Page 17 of Twisted Trust

I want her to feel every second of the pain I’ve felt for the past five years.

“A car accident.” Elio speaks quietly, and as always, it’s impossible to tell how he feels about it.

As the Don of the XXX Syndicate, my father is a master at concealing thoughts and emotions, even from his own son.

It’s a skill I strive to learn but as he gets on in years, I fear I’ll never grasp it as excellently as he does.

“No one was hurt,” I clarify. “It just delayed us.”

“By eight hours.” Elio sighs and flicks his cigarette, causing the embers to flurry upward like burning snow and then drift down where they melt into the darkness below. “You know what this means.”

My heart sinks and the words catch in my throat.

“You’ve handed Don to Antony on a silver platter.”

“You don’t know that, Father. There’s still the vote?—”

“The vote.” He scoffs sharply. “Antony is younger than you with constant ideas that he won’t shut up about. He’s also dating, which means he will produce an heir which will satisfy every traditionalist family underneath us. To them, he’s perfect because his only competition is you, and what do you have to offer, Levi?”

“I’m your son, for one.” A reason that holds less weight as time goes by. “And I’ve been working myself to the bones these past five years.”

“Hmm…” Elio drags deeply on his cigarette. “Something that ultimately benefits Antony, does it not? He doesn’t have your…” He glances at me with dark eyes. “Baggage.”

My baggage.

Thatbaggageis the reason I’ve spent the past five years scraping by trying to build my reputation back out of the sewers thanks to Maeve.

Five years ago, XXX Syndicate and The Wolves, two prominent Italian families, were primed to seal the deal of the century.

A deal I’d been working on for more months than I ever dared to count.

We were supplying an eyewatering amount of product for The Wolves and in return, they were paying usdoubleas a show of goodwill to the future of the deal.

It was the single largest deal between two families that had ever taken place and was supposed to be the start of an ongoing partnership that would secure our families in history.

I kept that deal a closely guarded secret.

The only people who knew other than myself were my father, Nazario Baudino, the Don of The Wolves, and Maeve who I told one evening while entangled in her arms.

I told her because I feared losing her if the deal went south and wanted her to know that if I vanished, it wasn’t because I didn’t love her.

She wasn’t from my world, or so I thought.

She was a beautiful outsider who wasn’t scared of me and treated me like I was a worthy person outside of all my Mafia achievements.

I told her because I loved her so deeply that I feared her thinking I’d abandoned her.

In the end, she abandoned me.

The warehouse we met up at was rigged to explode, even the product I supplied was hiding explosives, and shortly after a sniper tried to assassinate Naz, the bombs went off and over forty members of The Wolves were slaughtered.

Despite being injured in the explosion and thrust into a coma for three weeks, it looked to the Mafia world like I had tried to wipe out The Wolves with a fake deal that was too good to be true.

When I woke up, my father had been fighting a bloody war with the remaining Wolves and their allies while trying to hunt down who had betrayed us.

Internally, we knew the deal was legit, which meant we had a leak.

And the only person it could have been was Maeve.