Page 17 of Niccolo

When he didn’t, I sighed. “That’s all you have?”

“That’s it.”

“You enjoy making things hard for me, don’t you?”

“Of course. But I have faith in you.”

“Wonderful.”

“One more thing.”

“Let me guess: you want it done in the next 24 hours.”

“You have a week for that part. No, I need you to tell Papa I want him to offer Lars a job.”

That part I had been expecting. Dario had been pretty vocal over the last three years about hiring Lars as soon as he was released.

In fact, we’d sent a crooked cop on our payroll to give Lars a loyalty test. The cop told Lars his prison sentence would becommuted if he would just testify against Dario. Lars didn’t even have to tell the truth – he could just make shit up.

Lars had told the cop to go fuck himself.

So Lars was alright in my book, even though I’d never met him.

“I thought I was supposed to find out about the girlfriend.”

“You are.”

“You think he’s going to accept a job offer if the Runaway Bride takes him back?”

Dario sighed.“That’s the thing. For HIS sake, I hope she does… but for our sake, I hope she doesn’t.”

“We could just tell him we looked but couldn’t find her.”

“NO. Make a full attempt. Spare no expense. I owe him that.”

“You don’t owe him anything.”

“Yes, I DO. Besides, if he’s going to work with us, he needs to choose it of his own free will – and as long as this woman’s out there, she’ll be like a ghost haunting him. He either needs to find her and pick up where he left off… or he needs to rid himself of her completely. Either way, he won’t be of any use to us until the issue is settled. So do everything in your power to find her.”

“…alright.”

“If Lars does end up calling you, I want you to roll out the red carpet for him. I want Roberto to make our offer irresistible. I want him on our team, Niccolo. Fight for him – even if Fausto balks.”

I laughed. “Ahhh, now you’ve sweetened the deal for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“If Fausto balks, I’ll do everything I can to get Lars to come work for us – just so I can piss off Dear Old Uncle.”

In the end, I didn’t have to go to the mat on Lars’s behalf. Papa was charmed by him, and even Fausto was impressed. There was no denying the man’s competence.

He started right away.

I must admit, in the beginning, Lars rubbed me the wrong way occasionally… but only because he demanded a level of excellence in our operations that had been sorely lacking before his arrival.

He suggested upgrading every single window in our house to bulletproof glass.

He trained our foot soldiers relentlessly in tactics he’d learned in Special Forces.

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