Page 24 of Revenge & Ruin

Ida smirked. “Your brother was considering handing over information about me. I needed to talk him out of it.”

“A phone call would have sufficed,” Leon grumbles, despite us all knowing that was most certainly not enough to stop him when he got angry like this.

I nod, taking an empty chair at the opposite end of the table, suddenly feeling entirely exhausted. “Well, at least we know what Teo is after. He had both Leon and I in his grasp, but didn’t take the opportunity to kill us.”

“I think I’d prefer death over whatever he did to you,” Leon declares, also taking a seat.

I pointedly ignored him. “He’s afteryou,Mamma.This means that he’ll be tracking all of us and attempting to infiltrateour systems to get your location. You need to leave New York as soon as possible and triple your security.”

Ida sighs. “I hate having to hide away all the time.”

“As long as he can’t find you, we have an advantage.” I turn to look at my brother. “You want to smoke Teo out and take your revenge? All you need to do is bait him.”

Leon nods. “Could you make a trail to one of our locations?”

I shrug, my skills with a computer are well known at this point. Feeding Teo information would be childsplay.

“If we can get him to cross into our territory, then he’s fair game,” Leon adds.

“To do what?” Ida interrupts. “Beat him to a pulp?”

“What I have planned is far more excruciating.”

I feel an odd sensation come over me, something akin to dread, perhaps. The thought of Teo and Leon fighting is…unsettling, to say the least.

I tell myself it’s because I’m not sure who would win.

“Teo is still the don of the Guild,” I point out. “If anything happens to him, they will seek retribution.”

Leon glares at me. “It’s bad enough that my mother thinks so. But you? You think I couldn’t win a war?”

“You won’t win a damn thing if you’re dead before it starts,” I snapped right back.

Leon throws his hands in the air. “Fine, so what, we lure him here and justtalkto him?”

“No,” Ida interrupts once more. “There’s no way he’d be civil with our family. We’d have to force his hand somehow.”

“He’s not going to agree to an alliance,” I tell her.

Ida shakes her head in agreement. “We might have had hope with Giuliano’s son, but the Vitale family have had a vendetta against ours for half a century.”

A cool shiver runs down my spine. I don’t need reminding about our history. The cruelty of the Vitales has been keeping me awake at night since I was a child.

“So our only choice is to dismantle them,” Leon decides firmly.

Finally, Ida seems to agree with him. “It is possible, with preparations and an upper hand. If we lure Teo here, there’s only one thing we can hope to get out of him.”

“... more time,” I finished for her.

7

TEO

“Gym,Starbucks,Fifth Avenue for no less than three hours, Prince’s Hand Harlem until the earlier hours. Back to her apartment, then to the gym again in the morning,” Martino reported.

As was Isabella Natali’s daily routine. It hadn’t varied an inch in the last week, with the exception of a trip to the salon and a dinner reservation with the wife of the previous governor of New York.

Nothing to incriminate her beyond her ties to the mafia, and certainly nothing that had so far led them to Ida Natali.

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