The man got to his position for a reason. He was ruthless and a great politician when he needed to be. He could negotiate with the best of them.
That was okay. I was pretty good myself. I wanted fifty grand from the start.
“Sit back down,” Arturo said. “We’ll get your money right now. Finish your drink.”
“Sounds good to me.” I sat. Arturo picked up his phone and made a quick call, speaking in low tones.
We toasted again and drank before falling back into small talk. Ethan seemed more at ease, which made me think the danger had passed.
Fifteen minutes passed, and finally a man stepped into the room. He handed Arturo a briefcase before leaving.
Arturo popped it open. The case was filled with money. He smiled at me.
“Good?” he asked.
“Good.”
I took the case from him, snapping it shut. Ethan stood up.
“Kyle will show you back to your car,” Arturo said. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
“Same, as always.” We shook again, and then we left.
We followed that same porter man back toward the car along the same winding pathway. I had the case in my hand, and Ethan trailed slightly behind me.
It felt strange, walking around with fifty thousand dollars in my hand.
It felt even stranger that it was all going to go to Arturo’s biggest enemy.
This whole thing was a ruse from the start. Louisa needed money to help finance our plan, and I knew Arturo was good for it. I had already planted the seed with the chief, all it took was a little clever bluffing and I had him.
That bastard had just paid for his own downfall. I grinned to myself, excited to see the look on Louisa’s face.
22
Louisa
There are few things more beautiful than a briefcase full of cash. When Wyatt brought it over to the safe house, I had such a huge smile on my face when he handed it to me.
I had a bigger smile on my face when he spread the cash all over my bed and then licked my pussy until my toes curled.
Kasia hadn’t believed Wyatt was going to come through, but he did. She was not a fan of the plan, for a lot of reasons, but she saw why we needed to do it.
The Spiders were spread thin. We were fighting a much more powerful enemy by hitting and running away. We were fighting a guerilla war, but I didn’t want to slowly chip away at my father until he died of old age. I wanted to strike and strike hard, plunge a dagger into his chest.
That was what attracted me to his plan. I knew that if we actually followed through with this, we could have a real shot at overwhelming Arturo before he even realized what was happening.
There were risks, of course. I’d be stretching myself thin. I was also potentially alienating my core group, my girls, the reason for all of this. I was just hoping they’d understand why we were going in this direction, and why they had to trust me.
Preparations went underway the day after Wyatt brought the money. We had some of our own stashed away, and soon Kasia had hired twenty men, mercenaries from all over the country.
They began to arrive over the next week. I didn’t see Wyatt much, since he had to travel out of the city for work. We spread the men out across the various safe houses.
Like I expected, the girls were unhappy, but they went along with my plan. A few left, but nobody that mattered much. All in all, things were going better than I could have hoped.
Our numbers were bolstered by these men, trained killers that would fight and murder for money. I didn’t need anything from them other than they skills with weapons and they knew it. They were being paid well, plus the potential for huge bonuses. I didn’t think a single one of them was loyal, but I made sure to hire men that weren’t from the city. That way, Arturo wasn’t likely to have already paid them off.
Two weeks it took us to gather the men and to supply them. Two weeks of constant work, worry, and stress. Two weeks without Wyatt.
But on week three, we struck.
We started small. A few of the man and a few of the girls hit a small deli that was a mob front, killed everyone associated with the Barones, and took their cash. It wasn’t a big score, so I spread it out over the fighters.
We got more daring. Every single night that week, we launched a raid against the mafia. We attacked them in the north, we attacked them in the south. We killed twenty men and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, drugs, and guns. We gutted them, and the mafia was in absolute chaos.
They hit back, but not hard enough. We moved our safe houses around, kept nimble. The mafia couldn’t keep up with us, and with our new fighters, we had some serious strength to push back hard against them.
Nothing felt better than knowing that my father was getting pushed to the limit. There were whispers on the street that the captains were getting angry with Arturo, and wanted to get more aggressive against me. Some of them, my brother included, wanted to try and make peace with us like I had originally offered.