,” he explained, and I had to clench my fist under the table to keep from reacting. I already knew that, but it didn’t make it any easier to hear it coming out of his mouth. Nikita really thought that he could just take Nadia from me, as though it was that easy? He had another fucking thing coming.
“But, in truth, he’s going to use it to start an all-out war with you and your cohorts,” Leo continued. “Now, that’s the last thing we want. It’s hard enough to keep you both out of trouble without more reason for you to fight than ever.”
“I don’t get it,” I replied, shaking my head. “We’re - how is him getting married to Nadia going to lead to a war?”
“Because he’s not going to let her make it out of their reception,” he replied. “They’re going to have their first dance, and he’s going to have someone pick her off before she can so much as cut the cake.”
My eyes widened and my stomach dropped.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I demanded. The thought of Nadia in some beautiful gown, being taken out by some bastard on her wedding day stuck in my brain at once, lodging itself inside in that dangerous, frightening way that only losing someone you loved could.
“He’s setting it up to make it look as though you’re the one who killed her,” Leo explained. “He’s going to be weeping over her body and then he’s going to declare war on you and your people. What better reason to fight than over his wife?”
“He’s going to kill her,” I muttered, and I felt the rage rise inside of me before I could get hold of it. I knew I needed to stay calm, hear Leo out, but this was more than I could take. How could he do something like that? It was bad enough that he seemed to think he had any claim over Nadia at all, but this was something else entirely.
I was going to stop it before it so much as got started.
“Not if we can help it,” Leo replied. “If he does, and if he gets that story out there – the city’s going to be on fire by the end of the night. People you thought you could trust will turn on you, if they believe his story, and they’re going to. They won’t believe that he could have killed his own wife just to push this narrative further forward, and they’re going to do whatever they can to destroy you.”
I tried to wrap my head around it. The plan was a good one, honestly. If I could look at it with a little clarity, I could see that Nikita would get everything that he wanted from selling this story, no matter how much I hated the mere thought of it. He could convince the world that I was a monster willing to murder a young bride on the day of her wedding to get what I wanted, and he could pull in everyone around him to make sure I got what was coming to me.
But I couldn’t let that happen. I hardly cared about what would happen to me, but the thought of losing Nadia – no. Not a fucking chance in hell. I wasn’t going to let Nikita take her from me, from the world at large. She deserved better than that. She had been through enough. I wasn’t going to let her life end that way, with that indignity, as part of some scheme an evil man had come up with to win a game that he had been playing all his life.
“How do you know all this?” I asked him, narrowing my eyes.
“Because Mauro’s the one who helped put this all in place,” Leo replied.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“He’s the one who arranged for Nikita and Nadia to come together,” he explained. I shook my head.
“He would never have done that—”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about Mauro, trust me,” Leo cut me off. “A lot that you’ll probably never know. But he was working with the Serbians behind your back. It was his way of making sure we could keep control of both ends of this. We didn’t want to lose our grip on you or on Nikita, but once Mauro realized things were reaching a boiling point, he decided that we needed to take Nikita out.”
“Why not me?” I asked, hollowly. “Why wouldn’t Mauro just get rid of me, if I’m that much of a problem?”
“I think he grew fond of you, despite the circumstances of your meeting,” Leo replied, grimly. “And he knows we have a better chance of controlling the Italians rather than the Serbians. Nikita – well, he’s a loose cannon. We have no way to know what he’s planning on doing at any given time, and we’re not willing to take that risk.”
“So you set Nadia up with him... for what?” I asked.
“As a distraction,” Leo replied. “If he’s focused on the wedding, then we have the chance to take out the Serbians and destabilize their organization.”
“Mauro set Nadia up to be killed by Nikita?” I asked, shaking my head. He might have been lying to me about some things, but surely he wouldn’t have put an innocent girl in so much danger.
“The intention was never to let her be taken out by him,” Leo assured me. “We planned to lure them back to New York so we had a fix on Nikita, and kill him the night before the wedding was due to happen.”
“Tonight?”
“That was the plan.”
“And what is it now?”
He sighed.
“Some things have... changed, compared to how we wanted them to be,” he admitted. “We intended to take Nikita out and rescue Nadia, let her talk about what she’s been through in the hopes of changing the public perception of Nikita once and for all. But he’s got her right where he wants her, and I’m not convinced we can go through with the assassination and get her out in one piece.”
“So what do we do now?” I demanded.
“That’s where you come in,” he explained, pointing the cigarette in my direction. “We need you to get Nadia out of there. We can’t risk her going through with the wedding. If she does, Nikita will have the opportunity to pull the trigger on his plan – literally. If she ends up dead, then we have no control over any of this anymore, and we can’t risk that happening.”
“And what are you asking me to do?” I pressed him. I knew that it must be galling for a man like him to have to deal with someone like me, but that’s how I knew it had to be serious. There was no way they would have even entertained pulling me into this unless they had a damn good reason to. This was as important as they came, and I would do anything to make sure I didn’t lose Nadia just because of some plan Mauro had come up with behind my back.
“I’m asking you to get in there and steal your girlfriend,” he replied, a smile spreading over his face. “You leave everything else to us.”
He lifted the cigarette to his lips and lit it. It was utterly illegal to smoke indoors, but I got the feeling he didn’t care much about that. This was a man who was used to having everything his own way, and he wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of that.
I nodded. My mind was racing as I tried to piece together my plan. I knew that I had to act fast, that I had to make sure I pulled this off – if Nadia got hurt, or worse, I would never come close to forgiving myself. I had to pull a plan out of my ass that would ensure she stayed safe, no matter how tough it might be, no matter how hard I was pressed against the clock right now.
The smoke from his cigarette curled around his face, and he eyed me. I could tell he didn’t trust me, certainly not after what had happened to Mauro, and maybe I couldn’t blame him for that. This man wanted to be able to put his faith in me, but I was still a villain in his eyes – the lesser of two evils, but not by a whole lot.
“You’re not going to let me down on this, are you?” he asked me bluntly. I shook my head.
“You know I won’t,” I replied. I meant it. No matter how much I might be freaking out, I had to come through with this, more than I had ever come through with anything before. Yes, Mauro was gone, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t handle myself. When it came to Nadia, I would find the strength that I needed to see it through.
Because if I didn’t - then she would be stuck with Nikita for the rest of her short life. And there was no way in fucking hell I would let that piece of shit get anywhere close to the woman I loved. The fact that he had convinced her to agree to this wedding in the first place was bad enough, but on top of that, for him to use her for this twisted plan... he had no idea what was coming his way.
I watched Leo as he smoked his cigarette and wondered if I could trust him. I was just learning about Mauro’s secret double-life, and I didn’t know if I could believe everything that came out of Leo’s mouth. But I didn’t have a choice. He was the closest thing to an ally that I had left in the world right now, and I had to work with what I was being given.
The smell of the tobacco filled the air around me, and I narrowed my eyes against the smoke. Whatever it took, I was going to see this through. I was going to get Nadia out.
And I was going to keep her from spending another fucking minute with the nightmare that was Nikita.
