Page 140 of Vicious Little Princess

“What are you gonna do?”

“Connect with Nico and I’ll call you back. Just stay where you are. Promise me. No crazy shit. Please. I can’t… not again with you too, okay?”

“I promise. I’ll stay here. But call me as soon as you can.”

“I will.”

I hung up, then rushed toward the rundown apartment building.

There were two of Carlo’s soldiers guarding the door, but they each gave me a chin lift and stepped aside when they saw me.

I pushed on through the door and into the foyer.

Piercing screams gave away where Nico was, and I followed the sounds down the ground floor corridor and around the corner to a room at the back.

I shoved open the door and took in some sort of storage room, musty boxes and a couple of old appliances in disrepair filling the space.

Most notably, though, were the fifty-odd soldiers spread throughout the room.

Some were on their sides sprawled across the floor, their ankles and wrists zip-tied. Others were tied to beams. Some bound to metal chairs. And then there were a dozen standing in the corner near where I’d entered, not bound and looking unharmed.

Nico was looming over Gio who was tied to a chair, his face a map of swelling, cuts, and deep bruising. A couple of his knuckles were shattered as well.

Nico had shed his leather jacket, and he stood there with the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up to his elbows, blood staining the formerly unblemished sleek white material.

“Suck my dick,” Gio grunted at him.

Nico sneered.

“You really aren’t helping yourself,” Carlo commented, his arms folded across his chest as he looked on to the side of them.

Nico pulled a knife from the holster at the back of his pants and spun it around in his hand in a casually threatening way.

This was actually nothing for him. I could see by the limited damage that had been done to the guysandthe way he was handling Giovanni, that he was holding back majorly.

He didn’t want to unleash thatferalside of him.

I’d thought it was because he didn’t want Carlo to see it, so that it didn’t inspire any sort of distrust in their newly formed alliance—and what seemed to be a burgeoning friendship too, apparently. But the struggle I could see from him, how much he was actually holding back, suggested that it was more than that. Besides, thinking about it now, I recalled that Carlo had actually witnessed Nico unleashing like that a couple of times before, anyway.

Was it actually about the baby, like I’d suspected before?

Or maybe something to do with him taking power? Did he want to bury that part of himself so he could lead without having that unstable side of him coming along for the ride?

Goddammit,my mind was wandering.

It got like this when I was panicking.

And when that panic had intense emotional roots.

Just like when Julian had been missing.

“Milo?”

I blinked and looked out to see Nico had registered my presence. He strode from Gio and up to me. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?” he asked.

It had to be all over me.

I pulled him off to the side.

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