Nico was in the backseat of his limousine. And he was hardly looking congratulatory. “Something like that,” he said.
Kay smiled. “If it wasn’t for you, I think it would have been an entirely different night.”
Nico still hated that he had intervened on her behalf, but he wasn’t sorry. He did what he had to do. Kay always came first. “Perhaps,” he said.
“Perhaps my ass,” she replied, and laughed. “I should be wrapping up here in a couple of hours. Everybody wants to party now that we’ve won. But later, after the parties, your place or mine?”
Nico closed his eyes. What he would have given to be able to celebrate with her. But the heat was about to be on him. He had to leave anyway. And now was as good a time as any because the writing had long since been on the wall. “I have to leave the country,” he said to her.
Kay hesitated. “Now?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Nico! When will you be back?”
“I don’t know.”
Kay exhaled. The last time he said that to her, he stayed away two weeks. “I guess it can’t be helped,” she said.
“No, it can’t,” Nico said, the pain still in his voice.
Then knocks were heard on her office door.
Nico heard them. “You don’t want to keep your supporters waiting,” he said.
“No, I guess not. But call me later.”
“Good night, Kay,” Nico said. “And Kay?”
“Yes?”
“Give’em hell.”
Kay laughed. “I will, darling,” she said. And then they ended the call.
But as she held her phone, an odd feeling came over her. A feeling that gave her a sense of dread. But then knocks were heard on her door again, and she yelled for whomever it was to come on in.
It was Rog. And he no longer looked so festive. “We’ve got an issue, Kay,” he said as he closed the door.
“Already? What about?”
“Not what about. Who about.”
“Then who?”
“Nico.”
Kay hesitated. “What about Nico?”
“I’ve been worried about your relationship with that guy for some time now,” Rog said. “I felt that way ever since you told me he hated the idea of you seeking public office.”
“And?”
“And so I did some digging. And what I found out is quite disturbing.”
Kay didn’t want to hear it, but she knew she had to. “What did you find out?”
“I have a friend at CIA. A high-ranking friend. I asked him to run background on Nicholas Bacard for me, deep background, and he did.”
Kay braced herself. “And?” she asked.
A distressed look appeared on Rog’s face. “It’s not good, Kay.”
Kay stared at him. She felt as if she was drowning with fear. “What’s not good?”
“His background. It’s not good.”
“What do you mean? He’s been in prison? He has warrants? What? Tell me what you mean, Rog.”
Rog hesitated. And then just let it rip. “Nicholas Bacard is an international businessman, yes. And a very successful one. There’s no question about that. But according to my man at CIA, he’s also an international mobster.”
Kay was shocked, but she wasn’t surprised. She suspected he might have had some mob ties of some sort. But to be a mobster himself? “Are you sure?”
“He’s a mobster, Kay,” Rog made plain. “And not just one of the guys. Oh, no. He is the guy. He’s a mob boss. He’s the head of a crime family, Kay. A major crime family.”
Kay’s heart sank. She could hardly believe it. “What are you saying? Are you telling me that Nico is in the Mafia?”
Rog nodded. “He used to be in the Italian Mob, where his family still has a foot hole, but now his base of operations are out of France. But yes, he’s Mafia. That’s what I’m telling you.”
Kay couldn’t believe it. “There has to be some mistake. I ran a background on him myself. That never came up once. Not once, Rog!”
“Because he covers his tracks. According to my friend at CIA, he does dirty-work favors for the rich and well-connected to keep himself off of everybody’s radar. They never can get anything on the guy because he’s so big, and so successful. And he covers his tracks. Even the FBI doesn’t have anything on the man. But the CIA is a different dog. They know things other agencies do not know. I’m telling you my information is sound.”
Kay didn’t lean back against the edge of her desk, she fell back against it. It was as if her world wasn’t just shifting anymore, but crashing and burning too.
She immediately pulled out her cell phone.
“What are you doing?” Rog asked her.
“I’m calling Nico.”
“But Kay, wait a minute. You can’t just ask him something like that. He may have to . . .”
Kay looked at Rog. “He may have to what?”
Rog hated to say it, but he knew he had to say it. “He may have to silence you, Kay. He may have to take you out to keep you quiet.”
Kay’s heart dropped. “He wouldn’t do anything like that,” she said.
“He’s a mob boss, Kay. He heads a crime family, Kay. Yes, he would.”
Kay just stood there. She was so confused she could hardly think straight.
“And even if he won’t harm you,” Rog said, “how in the world are you going to be a United States Congresswoman with a mob boss for a boyfriend?”
Tears began to appear in Kay’s eyes.
“I know you’re falling in love with the guy, Kay,” Rog said, “but you’re on your way to the top now. You can’t throw away your dreams for some man. Especially a man like him.”
But it wasn’t so cut and dry for Kay. She wasn’t falling in love with Nico. She loved Nico already! She’d never loved anyone as hard as she loved him. But did she really know him?
And Rog had it wrong about her dreams too. Because one of those dreams, maybe the biggest one, was to have children with a husband she adored. And she was just beginning to see Nico in that role. And she wasn’t nearly as certain as Rog that she shouldn’t give up politics for the love of a good man.
But how in the world could a mob boss be good?
“Give me a minute,” she said to Rog and Rog, understanding, walked out of her office, closing the door behind him.
Kay remained where she was, and she didn’t shed a tear. She couldn’t. Because it was too surreal. It was still too raw and unnerving. Because she had to figure out what in the world was she going to do.
But Nico made that decision for her. He left the country and never looked back. He never phoned her. He never returned any of her numerous phone calls. She went to his office. He wasn’t there. She went to his home. He wasn’t there.
Days came and went. Weeks came and went. She went to his office again, just because she was having a difficult time letting go. But she was told the same thing again: he was out of the country. She didn’t know if that was true or not, but that was what she was repeatedly told.
And their relationship ended as quickly as it had begun.
It just fizzled away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Ten Years Later
Nico stood at the door of his home on the French Riviera, just outside of Saint-Tropez, stunned to see Kay again. It was only when she saw him standing there, and she froze in place too, was he certain it was no mirage. Ten years later and Kay was standing at his front door.
And he stepped aside and opened the door wider. And without either of them saying a word, Kay walked on in.
She inhaled that same cologne scent she thought she had long since forgotten when she walked into his home. A home, she also realized, that was so beautiful, and so well-maintained that it looked as if it was a prop house, and no one actually lived there. He never brought her there during their six-month relationship. Six months that shook the foundation of her world when she met Nico, and with the aftermath of those six months affecting her far l
onger and far deeper than she should have allowed it to.
She didn’t even know where he lived in France. It was Rog, through his connections at CIA, that got her the address. Which didn’t help her pain at all. There was so much she didn’t know about the man she once considered giving up everything to be with that it now astounded her.
She was so caught up in that pain that she didn’t realize he had closed the door, had walked over to his full-size bar, and was pouring her a drink. When he walked back up to her, and was handing her that drink, and they were face to face again after ten long years, she couldn’t help it. The memories flooded back like a tidal wave, and she lost it. She hated herself for losing it! But she couldn’t stop it. She burst into tears.
Nico felt emotional too. He, too, felt as if a bolt of lightning had shaken him just having her in his orbit again. The sting of losing her was as powerful now as it had been a decade ago. And he quickly sat the glass on a nearby table and pulled her into his arms.
“Oh, my dear Kay,” he said as he held her, rubbing her hair. The pain was searing her. The regret was weighing him down. “Oh, my dear Kay!”
And Kay held onto him. She didn’t know if she could let him go. All of her anger. All of her sadness. All of her disappointment in him, and the way he just left her as if she never meant a damn to him, were still there. But the love she felt for him was still there, too, and it might have been the deepest emotion of all.
But he left her. And didn’t give her a chance to have any closure. That bitterness was there too. And it gave her the strength to let him go.
She moved out of his embrace, and backed away from him. Then she wiped her tears away, took that drink off of his table, and walked toward his sofa.
Nico felt that sense of loss again as soon as she pushed away from him. Because he remembered her wonderful fresh scent too, and the way she felt in his arms, and the way he had missed her unlike he ever thought it was possible for him to miss another human being. It was as if that emptiness no other woman had ever been able to fill returned even more powerful now that the one woman that had filled it to the brim was right before his very eyes again. In his home.
But why?
As she sat on his sofa in a home whose walls were floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the picturesque hills and valleys and waterways that populated the south of France, he walked over and sat in one of the armchairs that flanked the sofa.
He was dressed casually in his home, Kay noticed, in a pair of twill pants and an untucked linen shirt that was unbuttoned to his waist. While she was certain she looked burdened down by the weight of the world politics often forced her to carry, he looked liberated to her. He looked free. He was older than she was, but he looked as if time had stood still for him. As if time for him, unlike for her, had been a breeze.
He looked so relaxed that she began to wonder if she had interrupted his quiet evening at home. Or was there some woman upstairs in his bed? Or was somewhere else in his home? Then she wondered, if he wasn’t home alone, how were they ever going to have a private conversation on the scale she needed to have? She had to evade her Secret Service detail that was given to her once she secured the Democratic nomination, to make the journey. What if it was all for nothing?
“Are we alone?” she asked him, suddenly unsure what she was going to do if they weren’t.
When he said that they were, she relaxed again, in as much as she could relax. And when he leaned back and folded his legs, staring at her as if she was a carnival act, she had forgotten how it felt to have those sexy, unnerving, big violet eyes bearing down on her.
“How have you been?” he asked her.
If he thought her initial burst of emotion on seeing him again meant that all was forgiven, he was sorely mistaken. “What do you care?” she asked him, that steely look she was known for during the entirety of her campaign gripping her own intense, penetrating eyes.
Nico should not have been surprised by her bitter response, but somehow he was surprised, especially after how emotional she became after she entered his home. “You know I care, Kay, come on,” he responded.
“Oh, I know that now?” Kay asked, still unable to let the bitterness go. “Really?”
Nico stared at her. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said.
But as soon as he said those words she jumped to her feet. “Don’t even go there,” she said angrily to him and began walking around the room, one hand on her hip, the other hand rubbing her forehead. “Don’t even try it!”
Nico watched her roam the room as if she were a wounded animal. He had hurt her. He knew at the time his decision to leave would hurt her. But he also knew, given her decision to seek public office, that it was the absolute only decision he could have made. For both of them.
But all Kay knew was the pain of it all. She couldn’t shake the pain! He didn’t mean to hurt her, he said. She wasn’t about to let him get away with that bull.
She stood in front of a glass cabinet filled with Nico’s plagues and awards. The Man of the Year award. The Businessman of the Year award. The Philanthropist of the Year award. But where was the Mob Boss of the Year award, she wondered? Where was the Heartbreaker of the Year award? Where was the Asshole of the Year award?
She folded her arms. Her back was to Nico, and she could barely contain the tears. But she held on. She had to remind herself that he wasn’t worth it.
But then she saw a picture also in that glass cabinet. A picture framed in the back, between two additional awards. And it was a picture of her. She was ten years younger then: she was twenty-eight. She was his girlfriend at the time. She was happy then.
When Nico realized she was staring at that picture he had of her, one of many pictures of her he kept around his home, he couldn’t hold back. “I truly didn’t mean to hurt you, Kay,” he said again.
But she still wasn’t trying to hear that. She steeled herself. “I need your help,” she said, and turned to him.
He knew there was a reason why she came. He had hoped against hope that perhaps it was a reconciliation. It was an irrational hope, given how their relationship ended, but that was what he felt when he saw her again. He realized how he had not been able to live without her. But apparently she had been able to live without him. But he’d take her any way he could get her. “What kind of help?” he asked her.
“I’m being blackmailed,” Kay said.
Nico was surprised to hear it. “Shouldn’t that be something you’d take up with the Secret Service?”
Kay was shaking her head. “No,” she said. “It’s something I need to take up with a mob boss.”
Nico stared at her. Even to her, he could never admit such a thing. “Excuse me?”
“Cut the shit, Nico, alright?” She walked back around and stood in front of him. “Somebody doctored a video of an ex-boyfriend of mine.”
Nico almost asked what ex-boyfriend was she talking about? Me? Then he caught himself. “What’s on the video?”
“My ex being shot and killed,” Kay said. “By me.”
Nico stared at her. He knew it couldn’t be true. “You have a copy of this video?”
Kay pulled out her cell phone. Nico stood to his feet. When she handed her phone to him, he pressed the Play button. And he saw the grainy video that first showed a shot of Kay sitting at a table, and then the backshot of Kay with a gun in her hand, shooting him through the head. Even Nico flinched at the shot. Not because of the shot, but because of the implication of who was firing the shot. But he was more concerned with getting a look at her ex (a very handsome black man) than the video itself.
He handed her back her phone. “It’s obviously doctored,” he said. “While you sat at the table you had on one outfit. While you were supposedly shooting him, you had on a different outfit. That video is laughable.”
“I know,” Kay said. “But it doesn’t matter.”
“Like hell it doesn’t!”
“It doesn’t matter nine days before an election
,” Kay made clear. “If that video ever makes it into the public sphere, I’ll lose this election. I already have too many strikes against me. This will just be one more strike that will more than likely be one too many.”
“What strikes against you are you talking about?”
“I’m African-American. I’m a woman. At thirty-eight, I’ll be the youngest President in history. Although I’m a four-term Congresswoman and a two-term Committee Chairwoman, I’ll have the thinnest resume of anybody ever to occupy the White House. Voters were already going to be taking a chance on somebody like me. They’re doing it because they want to try something completely different after the last disastrous eight years of this President. But that doesn’t negate the fact that I was already going in with a lot against me. And being accused of murder just ahead of election day will spell my doom. There’s no way I’ll have enough time to convince enough people that I didn’t murder my ex-boyfriend. There’s no way. Just trying to explain something like that means you’re losing.”
“It worked when you first ran for Congress and your opponent tried that last-minute raid on your campaign headquarters,” Nico said. “That was explained.”
“Because you, through the mayor, got Chief Granley to call it out for what it was: a smear by my opponent. Since most people in my district knew me and knew me well, they were able to dismiss it. But everybody in the current administration wants my opponent to win. They aren’t going to call out shit. And even if they do, that won’t be enough. We aren’t talking about some ill-timed raid in a district that knows me well. We’re talking about murder where many people in America don’t know me well enough to dismiss it out of hand.”
“I’m assuming your ex is dead?” Nico asked.
“Yes.”
“How did he die?”
“He committed suicide.”
Nico stared at her. She said it as if she had no feelings whatsoever for the man.
“We had broken up prior to his death,” she said. “He was a cheater.”
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