Page 30 of Niccolo (Mafia Kings #7)

I n the end, I proposed a simultaneous, three-pronged attack.

A financial strike to destroy their wealth, leaving them severely weakened…

An assassination attempt to take out Dario…

And – once we lured them out of their mansion – a final assault to wipe them from the face of the earth.

The beauty of it was that not all three attacks had to succeed. In fact, any one of the three would be enough.

If we stole all their money, the brothers would be ruined, and we could pick them off at our leisure.

If Dario was killed, the others would fall apart without their leader.

The final assault would be the last piece of the puzzle. We would wait for the perfect moment, then spring the trap.

Of course, the devil was in the details.

“You’re sure you can get access to their finances?” I asked.

“I don’t have direct access to the accounts,” Fausto said, “but I know where the money is. It shouldn’t be too hard to get at it.”

“I can do it,” Aurelio offered.

“No, this will require some delicacy,” Fausto replied. “I’ll handle it.”

Aurelio immediately began pouting.

“What about killing Dario?” I asked. “An assassin will probably have to sneak onto the estate and shoot him from a distance. Can any of your men pull that off?”

“Probably not,” Fausto admitted. “And as I’ve said before, I’m concerned about divided loyalties. I don’t want any of them involved.”

“Even after what you told them?”

“Even then.”

Fausto had told his men that the Rosolini brothers had murdered the Agrellas.

While most of the foot soldiers were shocked and angry, a few holdouts believed it was all a big misunderstanding.

I would have called them ‘smart,’ except their counterarguments were a bunch of conspiracy theories. Either the Italian government had done it, the Pope had ordered it, or the Illuminati were involved.

So… not so smart.

“How do we kill Dario, then?” I asked.

“I’ll have to hire a freelancer.”

“How difficult is that going to be?”

“Not difficult at all. There are at least a dozen elite assassins in Europe.”

“I can hire one,” Aurelio volunteered.

“You haven’t dealt with this sort of thing before,” Fausto replied. “I’ll handle it.”

Aurelio sank deeper into an angry funk.

I ignored his passive-aggressive snit and said to Fausto, “I’m assuming you don’t want your men for the final assault, so who do we get for that?”

“…hmm… the Wagner Group would be perfect. Ever since Prigozhin’s death, they’ve been hurting for work.”

The Wagner Group was a bunch of mercenaries originally commanded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, once the right-hand man of Vladimir Putin. That is until Prigozhin accused the Russian Defense Ministry of sabotaging the Wagner Group as they fought in the Ukraine War.

In June 2023, Prigozhin and 25,000 of his mercenaries mutinied and advanced on Moscow. After a bunch of back-channel negotiations, Prigozhin called off the attack… and then died in a plane crash two months later.

Since political opponents of Vladimir Putin had a way of falling out of ten-story buildings, everyone knew who was behind it.

“You can just hire them?!” I asked incredulously.

“Of course,” Fausto said. “If you have enough money.”

“I thought they only worked for governments.”

“They don’t care about ideology – only cash.”

“And you have enough to hire them?”

“Not the entire Wagner Group, no. But we’ll only need a hundred or so.”

“We can easily pay that,” Aurelio said with a smirk, then turned to his father. “I can contact them!”

Fausto made a face. “I don’t think – ”

Aurelio threw a tantrum. “You’re not letting me do ANYTHING! I don’t have ANY job to do – I might as well be sitting on a fucking beach in Aruba!”

I thought Fausto might tell him to shut the hell up –

But no.

“Alright,” he said calmly, “you can contact Wagner.”

Aurelio beamed like a two-year-old who’d had his first bowel movement in a potty-training bowl.

“Great!” Then his smile faded. “Um… how do I contact them?”

Fausto sighed. “I’ll get you the information. You’ll probably need to give them a down payment for their services, so I’ll get you access to our accounts.”

“Good!” Aurelio said and went back to being smug. “Wagner is going to destroy those fucking assholes!”

I hid my contempt for Aurelio as Fausto and I returned to planning.