37. Leona
LEONA
O nce we’d wrapped up, Max pulled his phone from his pocket, tapping a few times.
“Here.” He handed it to me. “Her number is programmed. The only thing I ask is that the two of you don’t plan to do something stupid, as per your usual MOs. She’s a lot safer where she is now. If you make some contrived effort to ‘rescue’ her, you’re only making her a bigger target.”
I took his phone and pushed from the table. The screen lit up with her contact card. “I’m going to talk to her upstairs.”
“No. Stay here, where we can all hear it.”
“Excuse you.” I raised an eyebrow. “We deserve privacy.”
My men glared at Max and presented a wave of disapproval that had me grinning. I loved the way they supported me no matter what.
“Fine. I’ll know if you snoop through it.” He gave me a stern look, one I recognized from countless scoldings and warnings during our childhood.
I rolled my eyes. “And you think that will stop me. Now, privacy, please.”
“So fucking stubborn, aren’t you? ”
I caught a ghost of a smile on Cas’s face before he seemed to remember Max was our arch-enemy. I couldn’t blame him for the slip. Even I felt my chest warming at the familiar banter.
“Don’t kill each other while I’m gone.”
“No promises,” Ryu grumbled. The table was in shambles, but he looked relieved to step away from it.
“Do you want me to go with you? Make sure nothing is wrong with the device?” Ciel asked.
I pulled him in for a quick kiss. His blush was so fucking cute. “I’ll be fine.”
“Five minutes,” Obi warned gently. “We have work to do.”
I hustled up the stairs, looking for Max’s father’s office.
I’d always enjoyed spending time in my Uncle’s favorite room of the house.
Max and I would play on the ground in the corner while our fathers worked together.
Only a few months before his death, Massimo had sat at the desk and explained that as my Uncle, he had a special responsibility to keep me safe, and he’d sternly warned me to stay away from boys.
Not that there ever were gentlemen callers.
But it was typical protective Uncle stuff that always made me feel like we could have been a normal family if we weren’t part of the mafia.
I loved Uncle Massimo. We had been happy. Our mothers were gone by that time, but I had thought we’d climbed our way out of that grief. Then, Max’s father had died, and things were never the same again after.
It didn’t matter now. We were all different people.
I closed the door to the office and tapped Chiara’s contact card. The phone line rang twice. My hand shook as I held it to my face.
“ What ?” she answered, her voice dripping with vitriol.
I swallowed, my throat choked with emotion. “It’s me.”
It took a second to sink in before she shrieked. “Leona! What are you doing? Why do you have Max’s phone? What the fuck is going on? Are you okay? ”
Hearing her voice brought forth an immediate wave of relief. I collapsed onto the leather ottoman at the foot of Uncle’s old Eames chair. A tear leaked down my face while I laughed at her thousand questions. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”
“Answer me!” she demanded. I could hear things rustling in the background.
“Where do I even start?”
“Give me the quick and dirty! Just tell me what’s going on!”
“Okay, fine! I’m at Max’s house. We made a temporary truce.
We need to work together on something.” I wasn’t sure what she knew, or where she was, or what was safe to tell her, so I kept it vague.
“But part of my agreement to help him was that I got to speak to you. So really, I want to hear all about you , and how you are, and what’s going on. ”
“Oh, my God! That bastard!”
I held my forehand in my free hand, dreading this next question, but knowing I had to ask it. “Has he hurt you?”
She sighed heavily. “No. I was fucking pissed at him and my father. I can’t believe how they lied to me, but Max hasn’t hurt me. He’s barely even spoken to me.”
Thank God. I would have stomped downstairs and dragged my knife across his throat with zero hesitation, alliance be damned, if her answer had been different. “What happened?”
“My father told me you and your dad had been killed during the attack on your birthday party. He said they thought Caspian had done it before disappearing, and that Max was taking over your Family.”
I swore. Cas would never . “So you thought I was dead the whole time?”
“At first, yeah. I was devastated.” She sniffled, and I once again regretted that I had never reached out to her back then. “I’m serious, Leona. Never leave me like that again.”
“I’ll try not to.” I folded my feet under me. “Then what happened? ”
“Well, my dad kept me on house arrest, telling me that all the Families were on lockdown and we needed to be safe. On the night Cas infiltrated my father’s house, Max visited.
He’d been injured, and at first I’d been concerned and offered to help.
But he said no, and that he and my father needed to speak.
They barricaded themselves in my father’s study.
I overheard them talking about you, Cas, and some guys named the Shadows.
At first, I didn’t believe it. You were alive all that time?
And you didn’t text me or call me? I ran back to my room and texted you. ”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, but she plowed on.
“I tried calling you over and over. I tried texting you. I thought maybe you had ditched your phone, but I had to contact you.”
“Cas destroyed my phone the night of my birthday party,” I said, remembering how he’d smashed it underfoot before he’d taken us to the Irish for help. “How’d you get my new number? Only my guys had it.”
“When I went back to listen in on my dad and Max, I overheard Max talking about an alliance. He pretty much blackmailed my dad into it, but I don’t know what he had over him. My dad was livid.”
Probably the fact that her father and my father were colluding. Vincenzo Tommaso would have had a lot to lose if that had come to light.
She continued, “They talked about a few things I didn’t understand, but one thing I heard was that he had someone doing technical support for him. It was all snippets, but it felt like something huge was going on.”
Lucia . The Camorra. The trafficking. Max had used that leverage to keep Tommaso in line and gain more power. But now we had that information, and proof that Sandrini and Lucchese were involved too.
“Pretty much,” I added.
“Max said he wanted to get engaged to me and become head of the Family.” She scoffed. “It was a total betrayal to your memory. There was no way I was going to say yes. I just knew that if they were going to drag me into it, then I needed to talk with you and tell you the truth.”
My heart warmed, and more tears pricked my eyes. She’d always been such a great friend, and it felt incredible to know she was still on my side.
I couldn’t wait to introduce her to Fallon, Willow, and Zoya. They’d love her just as much as me.
“You got dragged into it anyway.”
“Ugh, yes. But you know me. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
I burst into the room and said no. Flat out no.
Which, of course, made them both upset. The three of us got into a big fight, and Max left the room to get some air, except he left his phone behind.
I snagged it off the table while my dad yelled at me and told me I didn’t have a choice. ”
Fucking Vincenzo Tommaso. I’m sure Chiara had been sad at his death, but I was less and less broken up over it.
“You took his phone?”
“I stomped out of the room and went straight back to mine. I only had a few minutes to read through what I could, but I grabbed the number for his tech girl. Lucia. Then I went back and left the phone on the ground by the doors to the study so he’d think he dropped it.”
God, I loved her. She was so smart, even when she had no idea what was going on. Chiara had always been that way. “So you called Lucia? And she helped you?”
She chuckled. “I had nothing else. I called, expecting her to hang up or rat me out, but we ended up talking for a while. I heard a little about her grandpa and how annoyed she was that she had to come to New York. She agreed to get me your burner phone number.”
“That’s insane. Why would she help you? Help me ? ”
“I got the impression she didn’t really care too much about our Families.”
So Lucia might not be as loyal to her grandfather, the Head of the Camorra, as we thought. Or she at least didn’t care about us in the States.
“So that’s when you texted me?” I asked.
“Yeah. When you didn’t respond, I thought I had the wrong number, but I kept trying just in case.”
“I got them all,” I whispered. What would I have done if she had given up? “Every one of your messages.”
“Thank God,” she breathed.
“But your dad died. I’m so sorry.” I was only sorry she was hurt by it, not that he was dead.
“Don’t be,” she mumbled. “Max told me some of what he and your dad were doing.”
“He did?”
“Yeah. Afterwards. When I saw Cas in our hallway, I knew you had to be nearby. I saw how vicious Cas and Max were. It was insane. They used to be so close. I had to do something. By some twist of fate, I saw that guy on the roof across the street. I saw the glint of his weapon, and I knew he was going to shoot Max or my dad. I was so fed up, Leona.” Her voice dropped and filled with emotion.
“I was just so pissed off at both of them, but especially my dad. He didn’t listen to anything I said when I told him I didn’t want to marry Max.
He said some horrible things about me, about you.
When they lined up with the window…I just acted.
I pushed my dad forward. I don’t even know what I was hoping for, maybe just that he’d get shot in the arm or something, but I saw him crumble and the first thought through my head was What a relief.
Can you believe that? I thought everything was going to be over.
” A sob trickled through the receiver. “A shitty daughter I am, huh?”