Witness Protection ✔

Nico

Since Cassius and Chris were busy planning the transport to the courthouse Nathalia had been kept company by Nico. She'd been afraid it would get awkward since she didn't know him that well but in the end, that wasn't a problem.

His enthusiasm for everything was contagious and when he pulled out a deck of cards from his back pocket she knew they'd be fine.

They both were seated on the floor across from one another with the cards in between them. She'd been losing pretty consistently but now and then she managed to get in a win. she didn't care about winning, and she didn't care about losing. It was all about passing time until she could sneak in a few minutes with Cassius.

"By the way, I forgot to ask but how have these past few months been?" he suddenly asked, distracting her from the game.

Her entire emotional journey with Cassius ran through her head but she knew she couldn't talk about that. So she went with the standard answer, "It went well, Darius is a nice guy and nothing bad happened so I can't complain."

Plenty of bad stuff happened but she didn't think Cassius would've reported her near-assault at the gas station to his supervisors so she kept it to herself.

Nico nodded and seemed to accept her answer. "Yeah, he's super cool, you're lucky he got assigned to you because otherwise, you would've had to put up with our little sunshine Chris."

His nonchalant roasting of Chris caught her off-guard. Nico hadn't vocalized his dislike of Chris before and she honestly hadn't expected him to. But she was glad to know he felt the same way as her.

"Oh god," she laughed, "I think I would have gone insane."

She briefly felt bad about bad-mouthing him and looked at the camera in the corner of the room before she remembered that time he said it didn't matter what she thought. Oh, well.

"I swear that's exactly what happens when you spend too much time with him," Nico said with a deadpan expression.

"I once had to shadow him when I had just started working as a bodyguard and he made me do everything all the time. And when I asked him something he would ask me if I was stupid instead of helping me. I learned literally nothing in those two weeks and when I told my supervisor he promised me I wouldn't have to do that again. At least Darius is here to help us now," he finished with a goofy smile, making her burst out laughing.

Cassius, the only person protecting Nico and me from Chris.

"Have you worked with Darius before, then?" she asked out of curiosity. Cassius never liked to talk about his job so she stopped asking him about it, but Nico didn't seem to mind at all.

"Nope," he said. "But I've been wanting to since I started. My buddy got to work with him for a little while and he'd tell me about Darius and the cool stuff he's done."

"What kind of cool stuff?"

He took his time to put down some cards before answering. "He got assigned to some foreign diplomats who suddenly got attacked. He held off the shooters long enough for the police to arrive, which was a while. That's the day he basically got his legendary status at the agency."

"No one got hurt, then?"

"Miraculously, no. He's really good," Nico said with a small smile. "The diplomats tried to get him to go with them back to their home country but he refused, I don't know why."

Nathalia was glad he didn't leave back then because she never would've met him if he had.

"Let's be grateful for that," she replied. "Or else there wouldn't have been anyone to protect us from Chris."