“What do you want to talk about?” Nikko prompted when she didn’t speak right away.
“I think you know. Did you do it?” she demanded, keeping her voice to a hushed whisper. “Did you kill Barry?”
He studied her a minute before answering, and she would have given anything at that moment to be a mind reader. “Does it matter?”
Does it matter? “Of course it matters,” she hissed. “You could get caught. You’d go to prison.”
Nikko’s top lip twitched, not fully pulling off a smile, and she suspected he was working hard at holding it back. “That’s it? You’re worried I’m going to go to prison?” He gave in to his grin and flashed her those straight white teeth in a smile that felt oddly placating.
“Don’t worry,” he told her, smoothing his hand over the back of her head and leaning close as if he planned to divulge a secret. “I’ve taken care of it. Barry won’t bother you again. I promise.” His lips brushed over hers in the briefest kiss before he stood to his full towering height and tried to walk away.
She stopped him by grabbing his wrist. “Nikko, did you kill him? I have to know.”
The seconds ticked by, and she almost gave up hope he was going to answer her, when he finally said, “No. Not this time. But if I ever see him near you again, if he even so much as tries to contact you, he knows I will hunt him down and kill him.”
And Violet had no doubt in her mind that Nikko would keep that promise.
Ryann wasn’t kidding when she said the boys were going to be in the gym a long time. Vi was glad for the opportunity to get to know her better, especially because it was obvious these people were very important to Nikko. But she couldn’t help but wonder if Nikko wasn’t taking advantage of the opportunity to avoid her. In the hours that passed, she’d learned from Ryann that Aiden and Nikko were old sparring partners and their ties of friendship ran deep—ties that obviously extended to Aiden’s wife.
She’d be lying if she said a part of her didn’t struggle with a bit of jealousy where the redhead was concerned. But it helped that she genuinely liked Ryann, and she believed the woman truly wanted Nikko to be happy. Given time, she was confident she and Ryann would become great friends. If they relocated to Vegas, and it sounded like they were going to, Vi had no doubt Ryann would fit right into her and Pen’s dynamic duo.
It was well past midnight when she heard the shower quit and the connecting door of their guest room crack open. As Nikko stepped inside, the light from the bathroom illuminated his naked body, bathing him in a warm, ethereal glow that sent a rush of feminine awareness centering between her legs. Mercy, he was a magnificent sight. She watched him as he crossed the room, his muscles rippling beneath all that smooth golden skin.
“You’re beautiful . . .” she told him, rolling on her back to prolong her view.
His mouth curled into a crooked smile that sent her heart fluttering like a schoolgirl. “Isn’t that supposed to be my line?”
“Not from my view.”
“I thought you’d be asleep.”
“Disappointed?” she teased. “I was starting to wonder if you were avoiding me.”
“No way,” he said, coming around to the vacant side of the bed. “I was fighting like hell to make Kruze tap so I could get in here.”
“And did you? Make him tap?”
He crawled under the covers and pulled her into his arms, nuzzling the side of her neck, and growled, “You bet your sweet little ass I did.” His hand dropped to her thigh, slipping under the T-shirt of his that she was wearing as a nightgown. “You and Ryann have a nice time getting to know each other?”
The calluses on his palm set her flesh on fire as he kissed and nipped a path down her neck.
“We did.” It was getting harder to string her thoughts together. There were things she wanted to talk to him about, but she could feel her resistance fading fast as he cast his spell over her. The power he had to obliterate her defenses never ceased to amaze her. “Does she know you have feelings for her?”
Nikko’s mouth stalled at the hollow of her collarbone. Growing still beside her, he slowly raised his head to meet her eyes.
“Clover, I don’t have feelings for anyone but you.”
“All right, then, maybe not anymore, but you used to.”
“Fuck,” he cursed. “You know that’s the problem with dating a shrink, you’re like a damn psychic. Don’t I get to keep any of my secrets to myself?”
All teasing aside, she sat up and met his stare. “I think you have enough of those already, Nikko. I want to like her, but I can’t commit until I know I have nothing to worry about.” She didn’t want to come across as insecure, but after the years she’d had with Barry, old habits died hard. And in her defense, Ryann was just about the most beautiful, charismatic woman she’d ever met, so she could hardly blame him if he felt something for her.
Nikko’s frown softened, his eyes filling with a tenderness that took Violet’s breath away. “Sweetheart, you have nothing to worry about. I love you and only you. Ryann and Aiden were always meant to be together. And they’re perfect for each other—just like you’re perfect for me—in every way.”
Vi’s heart stuttered inside her chest at his confession. This was the first time he’d told her he loved her. “I love you, too, Nikko.”
Sadness darkened his eyes, and she realized he didn’t believe her. As long as there was this secret between them, his guilt would never allow him to believe she could truly love him. There would always be that what-if . . . that sliver of doubt in his mind. “I know you don’t believe me, but I promise there is nothing you could tell me about your past that would change the way I feel. But I can’t prove it to you unless you tell me what happened.”
He took a deep breath and dragged his hand through his damp hair, leaving it standing on end in a wild disarray that was so incredibly sexy.
“I promised myself that if I got you back, I would tell you the truth. I owe you that much. I know it. But you have to understand that I have never told anyone about this, and I’m so fucking scared that, when you discover what I did, you’ll never look at me the same again.”
Her heart broke for him. She could literally feel the ache in her chest, sympathetic pains to the agony tearing him apart inside. There wasn’t anything more she could say to make him believe her. It was up to him. He was going to have to choose whether or not to trust her. But his decision right now would undoubtedly determine where they went from here. As much as she loved Nikko and wanted to be with him, she couldn’t spend her life with someone who wouldn’t fully share himself with her.
She could see him struggling, waging an internal battle to find the right words, words that just wouldn’t come. “I know my past is ruining our future, Violet. You think I don’t see that? That in trying to hold on to you, to protect you from the truth, I’m losing you. I’m tired of living a lie. What’s written in those records isn’t what really happened that day.”
Violet wasn’t sure what Nikko could possibly tell her that could be worse than what she’d read in his file. But now he was telling her it wasn’t true. If it was a lie, then maybe . . . “It wasn’t your fault, was it?”
Her hopes for his innocence were abandoned when he chuffed. “Oh, it was my fault, all right. I’m just saying that’s not how my team died. When I called in that air strike, my lat and longitude were good. Whoever took those coordinates had the location for air support and our evac site, and they mixed them up. But that was my team I led into that ambush, and it was my responsibility to get them out alive. Maybe if I’d acted sooner . . .”
“Acted sooner how? Nikko, what could you have possibly done?” His guilt was palpable, his grief consuming. She had to be strong for him, had to make him see this wasn’t his fault.
His silvery-gray eyes locked on hers—hard and unwavering. His voice held no emotion when he said, “Pulled the trigger.”
Violet’s heart was racing. As she sat there looking at Nikko, she felt like
she was cresting the highest peak of a roller coaster, balancing on the precipice, suspended in the air for those few breathless seconds when reaching the point of no return, right before gravity took over, plunging its victims into a ninety-degree-angle, seventy-mile-an-hour plummet toward the ground.
Panic and anticipation gripped her stomach. She feared the words that were about to come out of his mouth as he bared his fractured soul.
“We were in Alice-Gahn. The city was supposed to be deserted. There were some insurgents holed up in this area right outside the city. Before we knew it, we were in the middle of a firefight. They were closing in, and I couldn’t risk us getting pinned down, so I called in an air strike. They were ten minutes out. It doesn’t seem like that long, but when someone is shooting at you, it feels like fucking forever. Remmy was the sniper in my unit. We’d become best friends during recon training. He spotted an enemy sniper hiding in a burned-out shell just a click west. He took off to flank him. I tried to stop him, but I was too late. Rem was a cowboy, always the first to charge into any firefight. I swore that guy had a horseshoe up his ass for all the times he’d cheated death. Maybe that made him reckless. The enemy sniper tagged him halfway between us and the shell. It was a shoulder shot, but bad enough that it dropped him out in the open. Every time Rem tried to move, to get to cover, the sniper would put another bullet in him. They were nonlethal hits, meant to wound and try to draw us out into the open to rescue him, so he could pick us off one at a time. I ordered my team to fall back to the evac site, but they wouldn’t go. No way would they leave one of their own behind. I had an air strike coming in, and we needed to move. I ordered them to go. Told them I was going to get Rem and we’d meet up with them on the hill. They reluctantly fell back.”
He wasn’t seeing her anymore—his gaze was vacant and unfocused. He was so far into his head that Violet could only take his hand and hold on.
“I tried to pin down the sniper with my scope, but he was too dug in. He put two more rounds into Rem. I couldn’t let that fucker keep torturing him, couldn’t let them take him alive. I had no way to reach him, and I could hear the aircraft engine in the distance, knew they were getting close. I had no choice. I pulled the trigger.”
“Oh, Nikko!” Vi gasped, pressing her hand over her mouth as the full impact of his confession slammed into her. “I’m so sorry . . .” She squeezed his hand, drawing his steely gaze back into sharp focus.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he growled, snarling like a wounded animal caught in a trap.
“Like what?”
“Like I deserve your pity. Like I’m not a murderer. Like I didn’t shoot my best friend in the fucking head! I know it was impossible for him to see me through that scope, but I swear to God he could. I swear to God he held my eye right up until I pulled that trigger.”
Violet was speechless. It was her job to know the perfect words in these situations, and she had nothing. All she wanted to do was throw herself into Nikko’s arms and tell him how sorry she was that he had to live with this guilt—this secret—for all these years, but that wasn’t what he wanted from her. She couldn’t give him the absolution he needed because she wasn’t the person he needed to be seeking it from.
“I was a klick behind my team when the air strike hit our evac zone by mistake. Just close enough to catch some shrapnel from the blast. I ordered them there. They died because I ordered them there. I survived because I stayed behind to kill one of my men. How fucked up is that?”
That explained the missing soldier. Why Nikko had survived when the rest of his team hadn’t.
“There were a lot of questions about what went wrong. How had the coordinates gotten mixed up? It was easier to tell those family members and loved ones that my team had died in a firefight. It’s easier to cope with loss when you believe your son died in the line of duty defending his country, rather than, senselessly, because of a governmental screwup.
“So they told the lie and included Remmy in it to cover up what I’d done. In exchange, they got my culpability and I avoided prison—murder is still murder, even in war. On paper, I called in the wrong coordinates. The government comes out looking clean, and everyone wins.”
“Except you. You haven’t won anything. Remmy still haunts you, doesn’t he?”
Nikko took a deep breath and dragged his hand through his hair. The tortured look in his eyes broke her heart.
“Every. Fucking. Night.”
“You have to put this to rest, otherwise you’re never going to be able to move on,” she said, placing her hand against his tightly clenched jaw and slowly sweeping her thumb over the scar slashing down his cheek. “Nikko, don’t you want this to end?”
His soulful gaze locked on hers, the silver ring around his pupils shimmering from the extra moisture in his eyes. “More than anything . . .”
“Then you have to tell Remmy’s family the truth. Tell them what really happened. Nikko, what you did was honorable, and Remmy died a hero. You saved their son from a miserable, torturous death. You kept him out of enemy hands. And, baby, whether you pulled that trigger or not, Remmy was already dead. You all were because you would have been at that evac point with him and the rest of your team. Remmy saved your life. And his parents deserve to know that.”
Maybe that was true, but Nikko didn’t think he could do it. How could he look Stan and Marla in the eye, two people that had been like a second set of parents to him, and tell them he was the one who had killed their son? How many times over the years had he refused to return their phone calls? Ignored their voice mails and petitions for him to come see them? He hadn’t even gone to Rem’s memorial service. Violet didn’t know what she was asking of him. And still, the truth of her words sat in his gut like a lead weight. Is that what it would take to finally be free of this pain, this insufferable guilt?
God help him, he was almost desperate enough to do it.
Violet had to admit, when she imagined what secrets Nikko could have been hiding, nothing like this had ever entered her mind. Killing your best friend, making the decision to take his life and then pulling the trigger . . . ? Devastating. In light of the truth, it was a miracle Nikko had held it together as well as he had all this time. No wonder he had nightmares and rage blackouts. How many times over the last few years had he pulled that trigger?
But as promised, knowing the truth changed nothing for the way she felt about him. If anything, she loved him more for his courage and his strength of sacrifice, for surely Remmy hadn’t been the only one to die when Nikko pulled that trigger. He’d left his heart in Alice-Gahn, and she wanted more than anything to help him get it back. And in order to do that, he needed to believe, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she loved him and would always stand by him. She could tell him this a hundred times but she didn’t think he would believe her. He thought himself unlovable, the unthinkable choice he’d been forced to make rendering him unworthy of that kind of devotion. But nothing could be further from the truth. She’d show him how much she loved him, how much she wanted him. Perhaps then she could convince him of what she’d always known—he was worth saving.
He was caught up in his own thoughts, the torment in his eyes bearing witness to the agony in his soul. This was not where she wanted his mind focusing right now. After such a dark and painful confession, how easy it would be to slip into the pit of despair. She couldn’t let him go there. He needed to be thinking of their future, not his past. She wanted to comfort him, to shift his focus on the here and now rather than getting sucked down that dark hole of regret.
“Nikko, look at me.” She lifted her hands, placing her palms against the square angle of his jaw. His gaze reluctantly shifted to hers. “I want you to know that I love you. Your past doesn’t change that.” She leaned closer and kissed the scar on his cheek. His furrowed brows tightened and she pressed a kiss there, too, then one on his other cheek, and finally his lips.
He sat still as stone, seeming unwilling to reach out to take the love she
so freely offered. When he didn’t return her kiss, she pressed her mouth more firmly to his, courting his lips to part and accept her words of truth as she whispered against them, “I love you, I love you, I love you . . .” She’d say it a million times over if that’s what it took to make him believe her.
The tension inside him built, as if he were fighting an inner battle—reach out and take the love she was offering and forgive himself, or continue to wallow in self-hate and misery as penance that could never be paid. It was his decision. She couldn’t make it for him, though God knew she wished she could. Let me love you! her mind screamed, railing in frustration, willing him to just take that step.
She would not give up, dammit. This was their life, their future she was fighting for. “I love you . . .” she cried, pressing her mouth tighter to his, the words leaving her lips in a broken sob as tears of frustration rolled down her cheeks, salting their kiss.
Could he do it? Could he forgive himself for pulling that trigger? It was the only way he could move forward and have any semblance of a normal life with her. All he needed to do was take hold of the absolution Violet was offering him. He’d been wrong when he’d told her he didn’t want it, that she couldn’t give it to him, because this woman clinging to him right now, begging him to let her love him, was offering Nikko a second chance. She was his salvation. It was a temptation too sweet to resist.
The pressure building inside him was about to explode. The walls he’d erected around his heart to keep the darkness close began to crack and crumble under the force of Clover’s briny kiss. Each I love you was a well-placed assault to his defenses until finally he couldn’t hold the fortress up any longer. His walls came crashing down with a soul-jarring bang. He slipped his arms around her, holding her in a death grip, and returned her kiss with the desperation of a dying man clinging to his savior. Her light flooded him, eradicating the darkness and leaving in its wake an overwhelming sense of peace. Love . . . he realized, his heart feeling fuller, beating stronger with each powerful wave. This is what it feels like to open your heart and let someone love you . . .
Fighting for Control (Against the Cage Book 3) Page 36