His Identity

53

|Nick's POV|

"You're not gonna ask how I got in your house?" I ask instead of dropping the hundreds of bombs she wanted me to on her.

Aveline narrows her eyes at me. She's still on the bed, her back against the headboard. Her eyes contain a certain level of wariness which I absolutely hate. She's never been this way around me before. Now she's looking at me like I'm someone who wants to hurt her. Or has already hurt her.

Fuck. I just helped her out of a panic attack. This is not how she's supposed to be looking at me. Not that I'm expecting her to give me the oh you're my knight in shining armor look. That's horseshit.

"You probably have a key." She says with a dismissive tone. Damn, she really doesn't want to know anything except the things I really don't want to tell her. Fun. "Let's just get this over with, Nick. We can talk about your infiltration kink after." That is, if you don't kick me the fuck out after finding out.

"What do you want to know?"

I watch as she straightens herself. She crosses her legs and places a pillow on her lap before resting her hands on it. "Well, the men who are after me knows everything about me. They know about my father. Did you lie to me about what happened to him?"

I bite my tongue. Moment of truth. The moment I've been dreading for. I wish I'd never asked for her help. "I didn't." That's not a lie, "not completely." Not a lie either. I tried to stick to the truth as close as possible when I told her about it, but yes I did say a fair share of bullshit as well.

Aveline hums and gives me a nod as if she suspected it. I know she did, she made it obvious but she didn't push it. Now she is, and I can't even be mad about her sudden persistence. Her life's been flipped upside down— she has men following her for fuck's sake. My dad's men on top of that.

I did make him call them off the second he told me about it. He didn't argue and told them to return the hell back to the main mansion. My meeting with dad didn't go as I expected it to— not that I was hoping for a warm hug or a couple of I missed you's or anything.

"Keep going."

"Your dad really was a snitch," I tried to hold a sympathetic tone but it's kind of impossible to feel bad for the man who tried to expose and ruin my entire family. "And he really was killed by some mafia dude. I lied about which one."

"So. . ." She raises her brows, looking as confused as ever, "he wasn't killed by the American mafia?"

"Thing is," I keep my eyes on her to take in her reaction, "the American, Italian and Russian mafia are allies. And your dad worked for the Italian one, but the information he contained was on all the three of them so the three leaders killed him–" I pause, "together."

"How does three men kill one man?"

"They took turns," I clear my throat, "they tortured him slowly until he finally met his demise."

Aveline chooses to remain silent for a while. I watch her carefully, there's not a single emotion except curiosity stretched on that face of hers. "And that someone you know told you that?"

"Yes."

"So why are there people after me now?" She asks, looking at me as if I'm supposed to have the answer to that. She somehow thinks I'm related to all the shit that's been going down in her life lately. Why she assumes that is beyond me— even though she's right. It's on me. "They said their boss wants me because I'm messing around with his son. And the only person I was messing around with," she drags her eyes to me, "is you."