Page 148 of Mafia Kings: Dario

“Why did you do it?” Dario asked angrily. “For money?”

“No.”

“Thenwhy?”

“Because your father had my husband and son killed,” she snarled… and then she began to laugh. “Which is why I killedhim.”

Silence fell over the room except for the old woman’s ragged breathing.

“…what?” Niccolo whispered.

“You’re lying,” Dario said, his voice shaking.

Filomena grinned, her teeth stained crimson. “I injected him with sodium nitrate… and you fools thought he had a heart attack. Well… I guess he did. Just not a natural one.”

“You fucking – ” Adriano roared as he pulled his gun to shoot her –

But Dario grabbed his hand and stopped him.

“Why did my father have your husband and son killed?” he asked the old woman.

“Why doanyof your kind do anything? For money. For power. For years I mourned their deaths… and then I decided to do something about it. I wormed my way into your father’s service… and became a trusted servant. When I killed him, I whispered into his ear… ‘For myfamily, you son of a whore.’”

“You didn’t get a job here without help,” Dario said. “And the Turk couldn’t have done something like that – so who did?”

Filomena just laughed and spat blood on his feet.

Dario squatted down next to her. “Youwilltell me who helped you… or I promise you will live to regret it.”

“My only regret,” she snarled, “is that I didn’t get to killyou,too.”

Then she bit down on something in her mouth.

Blood-tinted froth began to spill from her lips –

Just like the priest and the thug who had attacked me outside the church.

“Stop her!” Dario yelled.

He put his finger in her mouth and tried to fish out the cyanide capsule –

But it was too late.

Her body jerked a couple of times… and then she was gone.

53

After Filomena’s shocking death, the foot soldiers removed all the bodies from the house, and the servants began to clean up the blood.

While they did that, Adriano went with a half-dozen men to set my father free.

I wasn’t there to see it – I stayed at the house at Dario’s insistence – but Papa said later he almost died of fright when the trunk opened up.

Adriano calmed him down and told him everything was alright – and that I was alive and unhurt.

When he got to the house, Papa hugged me and started sobbing. “I’m so sorry, Alessandra… I should have told you…”

“It’s alright,” I comforted him, then introduced him to the six brothers and Lars. “They saved my life – multiple times.”

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