Page 5 of Twisted Trust (Mafia Lords of Sin #10)

LEVI

“ T his was your last chance, Levi. Don’t you get that? This was — beep — Where the hell are you? The meeting starts in — beep — Levi, you need to get here right now — beep — Levi? Antony says you didn’t show, what the hell is going on?”

Message after message plays from my phone one after the other from every angry XXX Syndicate General who bothered to phone me, but none of them hold any particular interest.

I’ve been locked in on Maeve ever since she vanished from the hospital, and doesn’t that just scream guilty conscience?

Why run if she has nothing to hide?

She must know I want to kill her. She must know her time is up.

Five years.

Five years I’ve spent rebuilding my life because of her treachery.

Five years of mending my reputation and suffering all manner of insults and distrust from my peers.

Five years earning back the crystal XXX badge, and no sooner did my father pin it to my lapel than the reason I lost it in the first place slams back into my life.

Is this my curse?

Did I do something awful and this is my punishment?

“Levi?” Chip stands next to me in the elevator as we ride it up to my penthouse suite. “What are we going to do about Maeve?”

That’s the only question in my mind. What do we do about Maeve?

“The man who attacked her… do you think it was a Red Serpent?”

“The Serpents don’t come out this far,” I murmur as I delete the messages from my phone. “But I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she screwed over some other guy and that was the result.”

“Mmhmm.” Chip hums softly. “But do you think—” He cuts himself off because as soon as the elevator doors open, the long corridor that stretches all the way down to the open-plan lounge shows the hunched-over figure of my father at the very end, standing out on the balcony.

“I didn’t know he was coming,” I say softly, stepping out of the elevator.

Chip glances at me with a me neither look, then makes himself scarce as I walk down the hall toward my father.

I loosen my tie and unbutton a few buttons on my shirt, then shrug off my jacket and place it over the back of a chair as I pass.

My father’s here for one reason and one reason only.

Antony.

It’s only ever about Antony.

“Father.” Bowing my head briefly in respect, I step up to my father on the balcony that overlooks the entire Vegas strip.

From this high up, I see miles more than I did from the hospital and it would be beautiful if not for how filthy the city is.

And I should know. I’m one of the people who dirtied those pretty lights.

“Levi.” My father, Elio, lifts his arm and offers me the packet of cigarettes dangling from his fingers.

I take them on reflex but just as I go to take one out, something makes me stop.

The face of that child, Maeve’s son, flashes in my mind and I hesitate. Placing the packet on the bamboo wicker table behind us, I settle against the balcony’s railing.

“You didn’t attend the meeting with Antony.” Elio breathes deeply and tilts his head skyward as he breathes out. “Why?”

“I was in an accident. A kid ran out into the road and we swerved to avoid him.”

I bury the real truth in a half-truth because the thought of mentioning Maeve to my father fills me with cold dread.

Her betrayal hurt too many people to count and if he catches wind of her, he’ll kill her before I get the chance to.

And I want to kill her slowly.

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.

That baggage is 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 us double as 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.

When I hunted her down, she’d vanished, and all I found was some loose proof at her old apartment suggesting she was actually a member of the Red Serpents, a smaller family who have been biting at our ankles for over a decade.

This was confirmed when I conducted a thorough investigation into her past and discovered that she had been close with Leo Pesci, the leader of the Red Serpents.

I had been fooled.

Tricked.

Lied to.

I was nothing but a pawn to her and by trusting her, I doomed the XXX Syndicate and The Wolves to six months of bloody war.

In the end, I offered up my life to Naz as payment because Maeve was in the wind and I couldn’t produce the traitor to prove my innocence.

I expected Naz to kill me immediately, but he didn’t.

He kept me alive and put me to work.

For two years, I was a dog for The Wolves.

I beat, mutilated, and murdered anyone he pointed me at. I did his dirty work and didn’t complain, all while waiting for the noose to tighten around my neck.

There’s a saying in our world. To cross a Gallo is to tie your own noose.

I expected Naz to be my executioner but after two years of service, he let me in on a little secret.

I had worked off my debt and a new age was drawing between us because Naz had suspicions.

He wasn’t fully convinced that Maeve was the leak and if she was, in his eyes, she wasn’t working alone.

I hated him for giving me a sliver of hope, the tiniest doubt that maybe Maeve hadn’t broken my heart and trust on purpose, but her sudden disappearance from the hospital screams guilty.

“My baggage,” I say eventually after silence has dragged between us, “is the reason we even have a good relationship with The Wolves after what happened. My baggage is why we now have a lifelong drug-running deal with them. Without me, The Wolves wouldn’t even let us near the casinos Antony is spending so much time at.

We cook and sell at a low price to them and in return, they let us sell through the casinos for a fraction of the fee they charged others.

And they run security. The sheer volume of product we’ve managed to shift in six months alone already shows how lucrative this deal is for both families.

That’s what my baggage has done for this family. ”

“And yet it’s Antony who is at the meetings and not you.

It is Antony who makes the calls and shows face.

Not you.” Elio turns to face me. “I want you to succeed, Son. A transfer of power between us and the Marinos will be rough and could turn bloody. You know your uncle has been hungry for power ever since my sister passed. So believe me when I say I root for you. But what do you have to offer that he doesn’t? ”

Underneath my father’s cool, calm demeanor, I catch a glimpse of worry.

If Antony continues to ride the high of my achievements based on never having a black mark on his record and earns those votes, then it won’t be just me on the chopping block.

My mother and father will be too.

“If only there was a nice daughter for you to marry and secure everyone’s fears about an heir.

You’ve scared most of them away.” Elio pats my forearm and flicks his cigarette over the balcony.

“You need to show up, Son. Show me you’re serious.

” He pats my arm once more and heads back into the penthouse, leaving me with the distant hum of the strip.

Fuck.

Is this really the power Meave has over me after all these years?

I should have left her to die in the parking lot or killed her in the hospital.

Now she’s an ever-present, distracting problem.

“Hey.” Chip appears a few minutes later and presses a Bourbon into my hand. “You look like you need it.”

I nod and drain the glass in a single gulp.

“How was it?” he asks.

I stare out over the city and quickly fill him in on how my lack of appearance at the meeting has given the painful impression that I’m working for Antony rather than competing against him.

“Shit,” Chip sighs.

“I let myself get sidetracked by her,” I mutter, gripping the glass tightly. “I should have left her to die in the parking lot. It’s no different from what she did to me.”

Chip nods slowly. “But you didn’t.”

I remain silent.

“Why?”

I look at him as the wind picks up and tugs at the collar of my shirt. “I don’t know. After all these years, I was shocked to see her. I want to make it hurt. I want her to feel a fraction of what I went through.”

“And if Naz is right?” Chip’s words cut into me like wire. “If it wasn’t her, or worse, she wasn’t working alone?”

My attention drops to my empty glass and I set it precariously onto the railing. “Either way, I’m not letting her get to me again. I’ll find her and I’ll kill her. The rest doesn’t matter.”

“And the kid?”

My heart skips a beat.

The kid.

What do we do about the kid?