Page 119 of Niccolo

I shrugged. “Probably only 25%. Maybe less.”

“And what are the odds you can sway her?”

“Fifty-fifty.”

He gave me a look.

“Fifty-fifty,” I repeated indignantly.

“So, combined, you have a 10% chance of success.Maybe.”

“That’s better than what we have now,” I shot back.

Dario looked at me grumpily. “I hope you know what you’re doing,consigliere.”

“So do I,” I said. “So do I.”

52

Roberto didn’t like the fact that I was tagging along. He thought Dario didn’t trust him to handle the Hong Kong deal on his own.

When he found out I had no intention of sitting in on his meeting, he was still pissed. He knew something was up and was resentful that we weren’t telling him what it was.

He didn’t quit pushing until Dario brought out the big guns:

“Roberto… your don has spoken.”

That settled the matter once and for all.

After all we’d been through that morning, the rotten cherry on top of the shit sundae was when Lars came back empty-handed –

And informed us that Dario’s would-be assassin had most likely been Lars’s ex-girlfriend.

Who worked for MI6.

Orusedto, anyway.

Lars thought it highly unlikely it was an MI6 hit because our family was so low on the totem pole of organized crime.

Ithought it unlikely because both the assassination attempt and the mess in Venice benefited the same person – Fausto – and I found it unlikely he would be doing business with British Intelligence. Lars concurred.

Whatever the case, hiring his ex had been a brilliant stroke of psychological warfare. Lars was more agitated and distracted than I’d ever seen him before.

Like Mezzasalma, it was a double attack straight out of chess.

In the Sicilian gangster’s case, he’d failed to kill us…

But now the entireCosa Nostrawas united against us.

By using Rachel Bauer, even though she’d failed to kill Dario, her involvement had turned our Enforcer into a lovesick teenage boy with the attention span of a gnat.

I told the others it was Fausto’s doing…

But I secretly believed it was Sofia’s.

Either way, it achieved the desired result:

To diminish our capabilities as a team.

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