Page 90 of Nikolai (Kansas City Reapers)

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I just got off the phone with Quinn.”

“What did Mercado want?”

“It was about what I wanted, actually. I told him that keeping her on here, protecting her, wasn’t working out. And he just got the new safe house set up.”

“Man… you didn’t.”

“I did. She leaves the day after tomorrow.”

“Niko, you better fix this,” he sighed heavily as he stood from the chair. “If you don’t, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”

As he walked out of the room, closing the door behind him and leaving me to my thoughts, I realized he might actually be right.

And I had no clue what the hell I was going to do about it.

But at the end of the day, the plan was already set into motion. The only problem was, I was pretty sure I’d made a huge mistake.

Chapter 22

Maddy

I stood there justbeyond the edge of the open door, feeling the weight of the moment settle over me like a shroud. The hallway was a narrow strip of darkness, barely touched by the feeble morning light filtering in from the kitchen. My fingers grazed the cool wood of the doorframe, the only support I could find as my world tilted precariously on the brink of an abyss I could neither avoid nor escape.

Niko was on the phone, his voice an indistinct murmur drifting through the thin door like the whispered winds of a storm. I hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but the conversation wrapped around me with a sickening inevitability, pulling me into its gravity. I had come here to surprise him, to bring a spark of sass into the morning. Instead, I had stumbled into the cruel theater of his deceit.

His words reached me through the gap between thedoor and the frame, each syllable a jagged shard that cut through the stillness of the hall. “I just can’t do this anymore. It’s too much,” he said, the casual dismissal of my presence delivered with a stark finality that left me gasping as if the very air had been wrenched from my lungs. I pressed my ear against the door, desperate to hold on to the fragments of his voice, to grasp the reality of what I was hearing even as it shattered what little resolve I had left.

In that moment, time seemed to stretch out endlessly; a heavy, unyielding expanse filled with the weight of unspoken truths. My hands felt numb and unsteady, as if they were disconnected from the trembling body they were meant to steady. I could almost feel time itself grinding to a halt, the seconds elongating into an infinite loop of pain and disbelief.

My heart pounded in my chest, a frenetic drumbeat that echoed in the hollow cavity of my ribs. It was as though every beat was a futile attempt to keep me grounded, to anchor me in a reality that was slipping through my fingers. I could feel the tears welling up, hot and stinging, but they remained trapped behind the dam of my resolve, standing as a silent testament to the overwhelming sorrow that consumed me.

Niko’s voice was a distant, distorted echo of the trust I had thought we shared. Each word he spoke seemed to resonate through the walls, reverberating off the surfaces of our time together, dismantling the memories we had only begun to build. I remembered the gentle touch of his hand, the way he had once looked at me with so much reverence and passion; now thosemoments just felt like cruel lies, their sweetness turned bitter and false.

The silence that followed his words was almost worse than the confession itself. It was a deafening void, filled with the ghostly echoes of our laughter, and the empty spaces where our dreams had once lived. I could feel the heaviness of that silence pressing down on me, a suffocating weight that left me paralyzed and breathless.

My mind was a storm of confusion and hurt, churning through the images of our past and the specters of a future that had been so abruptly snatched away. I felt as though I were trapped in a twilight zone, suspended between the warm familiarity of yesterday and the cold, unyielding reality of tomorrow. The door was a flimsy barrier between me and the pseudo-relationship I had begun to trust, now crumbling under the force of his betrayal.

Every breath I took was a laborious effort, laden with the weight of despair and disbelief. I stood there, a fragile wisp of a woman caught in the cruel twist of fate, my body trembling as though it could break free from the pain that gripped my soul. The walls around me seemed to close in, a tightening circle of anguish that bore down on me with relentless pressure.

And so I remained, frozen in that moment of awful clarity, enveloped in the profound silence that had replaced the joy I’d begun to find with him. The feeling I had once thought was unshakable. The echoes of his words hung in the air like the last notes of a sad song, their haunting melody a painful reminder of the future that had been so heartlessly severed from the past. Ihadn’t realized I wanted that future, but as the reality settled over me, I realized that perhaps I’d just been lying to myself the whole time.

I shook my head to clear it and gulped in a deep, shuddering breath. I couldn’t sit there any longer, wallowing in my feelings. Wiping the tears from my face with a harsh swipe of my hand, I sped off toward my room, taking the stairs two at a time.

“If distance from me is what Niko wants,” I hissed out as I slammed my bedroom door. “Then that’s what he’ll get.”

I pulled my suitcases from the closet, throwing them onto the bed with violence that reflected the anger and pain I felt inside of me. Throwing them open, I began pulling my things from the closet, tossing them at the suitcases with every ounce of fury I felt inside.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to — I didn’t even know what I wanted to do.

Tears spilled over and down my cheeks as I picked up my shoes from the bottom of the closet and flung them across the room with a scream of agony. The shoes skipped right over the bed, landing in a crashing heap against the door — just as it opened.

“Hey — oh shit!” Jax’s voice surprised me, drawing my attention to the door. “Uh… I guess this is a … bad time?” he asked, running a hand through his long hair as he picked up my discarded shoes and tossed them onto the bed.

“Not a bad time, just dealing with a fucking asshole.”

“I assume we’re talking about Niko?”

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