Chapter 3
Chapter Three: Antonia
The compound looks exactly the way I'd expect the enemy's headquarters to look. Boring and functional. Less flashy than ours, but different strokes for different folks, I guess.
I've been studying the Bonaccorsos since I was old enough to understand that studying your enemy is the first step toward destroying them.
Marco made sure of that. Maps, dossiers, personnel files, financials.
I've read every intelligence report we ever compiled on the Bonaccorso family, and I can name their key players the way other women can name Kardashians.
Leone Costa. Don. Aurelio's hand-picked successor.
The man who held the family together through a trafficking scandal, a two-year war with my family, and the death of the founder.
He's respected because he's competent, and he's dangerous because competent men with armies are always dangerous.
Alexandra is his claimed partner, and she is the brains behind connecting the dots.
Claudio DiAngelo. The twin who doesn't talk.
Security, strategy, the operational brain that runs the machinery while Leone makes the decisions.
His woman, Charlotte, is apparently highly intelligent, even if she comes as unstable to outsiders.
I've been warned about her specifically.
Marco's intelligence file on Charlotte Richardson is two inches thick, and the summary line reads: Underestimate at your peril.
Emilio DiAngelo. The other twin. The one who can get away with murder because he has a mega-watt smile. Loud, charming, reckless. Currently involved with a bartender named Savannah who, according to our files, is a sassy loudmouth.
Carmelo. Surname unknown or classified. The Bonaccorso Butcher.
The file on Carmelo is thin because the men who could have provided intelligence on him are dead, and the men who are still alive won't talk about him.
What we know: he kills efficiently, communicates rarely, and his loyalty to the Bonaccorso family is absolute.
The file recommends avoiding eye contact.
I plan to make eye contact immediately because fuck the file.
And now, the newest addition. Matteo Billone. Aurelio's bastard. The man who showed up at this compound a week ago and demanded his birthright. The man I'm being traded to in exchange for my family's continued existence under the Silent's umbrella.
My husband in a few days.
My father called ahead and told them I would be arriving, so when we pull up, they open the gate immediately and the soldiers see us coming and adjust. Postures straighten.
Hands move to weapons, not drawing, positioning.
The Castillo flag on the vehicle marks us as the enemy, and the fact that we're driving through their gate instead of being dragged through it doesn't change the fundamental nature of the relationship.
We are Castillos in Bonaccorso territory.
The treaty is a piece of paper that has been breaking down since Aurelio died. The hostility is genetic.
I'm in the backseat with Giada. Two soldiers in the front, Marco's chosen security detail, men I've known for years and trust about as far as I can spit.
They work for my father. They report to my father.
Their job is to deliver me and confirm delivery and then drive back to the estate and tell Marco that his daughter walked through the gates without incident.
I had to fight for Giada's seat in this car.
Marco didn't want her here. Additional variables, he said.
Complications. As if Giada is a variable and not a human being who has slept three doors from me for twelve years and held my hair while I threw up after my first kill and taught me how to braid when I was eleven because my mother died before she could.
My mother died when I was four. Some type of rare genetic disease, a chromosome deletion that caused her to deteriorate at a rapid rate after I was born.
Marco doesn't talk about her. There are no photographs in the estate.
Whatever she was to him died with her and he buried it along with her body.
I have one photograph, a Polaroid I found in a drawer when I was nine.
A woman with dark hair and my eyes, holding a baby, smiling at whoever held the camera.
I keep it in the case with Vita and Morte, folded into the velvet lining.
My mother and my blades, stored together, the only inheritance worth keeping.
"You're spinning," Giada says.
I look down. Both karambits are out, rotating on my index fingers, the idle spin I don't always notice I'm doing.
The sound is faint, a whisper of rotation that most people tune out.
Giada hears it because she has spent a decade listening for the specific frequency of Antonia Castillo losing her shit.
"I'm fine."
"You've been spinning since we got in the car. That's forty-five minutes of continuous karambit rotation. Your fingers are going to cramp."
"My fingers don't cramp."
"Your fingers cramped last week when you were nervous about the—"
"I wasn't nervous. I was focused."
"You were nervous and your left index finger locked up, and I had to massage it for ten minutes while you swore at me in Italian."
"That's not what happened."
"That's exactly what happened, and also you called me a goat."
I stop spinning. Sheath both blades on my belt.
The absence of the rotation makes my hands feel wrong, empty in a way that has nothing to do with the blades themselves and everything to do with the fact that in about three minutes I'm going to walk through a gate into the headquarters of the family my father has been trying to destroy for years, and the only thing keeping me from cutting my way back out is the woman sitting beside me, who is currently picking something out of her teeth with a fingernail.
"Giada."
"Mm."
"When we get in there, I need you to be—"
"If you say careful, I will open this car door and roll into traffic."
"I was going to say observant."
"Liar. You were going to say careful, then you remembered who you were talking to and pivoted.
" She finds whatever was in her teeth, examines it, flicks it at the window.
"I'll be fine, Toni. I've been walking into rooms full of armed men since I was twelve.
These armed men just have a different logo on their jackets.
Their dicks all work the same and I intend to use that to my advantage. "
I roll my eyes as she giggles.
The car stops in the courtyard. The soldiers in the front seat get out first, opening doors, maintaining the protocol drilled into them.
I step out and the air hits me, cold, tinged with exhaust and concrete dust and the particular smell of a compound that runs on diesel generators and testosterone.
I scan the courtyard in three seconds.. Exits: the main gate behind me, a side door on the east wall, a loading bay on the west side, partially open.
Soldiers: fourteen visible, six more probable based on the guard positions on the wall.
Cameras: four on the courtyard, two on the building, angles suggesting additional coverage I can't see from ground level.
Vehicles: three SUVs, one sedan, a van with tinted windows near the loading bay.
The courtyard has a grave in it.
I didn't expect that. A headstone, low and gray, set into the ground near the far wall.
Fresh dirt, recently turned, and beside the headstone a knife standing upright in the soil, the handle pointing at the sky.
The blade has rusted from the weather, and nobody has moved it, which means it was placed there with intent and the intent is being honored.
Aurelio's grave. My soon-to-be-husband's father.
The man my family spent two years trying to outlast, buried in his own courtyard with a rusting knife as a headstone decoration.
There's something honest about that. No marble angels.
No manicured grass. Dirt and a blade. The two things that define every man in this world.
The door to the main building opens and Leone Costa walks out.
He's taller than the dossier suggested. Dark hair, strong face, the posture of a man who hasn't questioned his own authority in years because nobody around him questions it either.
He's wearing a suit, charcoal, and it fits well, his shirt is white and the whole package communicates one thing: I am the Don and you are in my house.
Behind him, a woman. Small, dark-haired, intense. Alexandra. The analyst. The one who decoded Kreiss's files and mapped the financial architecture of the Silent's operations. She's carrying a tablet and her eyes are on me.
"Antonia Castillo." Leone extends his hand. His grip is firm, professional. This one means: welcome, provisionally. "Thank you for making the trip."
"Thank you for making it necessary." I don't smile.
"This is Alexandra. She'll help you and your companion get situated once you’ve been seen to your rooms."
Giada steps out of the car behind me and the energy in the courtyard shifts.
Giada is five-foot-nine with red-brown hair and a body she maintains through a combination of inconsistent exercise and aggressive metabolism, and she enters spaces the way a grenade drops. With noise and the promise of damage.
"Hi," Giada says to Leone, extending her hand. "I'm Giada. I'm here to make sure nobody fucks with my girl. Nice compound. Very concrete. Love the vibe."
Leone shakes her hand. His expression doesn't change but I catch the flicker behind his eyes, the micro-adjustment of a man recalibrating his assessment of a situation.
He expected one Castillo woman. He got two, and the second one is grinning at him with the confidence of someone who has never once in her life felt intimidated by authority.
"Emilio will show you to your rooms," Leone says. "We'll meet formally this evening to discuss the arrangement."
On cue, a man appears from inside the building. Tattoos, jeans, a bandage on his left arm, and a grin that belongs on a man who is either very confident or very stupid.
"Welcome to our humble abode," he says, and the warmth in his voice is genuine in a way that irritates me because I'd prefer hostility. Hostility is familiar. Warmth from a Bonaccorso is a variable I haven't prepared for.
Behind Emilio, a woman appears. Tanned skin, curves, a rag over her shoulder and a look on her face that says she's been watching this exchange from inside and has already formed opinions she won't share until asked. Savannah. The bartender.
She looks at me. I look at her. The assessment takes two seconds and covers everything that matters. She's reading me, fast and thorough, and whatever she sees makes her nod. One nod. Short, firm. The nod of a woman recognizing another woman who doesn't need protection but might need a drink.
I nod back. Same nod. Same meaning.
"Come on," Emilio says. "I'll give you the tour. Fair warning, the gym is in the basement, and the hot water runs out at ten and Charlotte's cookies are not optional. If she offers you one, eat it. Trust me on this."
Giada is already beside him, asking questions, filling the air with her particular brand of chaos.
She asks about the food, the wifi password, whether the gym has a heavy bag, whether Carmelo is single.
Emilio answers everything except the Carmelo question, which he deflects with a laugh that says asking about Carmelo's romantic life is the bravest or stupidest thing Giada has done today.
I follow them inside. The corridors are wide and clean and smell like the same combination of coffee and cleaning products that every institutional building on earth shares.
Soldiers move through the halls with purpose, and every one of them looks at me and the karambits on my belt and arrives at the same conclusion: the Castillo woman is armed, and nobody told her not to be.
That makes me smile. Let them notice me, fear me. Let every man in this building see the blades and understand that the woman wearing them isn't here as a gift. She's here as a warning.
Emilio shows us the second floor. Two rooms, side by side.
Giada's is on the right, mine on the left.
The rooms are small, functional, identical to each other and to the dozens of other rooms in this corridor.
Bed, desk, lamp, bathroom. Concrete walls, concrete floor.
The accommodations of a soldier, not a bride.
"I know it's not the Ritz," Emilio says. "But the mattresses are decent and the walls are thick enough that nobody hears you scream, which is useful for various reasons I won't elaborate on."
"Charming."
"I try. Dinner's at seven in the kitchen.
Bar's open after eight. Savannah pours a mean whiskey and an even meaner judgment, but you'll get used to it.
" He pauses at the door. "For what it's worth, Antonia, nobody in this building wanted this arrangement.
Not Leone, not me, not the soldiers. And not the man you're supposed to marry.
Whatever happens, you should know that the people in this compound didn't ask for you to be traded.
That decision was made above all of us."
"I know where the decision was made."
"Then you know we're on the same side of it." He taps the doorframe once with his knuckles. "Welcome to the compound. Try not to stab anyone on the first day. We're still patching holes from the last Castillo visit."
He leaves. Giada is already in her room, and I can hear her through the wall, opening drawers, testing the bed, humming something tuneless and loud because Giada cannot exist in silence for more than forty seconds.
I close my door. Set the bag on the bed. Pull Vita and Morte from my belt and lay them on the nightstand, blades crossed, the X they form when they're at rest. Then I stand at the window and look down at the courtyard.
The courtyard is empty now. The cars are parked, the soldiers have resumed their positions, and the gate is closed behind me.
Aurelio's grave is visible from this angle, the headstone and the rusted knife, and beyond it the wall and beyond the wall the city and beyond the city the world I used to live in, the Castillo estate, Giada's apartment, my room with the whetstone on the nightstand and the sound of Morte on stone.
That world is behind me now. This one, the concrete and the soldiers and the karambits on the nightstand, is where I live until the arrangement is complete or until I decide it isn't, whichever comes first.
Eight days until the wedding. Eight days of living in this building with a man I’d rather fucking gut then marry. Eight days of navigating a compound full of people who didn't choose this arrangement any more than I did. Eight days of pretending I'm a bride when I'm a mafia princess.
Eight days to pretend I’m not fucking furious and ready to slit the throats of anyone who dares get in my way.
Eight days.
I pick up Vita again, and I spin.