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He sighed and scrubbed his fingers through his hair. “You really want to know?”
“Yes,” I said, meeting his gaze.
“It’s like a drug. You get a taste of all that power, you know what it’s like to hold a man’s life in your hands, and you want more of it. You feel in control in a way that no other facet of life can offer.”
“How old were you when you first…” I let the words hang unspoken in the air.
“Fifteen,” he said without hesitation.
He’d been a teenager the first time he’d killed someone. That’s awful.
“I’m sorry,” I said, though the words seemed too small.
“Don’t be sorry, Raven. It’s not something I’ll ever regret.”
It was the shadows that crossed his expression that caught me more than his words. There was a story there. As much as I was certain about it, I was equally sure it was not a story he had any intention of sharing with me now.
Maybe he would eventually. But I realized it wouldn’t be long before he moved on to his next prey, leaving me alone with my unanswered questions.
I knew this a temporary thing, a dalliance. I knew it all before it ever started. But the thought tugged something inside me, something that could break.
Maybe Greta had been right about this too. I wouldn’t be ready to get off this ride when it ended.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Raven
We had the hotel suite to ourselves. Greta had been gone the past four days, visiting cousins who’d gotten word she was in the city. Nico and I had used the time well.
“Favorite TV show as a kid?” I asked him, trying to muster the energy to lean up on my elbow. We’d christened every room in the suite—except Greta’s—and then re-christened them over and over again. Our latest venture had ended us on the suite’s living room floor. I was still catching my breath.
“Don’t have one.”
“Seriously?”
“We weren’t allowed to watch television,” he said with a shrug.
“Did your parents worry it would rot your brain?” I asked, half-teasing, half-curious.
He shook his head. “Not exactly. My father thought it was a waste of time. Children didn’t require entertainment; they required knowledge.”
I furrowed my brows. “So, you read a lot of books as a kid?”
There’d been bookshelves in Nico’s house, but I hadn’t paid much attention to the titles. Now, I wished I had. What did he read as an adult? Sci-fi? Mystery? “How To Be the Scariest Man in the Room 101?”
“You could say that,” he said with a reluctant nod, and I wondered why.
“Seriously, how many—a ballpark figure.”
He laughed but shifted at the same time, spotlighting his discomfort. “Enough that I had two undergraduate degrees and a master’s by the time I was twenty-three,” he said a little shortly, like he was anxious to move on.
I had to blink a couple of times. It wasn’t that I thought Nico was stupid—far from it—but I hadn’t really seen myself as his intellectual inferior. I was seeing it now, though.
“What about you?” he asked, and it was my turn to shift uncomfortably.
“I don’t have any degrees, not yet.”
He looked at me like he couldn’t quite figure out why that would bother me.
