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“Good,” Ezra says. “It’s about time you two had a kick up your asses.”
Nico’s lips twitch, and he looks to me in question.
“Yeah, man. Honestly, it works. Don’t ask me why or how, but it does. You’re up for that? Sharing?”
“Being with Harlow in any capacity is a fucking dream far beyond my imagination, so yeah, I’m up for that.”
“You haven’t talked about it?” I ask, finding that strange, seeing as they spoke for at least two hours earlier, but he shakes his head.
“There were other things to discuss.”
He doesn’t offer up what, though, and I want to know what made her decide she was done pretending to hate him.
“You know, I encouraged her to come and find you. I knew not speaking to you was making her miserable, and I hoped there’d be a reason for you being an asshole.”
His face tightens again. “It’s not an excuse,” he says.
“Excuse or reason; either way, I’ve not heard it.”
“All you need to know is that I dragged her into this. Whatever happens is my fault.”
I lean forward in my seat, elbows on my knees.
“She was entering anyway, Nico,” I tell him for the second time this week. “You need to accept that. You’ve seen now how prepared she is. It wasn’t a silly pipe dream—she would’ve done it with or without you.”
“Not to help the Seconds, she wouldn’t have. She hates them, and with good reason.” He looks at me pointedly, but I’m not picking that end of the conversation up so easily.
“Is there a way for you to get out?” I ask bluntly, but he scoffs.
“I’ve never wanted anything more. Except maybe her.” His eyes flick back to Harlow, not able to keep them off her for too long. “But it’ll never happen, not while—” He clenches his jaw. “Not now.”
“Sounds like you had just as much choice as she did.”
“She had no choice, because like a selfish prick, I couldn’t stay away from her.”
“Maybe the way to make this up to her, and to help you and everyone else, is to win and change things. That’s what she wants—make her help worth it. She hates how the Seconds terrorize this city.”
“You sound just like Harlow,” he says with a frown.
“In what way?”
“She thinks I can take over and run the Seconds how I want and everything will be solved. No more guns, drugs, or violence—everyone gets what they want. But it doesn’t work that way.”
“How does she think you can take over the Seconds?”
Nico sighs, leaning his head back against the armchair as if he has the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“My father is the head of the snake—the leader of the Seconds. I’ve been groomed my whole life to lead the Seconds to victory in The Games, and after. My father would sooner see me killed than let me off the hook. In fact, he’d probably pull the trigger himself.”
“Fuck.”
That’s nearly the first thing Ezra has contributed to this conversation, but it seems pretty apt.
“Fuck,” I add, for lack of a better response.
“Yep. He found out I cared about something in this world, and like everything else I’ve ever cared about, he’s using it—using her—against me.”
“It was him who took Harlow?”
