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It wasn't supposed to have happened this way. Nikko had been looking forward to getting some serious payback on Cal for all the times Cal had walked off with Nikko's girlfriends, but this wasn't what he had wanted. All Nikko had been after was messing up Cal's date. He knew he didn't have a prayer of walking off with Sophie himself, given all the history that she and Cal shared.
He'd known that something was wrong right from the start, though. Well, OK, maybe not right from the start; when they all met in the Uffizi it just promised Nikko a lot of fun teasing Cal about his old flame. When Sophie came to their room later that night, on the other hand, Nikko knew that there was trouble brewing. He didn't know why, he just knew that something was wrong, that Cal really shouldn't go off with her. Unfortunately he couldn't put it into words so he and Cal just ended up shouting again, which pissed Nikko off no end because he thought they were past that.
He was right, which is no comfort whatsoever. Sophie had been the one selling the letters, and his dad had gone totally ballistic when he found out that Cal had gone out with her. Which was completely unfair, and no matter how much Nikko was coming to dislike the woman his dad shouldn't have ignored the very real 'in' that Cal had with her. But no, with Veritas itself at stake everything had to be done Solomon Zond's way, because no one could possibly come up with something better. Nikko knows he's not exactly being fair to his dad thinking like that, but then fair is as fair does and his dad totally deserved the lecture Nikko didn't give him.
In the end, thanks to Cosimo Medici, it hadn't mattered. Sophie was dead. Veritas had got the letters, but she was dead and Cal was wounded and Nikko hopes that he will never, ever see his buddy looking so hurt again. Payback be damned, the emptiness in Cal's eyes as his wound was being treated was something that will stay with Nikko for a long, long time. Nikko was worried enough to have quietly hung around until he was quite sure that Cal wasn't going to do anything stupid.
He wasn't afraid of Cal trying to kill himself or anything like that. OK, so maybe he was a little terrified of the possibility, but Cal wasn't like that, so Nikko didn't worry himself too much on that score. What Cal might have done was to go after Cosimo himself, and that really didn't seem like a bright move to Nikko. It didn't seem like a Cal move either, and fortunately Cal seemed to agree.
Cal's revenge, it seemed, was to beat Cosimo to the diary. Privately, Nikko was in awe. He thought he'd seen Cal focusing before, but this time he was scary. He blew through the puzzle of the letters that Juliet had spent hours on like it wasn't there. He located the clues in the model bridge. He found the way into the catacombs. It seemed like every time a problem reared its head, Cal was already three steps ahead in finding a solution. Cal even got to punch Cosimo's lights out, and he'd have killed him if Nikko's dad hadn't pulled him off.
So now everyone's back home, the diary has been delivered to their mysterious benefactor, and everything is returning to normal. Not. There are still two things really worrying Nikko.
First, he's still a bit concerned about Cal's state of mind. Cal is recovering, which is one hell of a relief, but Nikko still remembers that empty look and it still haunts his dreams. He leaves Cal in Juliet's care a lot, partly because she'll be good for him, and partly because he's still feeling all mixed up about things himself and is pretty sure that he won't be any good for Cal like that. Having the nearest thing he's got to a brother lying wounded and in the line of fire of a psychopath shook Nikko harder than he's really willing to admit.
Still, for all the confusion and concern, that's actually the least of his worries. He was much more alarmed when he changed the dressing on Cal's leg wound.
You see, Nikko isn't as unobservant as people like to think. He'd noticed that Cal stopped limping long before they left the Uffizi but he didn't think much of it at the time, assuming that Cal had just got annoyed enough to focus past the pain and stop letting it affect him.
However, Nikko has acquired quite a lot of first-hand knowledge of gunshot wounds of late, and grazed or not, Cal's wound shouldn't be nicely closed up already. Particularly not since Cal was running around on it all day. Maybe it's relic of their time in Antarctica, and Nikko really doesn't want to think about just how close to death Cal was then, but for some reason Cal is healing a lot faster than he ought to.
Nikko put the new dressing on anyway, because for several reasons he doesn't want the others to know yet. He doesn't want anyone treating Cal differently, which they certainly would if they knew, and there have been too many shocks in the last few days for anything good to come of his little revelation. He doesn't think Cal's noticed yet himself, since he's still feeling the emotional pain of Sophie's death, and that's probably a good thing. The very last thing that Nikko needs is for Cal to go around getting casually injured because he'll recover quickly. Nikko's had a bad enough time this week, he doesn't want to think of how he'd feel if Cal got himself hurt deliberately.
So of course he thinks about it constantly.