Page 120 of Niccolo (Mafia Kings #7)

I literally ran to get Dario. He threw on some clothes and we hustled back to my room, where I used my laptop to log into Roberto’s account using the information he’d given me.

Nothing to sneeze at, but nothing impressive, either.

“How bad is it, do you think?” Dario asked me.

“With Roberto? Well, he told me to tell everyone he loved them.”

Dario stared at me in shock. He knew how reserved Roberto was. “Christ.”

“Yeah.”

“You think he’s going to do something rash?”

I opened the program that would remotely destroy the memory on Roberto’s phone. “He’s incapable of anything rash. Whatever he’s about to do, he weighed all the options and decided this is the best one.”

“But… you said he implied he might not make it out alive.”

“Him dying and it being the best option aren’t mutually exclusive,” I said grimly. “Especially if he’s doing it for the family.”

I selected Roberto’s phone number in the computer program and typed in a password.

The program warned me that the action would be final and that all data would be lost forever.

Exactly what I want.

I clicked the button to proceed.

An empty bar appeared on the screen. As it began to fill up, a percentage next to it started at zero and quickly accelerated past 10%.

“Call him back and tell him I’m ordering him to leave,” Dario said. “Fuck the money.”

“We both know it’s too late for that,” I said quietly as I watched the number move past 25%. “Whatever he decided to do, he’s doing it right now.”

Dario shook his head angrily. I knew he was blaming himself. “I should have ordered him back sooner!”

“It’s my fault, not yours,” I said. “ I was the one talking to him. I thought he could handle the situation. You didn’t know. It’s on me, not you.”

Dario sat down on the bed opposite me and looked at me sympathetically. “Still… I’m sorry, Niccolo.”

“For what? He’s your brother, too.”

“Yes, but he’s your twin.”

The words hit me like a knife through the heart.

I was about to lose my twin brother…

My other half…

The one who had always been there my entire life.

I couldn’t remember him not being there, even in my earliest memories…

And now…

He might be gone.

It might just be me… alone… for the rest of my life.

I watched in silence as the bar on the screen gradually filled up.

The number crept up to 98%...

99%...

When it hit 100, a new message appeared:

ROBERTO PHONE DELETED.

I stared at those words for a long moment…

Then tried to shake off a feeling of doom as I switched to my internet browser.

As I refreshed the Bitcoin account screen, I said, “We don’t know what’s going to happen, so we might as well – ”

I stopped speaking, and my eyes nearly bugged out of my head.

“What?” Dario asked in alarm.

“…holy fuck…”

Dario got up from the bed and circled around behind me. “What are you – WHAT THE FUCK?!”

We both stared at the screen.

It was now showing $251 million in Bitcoin.

We just stared at the number in silence, shocked beyond words.

Finally, Dario managed to ask, “That wasn’t the amount when you checked 15 minutes ago, was it?”

“No,” I said. “It was not.”

“So…”

“So Roberto succeeded,” I said in wonder. “However he did it, he just pulled our asses out of the fire.”