Page 46 of Niccolo (Mafia Kings #7)

Niccolo

I was stunned – and felt foolish, indeed.

I’d joked with her earlier that I was audacious –

And yet she had entered the lion’s den to walk amongst her enemies!

I knew she probably felt protected by her anonymity –

And no one would have realized who she was if I hadn’t become mildly obsessed with her.

But why take such a chance in the first place?

There were only two answers I could see:

To do reconnaissance on the property…

Or to do reconnaissance on us.

Me… Dario… Lars… my brothers.

That was the option that made the most sense:

She’d come to profile us.

We’d beat her twice… so she came to see us in person and probe for our weaknesses.

I shook my head in admiration.

What a woman…

I didn’t have any proof, though – and I didn’t want to go to Dario with mere conjecture, not after I’d shut down Adriano’s suggestion to kill Fausto – so I resolved to find out more.

I slipped away from the wedding and retired to my office, where I fired up my computer.

I googled ‘Aurora chess,’ but that only turned up an online chess program.

Ha!

I wondered if that was why she’d chosen it? To amuse herself?

Probably.

It was something I would have done.

It was a dead end, though, so I tried ‘Italian female chess players.’

And there she was – the number one entry.

Sofia Toscani…

The subject of international scandal, no less.

Former chess grandmaster… one of the highest-ranked players in Italy…

Until she was accused of cheating and stripped of her ranking.

And what was this…?

Vibrating anal beads?!

I burst out laughing and immediately began plotting what to say to her at our next meeting.

Then, after reading a bit more, I changed my mind.

Sofia had been accused of cheating after trouncing the number two player in the world, who had been previously unbeaten.

That was the first sour note.

Then the article said that the International Chess Federation found incriminating evidence – but not on her person.

I knew a setup when I smelled one.

All the articles kept referencing ‘Hans Niemann,’ so I looked him up as well. After that, I was even more convinced that Sofia had been framed.

In 2022, Niemann had beaten the world champion, who later accused him of using vibrating anal beads to get signals from an accomplice. The vibrations were apparently coded to tell him which moves to make.

Real life was stranger than anything in fiction, that was for sure.

The allegations destroyed Niemann’s career and made him a laughingstock. (And the ‘butt’ of a million jokes – sorry, I had to.)

Niemann claimed he had been framed, and he may well have been –

But I was absolutely convinced that Sofia had.

The situations were too similar.

Whoever had gone after her knew they didn’t have to prove anything –

They just had to turn her into a joke, like Niemann.

Which they did.

I actually grew angry on her behalf –

Until I remembered that, Oh, right, she tried to kill us.

Still, the injustice of it all was galling.

Most of all, the articles revealed some illuminating bits of information –

Like the fact she was a civilian.

Her father was a grandmaster and a university professor. Sofia had been a chess prodigy as a child and had been playing professionally since the age of 16.

Which meant that Fausto had recruited her from outside the Cosa Nostra …

And that she hadn’t been raised in the mafia like my brothers and me.

That fact was suggestive of several things.

Number one: she might not truly understand just how much danger she had placed herself in.

I’m sure she knew Fausto was Cosa Nostra, and that were we, too…

But to her, it might all seem like a game.

It always did, until somebody got shot in the head.

Number two: Fausto had obviously hired her for her strategic brilliance, but also to throw me off.

He knew I was familiar with his way of thinking, so he’d recruited an outsider to confuse me and cover his tracks.

Well played, old man.

I may have hated Fausto’s guts, but game respects game.

Number three: if Sofia had been disgraced and forced out of her profession, then financial desperation was another reason for her to take a job with my uncle.

My guess was that Fausto had dangled an obscene amount of money in front of her, and she had jumped at the chance without really understanding the risks she was taking.

Or…

If she truly did understand what she’d gotten herself into and didn’t mind…

If desperation wasn’t the driving factor behind her choice, but rather amusement…

Then she could be a terribly dangerous opponent indeed.

Which did nothing to lessen my attraction to her.

In fact, it only made me desire her more.

Beautiful, smart, and a rival player in the Great Game?

Yes, please, and more!

The one issue that gave me pause was my father.

Had Sofia been the one to plan his death?

I could overlook her attempts to kill me.

Plotting to kill my brothers was less forgivable, but still within the realm of possibility.

But if she had planned my father’s murder, I would gladly strangle her myself.

However, I didn’t think she was the culprit.

The timeline didn’t sync up.

The match she’d won against the grandmaster – the one that had sealed her fate – had occurred six months before.

My father had died eight months ago.

I doubted she would have taken Fausto’s offer if it was still possible she could become the world champion.

If she had already been stripped of her title and forced out, though, that was another matter entirely…

But that didn’t happen until two months after my father’s death.

Now that I knew her name, I googled her to see if there was more to discover.

Oh my – was there.

After scrolling past everything about the scandal and her disgraced exit from the world of chess, several articles mentioned that she had become a professional poker player.

Oh HO…

This just keeps getting better and better!

I love chess, and I’m quite good at it…

But I adore poker.

One of my favorite things about it was getting inside my opponents’ heads and figuring out if they were bluffing.

Far more than chess, poker was the game most similar to being a consigliere.

It was the psychological component:

You always had to figure out who was bluffing and whether you could beat them –

And if you couldn’t beat them, then you had to out-bluff them.

There was no more valuable skill for a consigliere .

I found the official website for world poker tournaments and discovered that four months ago, Sofia had won fifth place in San Remo – to the tune of 47,000 euros.

I was guessing she’d made the leap to poker purely for money.

Unless she had some private fascination with the game, she’d probably picked it up in a matter of months.

If that were the case, then placing fifth amongst professionals who had been doing it for years – decades, even – was incredibly impressive.

A related search turned up a list of all past winners, including the events they had played in, as well as all future events for which they were registered.

Even though Sofia had participated in a number of recent international tournaments – Paris, London, and Amsterdam – she hadn’t placed highly after San Remo. Certainly nowhere near fifth.

Not only that, but she was registered for an upcoming tournament in Macau just a few days away.

That threw me for a second.

Why was she continuing to play poker if she was Fausto’s consigliere?

Then the answer hit me:

I’ll bet the old fucking miser won’t pay her until after the job is completed…

And he won’t give her enough money to live on in the meantime.

Outside of his own personal luxuries – clothes, cars, and wine – Fausto had always been notoriously tightfisted.

When he was my father’s consigliere, he had always wanted to underpay the foot soldiers and staff. Papa continually had to overrule him.

It made perfect sense: Fausto was too fucking cheap to pay Sofia what she was worth upfront.

Unfortunately for her, it also suggested my uncle might kill her if she didn’t deliver.

Not placing in the Paris, London, and Amsterdam poker tournaments was still a bit confusing, though.

Judging by the fifth-place finish in San Remo, Sofia was too brilliant to just crater like that.

I figured she hadn’t lost so much as she’d been distracted by her other duties.

San Remo was the last time she’d won big…

The last time she hadn’t been distracted…

So Fausto recruited her in San Remo four months ago, or shortly thereafter.

I’d bet my last dollar on it.

Which was a relief.

If I was right about the timeline, it meant she couldn’t have been involved in my father’s death.

In addition, everything I found out about her increased her allure even more.

She had gone from one game I loved – chess –

To another I was even better at – poker –

And had finally landed in the most thrilling game of all:

The Great Game.

Life and death in the Cosa Nostra.

Well, well, well.

I look forward to playing you, Sofia Toscani, now that I know who’s sitting across the table from me.

But first, I had to tell my don what I’d found out…

And what I had planned.