Devil You Hate (The Diavolo Crime Family 1)

I continue my pace across the floor, letting the data flow in and assimilate. “Marino is an easy target. His daughter is too well protected. He actually cares about her safety, unlike Ricci. We should target his oldest son: Dominic. He’s being groomed to take over. The Grecos are a little different. The twins run the family together, and the rumors are…” I break off, trying to think of the word. “Disturbing. From what I’ve heard, the twins crippled their own father and run the family together, together.”

Soo nods. “That’s what I’ve heard too.”

I shake my head as we don’t have time to deal with that clusterfuck. “Gardello we can still hit with the casinos, but what if we do it the other way? Force them to shell out their money instead of winning. It might keep them all occupied for a while. Every brother has a substantial debt racked up. Bianci is the wild card. I need more time to think about how he plays into things. Technically, my fight was with his father. He rarely involves himself with the family businesses anymore.”

Typing in a furious stream, Soo speaks up. “I have something to help with that.”

I pause and face him. When I have a plan, he always has what I need to wrap things up in a tight little bow. “What’s that?”

His lips curl up into a grin, and he jabs his finger at one monitor. A woman in a slinky red dress sitting on one of the Gardello brothers’ laps is displayed on the screen. “This is one of my spies on the casino floor. One of the paid girls. She gets a little extra on the side when she picks up anything I might want to know about. The other night she was working with Dominic Marino, and she caught him mentioning a meeting with one of his brothers. It looks like the families are about to have a reunion.”

I curl my hands up and drop my head. “And why didn’t you lead with this little tidbit?”

“Probably because it wasn’t relevant until you threw years of careful planning out the window to start over?”

And that’s where my side of things comes in. Soo covers minor details, whereas I can see the bigger picture much better than he can. “It was relevant. It doesn’t matter what the plan is. The families meeting for the first time in over twenty years is a big fucking deal. And it’s the first meeting without the fallen Costa family.”

Soo observes me. I see him studying my every twitch, looking for clues as to his next move based on mine. “What does it mean? Where I come from, meetings of the families happen all the time.”

I lean against the counter and cross my arms to tuck my hands into my armpits. “It means things are about to change. But it also means we need to be in that room. Did your spy have information on when this meeting was happening?”

Soo shakes his head. “I can put her on it. She’s trustworthy. Shove her into the fray with all our targets and see what other information she can get.”

I nod and let out a long sigh, an ache blooming in my temples. “We need to know when. It’ll happen at Ricci’s since he’s the head of the five. Put a watch on his house and his wife. She’ll be preparing a menu. You might get information out of a caterer or staff. That woman does nothing herself.”

“There’s one thing that you need to decide next,” Soo says, his attention back on his keyboard and the workstation.

I watch as he pulls up his dossier on the families, pictures included. My prey all lined up in a digital row. If only life made things so orderly.

“We need to decide if we take them out one by one or pull a mass strike on all the bastards at once,” I say and Soo nods. “The reunion meeting is the perfect chance to do it, but it will also be risky with the amount of security each family will have in place both before and during the event.”

“Not we, though. You need to decide. This vengeance belongs to you and Lucas. Maybe it’s time you bring your brother in and let him make some of these choices with you. The blood of these enemies belongs to him as well.”

It’s always been my job to protect my brother. I’ve been protecting him from himself for so long I don’t know how to stop. But Soo is right.

He belongs at my side when we kill these fuckers, if not pulling the trigger himself.

I shove away from the counter and head for the door. “Thanks for the drink. Set a meeting with your spy. I’ll talk to my brother.”

The time for vengeance is coming, and if anyone deserves to put a bullet in someone’s head, it’s Luca.