Page 66 of Legacy

“And she’s young enough to give you a son,” Cristo added, raising his glass to me.

Of course, he’d want to celebrate a marriage to a young bride. He’d just remarried a wife twenty years his junior to try for an heir.

“Hey, it’s not the age.” Morisi smirked. “It’s how you handle them and fuck them.”

He continued with jokes about wives, and Cristo carried on with him.

I clenched my teeth, unable to hide my reaction this time. The two disgusted me.

Morisi’s reputation for how he treated his gentle wife was an open secret, a trait he’d shared with Ozias. Mama couldn’t produce more children, but Morisi’s wife of the last two and a half decades was abused and forced to produce child after child.

Pello remained quiet during this exchange, knowing anything he said would make him look like a hypocrite. A few months ago, his third wife died during a territorial battle along with his two children. Instead of showing respect and mourning, he was hunting for a young bride to bear him more children.

Once their laughter died down and Morisi and Christo ran out of lewd jokes, Pello shifted the conversation, having noticed my reaction to his friends’ behavior.

At this point, I wanted the fuckers to know they repulsed me, and I was the asshole who enjoyed torturing a shithead or two.

“I heard you are tight with a few of the families in northern Italy. I don’t recall seeing any of their representatives at your wedding,” Pello commented.

I arched my brow. “You didn’t?”

“Not the northern Italians,” Cristo added, nodding at his friend. “Your father mentioned you’d allied with them.”

Nosy, as always. They couldn’t get anything out of Ozias since he was clueless, so they wanted to pump me for information.

They wanted to know about the connections I’d built. That knowledge brought with it contacts for moving our products, something they had no access to.

“It’s true,” I stated. “We have an alliance as well as abusiness agreement. One has nothing to do with the other. We prefer to keep business apart from personal arrangements.”

“What did you do to gain their interest?” Morisi scowled and then downed another serving of wine, which a server refreshed. “Who approached whom? Ozias tried to meet with them for years. Even my connections gained no interest.”

“I can’t get a meeting with them no matter where and what I suggest,” Pello added.

I shook my head.Of course, you haven’t had luck.These idiots employed the same high-handed tactics Ozias used. They couldn’t understand that a new generation of power players had taken over, and their methods of one-upping and feather-fluffing worked against them. In an age of technology, facts showed power and the ability to prove one possessed the power they claimed to have.

“It’s all about how you approach them and what we can offer each other. It has to benefit both parties.”

“Well, no shit, Elias,” Cristo scoffed. “You think we don’t know that?”

Iknowyou don’t.They were too selfish and greedy ever to compromise or come down and level in an alliance. This all worked in a give-and-take method. We were all power players in our territories, and as allies, we garnered more influence and strength.

The process wasn’t about swinging our dicks around to see whose was bigger.

“Don’t think you’re the head of the family,kid,” Morisi taunted. “Marriage doesn’t change anything. Your father’sstill in charge. You work for him, and the deals you make with those fuckers belong to him.”

I nodded, listening to the drunk bastard rant. His opinion, or those of the other two at the table, mattered little. They were all dead men walking.

As if I’d cued them, Avra and Laya stepped out from the shadows of a covered patio overlooking the vineyard. Calista had decided to stay behind. She understood the way of our world and trained like her sisters but also accepted she wasn’t built like them and preferred books to guns.

Avra’s and Laya’s expressions showed the calm and cool confidence of two women on a mission. Their steps were measured, not rushed, as if taking in the scene before they confronted their enemies. They moved without making a sound—not a click of heels, no rustle of the fabric from their clothes. Vik had done his duty by Juno and trained these sisters well.

Vitalis and Xenos soldiers trailed in after them. The men I selected to join them were loyal only to me and would die before betraying me to Ozias. They’d lived through both of our leaderships and preferred my way of running things. I treated them with respect and had garnered theirs in return.

My beautiful wife’s gaze locked with mine as she approached, and her expression changed for a moment, softening. She wore something I could only describe as form-fitting black and blue combat fatigues. They were fucking sexy as hell and hugged her in all the right places. Then add in the guns strapped to her waist, and all I wanted to do was screw her senseless.

As if reading my thoughts, she rolled her eyes before donning her mask of all-business again.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” Avra said as she approached, capturing their attention.

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