Epilogue
Rory
I’ve been at this so long, my fingers are about to fall off.
Carpal tunnel syndrome is real. Shit.
Cracking the knuckles of both my hands, I shake them out and lean back in my office chair. My hands may be aching, but at least in here I get a reprieve from the insanity gathering outside.
The war brewing between us and the De Lucas gets more dangerous by the day.
Allies and enemies on both sides of the fight have been walking that fine line between staying out of it and getting involved. Staying out of it shows how shallow alliances between families can go, and getting involved creates the possibility of a wider, regional gang war. No one fucking wants that.
Different people will describe our position in this fight in different ways, but the way I see it, the major weakness in our camp is a lack of emotional heft.
Leo De Luca and his family hate us with a passion. The emotional, egotistical intensity Leo brings to this fight is his strength, I think. His impassioned desire to end the Kings makes him unpredictable. How far he’s willing to go… Maybe even he doesn’t know.
Leo De Luca is armed, dangerous, gathering his forces, and totally unhinged.
His hatred and sinister creativity are entirely unchecked. He doesn’t have his father or uncle or a De Luca administration to rein him in or steer his nascent leadership. This is the first time he’s ever been in charge of his own clan before.
No one knows what to expect from his tenure as don, least of all us.
There’s no way for us to guess how low he will or won’t stoop. And because we don’t have the same level of hatred for his clan, we won’t be able to fight his insane intensity with any insane intensity of our own.
He’s fully on the offensive, and right now, we’re fully on the defensive.
A horrible place to be at the beginning of a fucking war.
Which is why Shane gave me a special assignment as soon as news broke of Leo’s freedom.
Look for a way to get the De Lucas on a leash and keep them there.
In other words, our goal isn’t to crush the De Lucas into the dirt. We don’t need to slaughter every last one of them. They’re not that big a threat. Our plan of attack is to not attack at all.
It’s to get leverage.
Something to stop Leo’s crazy-ass runaway train, like an emergency brake system. We just need some insider intel about what matters to Leo. What would force him to rethink his revenge plans?
What would get him to sit down, shut up, and stay away from us?
I’ve been cooped up in this office working on this for weeks.
And so far? Zilch.
Apparently, Leo De Luca’s been a loose cannon his whole life. There’s nothing in our archives that indicates anything special about him. He was a dumb kid working higher-profile jobs than he should have been when he was caught in New York a few years ago and extradited to Nevada to face human trafficking charges.
He’s been in jail ever since, no visitors, no letters in or out. His only phone calls have been to De Luca sympathizers, according to our records.
From the outside, it seems like the only thing he cares about is decimating the Irish Kings. He wants revenge for the years he’s spent behind bars. He wants revenge for his father, who we killed in retaliation. He wants revenge for his Uncle Enzo, though as far as I can tell they never really got along.
Perhaps most importantly, he wants revenge for the whole of the De Luca Mafia. Their fall from grace following his arrest and his father’s assassination was near total. Many didn’t believe the family would ever recover from all that catastrophic misfortune. And now that he’s out of jail, Leo wants to prove everyone wrong.
Definitely strikes me as a black-and-white thinker…
But there’s got to be some gray in there somewhere. There’s got to be something he cares more about than violence, pride, and glory.
At this point, it feels like if I scroll through Leo’s file one more time, I’m going to blow my brains out. This assignment has been like banging my head against a wall for eight hours a day. But it’s too important to let myself get jaded. I have to find something .
Rolling out my wrists, I place my hands back on the keyboard and toggle open Leo’s file. I scroll through it for the millionth time. There’s one page dedicated to his family members.
When I see his father’s name, I stop and think about Matteo De Luca.
A thought whispers through my mind. Sometimes, the only thing strong enough to destroy something is itself.
Oh my god.
My first breakthrough.
Matteo. What if the best way to defeat the De Lucas is to use their own strategies against them? Maybe what they do to other people are the same tactics that would work against them.
The Matteo De Luca playbook. To get even with us over what happened to Leo, what did he do? Kidnapped and killed Finn’s first wife. Finn hunted him down, murdered him. Enzo tried to take his revenge on Finn, failed, and what did he attempt next? Kidnapping Finn’s would’ve-been second wife.
Light bulbs go off in my head, one after the other. A chain reaction.
Sometimes my mind catches fire, and everything falls into place.
I have that same intuition now. I’m onto something, I just know it.
The De Lucas’ weakness. What if it’s women?
Whenever they tried to cripple us, they did it by going after a woman they knew or believed mattered a great deal to us. It wasn’t our downfall, but it just might be theirs.
Clicking rapidly, I toggle into the De Luca family dossier, perusing through all the known family members we have details of in our database.
Leo’s parents are deceased. No siblings.
No women of value in sight.
Damn it , I thought I had something.
Something to keep me busy instead of wandering around here like an overworked, over-caffeinated ghoul, envious of Finn and Cian for finding some way to fall in love in this hellscape we live in.
Never thought my friends would be the ones to remind me how much of a fuckup I am in the romance department. They don’t even have to say anything.
I’m not stupid. I know I’ll die just like this, alone and hollow as a drum, with no one by my side. Not even my boys.
But at least I have my work.
Until I find a way to paralyze the De Luca mafia now and forever, I won’t rest .
Even if it fucking kills me.