Chapter 7 Elio #2
Valente's hand on my shoulder brought me back. A grip hard enough to hurt.
We moved on.
The women were taken to safe houses. The surviving guards were moved to a basement in Catania that belongs to a man who owes me three favors and was about to repay one of them.
I gave my men instructions. Find out where the women were being moved next.
Find out who ran this operation. Find out where the compound is. Find out any-fucking-thing.
For over two weeks, no one talked. Foot soldiers who feared their boss more than they feared Elio Marchetti.
They were less scared of death than the man in charge.
This should have told me everything about the kind of operation I was pulling apart, but all I could process was the waste of hours, the accumulation of days she was somewhere I couldn't reach.
I stopped sleeping properly. The bruises from Cicero's warehouse faded from purple to yellow to gone, and I didn't notice because the pain had become background noise, as unremarkable as my own heartbeat.
On the eighteenth day, a guard cracked. Not from anything my men did. He cracked because another guard, three cells down, started screaming about his children, and the first guard heard it and broke.
"Bianchi," he said, teeth chattering, blood from his nose making his words liquid and imprecise. "Mauro Bianchi. He's above me. Above all of us here. He knows where things go after they leave Catania."
It took my men five more days to find Bianchi. Five days of tracking a man who moved between three cities and four aliases and never slept in the same bed twice.
She has been gone for almost a month.
I open my eyes.
The bare bulb above me buzzes, and on the other side of this door Mauro Bianchi is waiting, and I am no longer the man who sat across from Lombardi in Messina, letting silence do the work.
That man had a plan. That man believed in patience as a weapon, that control applied correctly would always yield faster results than force.
He was right, and then Dario Sala yielded nothing for weeks, and that man started to disappear somewhere around day ten, somewhere around the fourth time Valente put food in front of me and I couldn't remember what I was supposed to do with it.
This man just wants her back.
I push the door open.
Bianchi is smaller than I expected. Lean, wiry, mid-forties, with the hard eyes of someone who's lived inside the machinery long enough to know how the gears turn.
Not a paper-pusher like Lombardi. His hands don't shake.
His breathing is controlled. His gaze tracks me from the door to the chair across from him with the calm of a man who has prepared for this.
I don't sit.
I hit him.
The punch comes from somewhere below rational thought, powered by almost a month of dead ends and cold trails and the phantom echo of her scream that I still hear in the moments between sleep and waking.
My fist connects with his jaw, his head snapping sideways as the chair rocks on its bolts.
I follow with a second blow before he's recovered from the first, this one to the ribs, and a third to the same spot, and by the fourth his composure has crumbled into the biological reality of a body under assault, gasping and flinching and trying to curl inward against restraints that won't let him.
My ribs scream. I don't notice. Haven't noticed in days, the dull throb so constant it's become indistinguishable from the rest of me, folded into the baseline of what it feels like to exist in this body at this moment.
"The women." My voice doesn't sound like my own. Too raw, stripped back to something that hasn't been modulated or controlled, or filtered through the version of me that runs boardrooms and negotiates with men in expensive suits. "Where are they?"
Bianchi spits blood onto the concrete between his feet. His left eye is swelling shut. When he looks up at me, there's a calculation running behind the remaining eye, how much pain versus how much information versus how long until the pain stops.
I grab a fistful of his hair and pull his head back until he's looking at the ceiling, and I lean in close enough that he can feel my breath on his face.
"You don't get to decide how long this takes. I do. And I have nothing left but time and the will to fill it."
He talks within minutes. Not because he's weak, but because whatever armor he'd constructed was built to withstand a certain caliber of violence, and what I'm offering him tonight exceeds it.
"Hills outside Palermo." He's breathing through his mouth, jaw clicking where it might be fractured. "There's an old agricultural compound. Stone buildings, fenced, twenty... twenty-five guards on rotation. More during transfers."
"Transfers."
"Girls come in, girls go out. Three-week cycle. The American comes every..." He coughs. Blood and spit. "Every ten days. Never stays more than a few hours."
"The American."
"I've never met him. No one at my level meets him. He uses local operators, different ones each time. Cuts them loose after a single job. The only constants are the compound and the cycle."
"If a woman was taken from a private estate outside Palermo four weeks ago. American. Auburn hair. Where would she be."
His good eye finds mine, and in it I see a flicker of something that might be pity, which is an odd thing to see in a man whose face I've just rearranged.
"Four weeks?" He shakes his head, just barely, the motion limited by my grip in his hair.
"The cycle is three weeks. If she went through the compound, she's been moved on.
They train them there. Break them. Then they go to buyers, auction houses, private sales.
If your woman was taken four weeks ago, she is most likely no longer there. "
Fuck. I suspected that she could be gone. Sold. Shipped somewhere I can't reach in time, packaged and delivered like Lombardi's cargo.
My hand tightens in his hair. My jaw locks. The knife in my pocket burns as I reach for it.
She is not gone. She is somewhere, and I will find that somewhere, and I will take it apart stone by stone. And if she's not there, I will follow the trail until it ends or I do.
I pull the knife out. The same knife that has Cicero's blood on it, Lombardi's blood on it, and now Bianchi looks at the blade, his bravado dissolving into the primal understanding that he is about to die.
"The exact location."
He gives it. Coordinates spilling out of him alongside blood and broken teeth, a road name, a landmark, the turn off the provincial highway where an unmarked track leads up into the hills.
I commit every word to memory because this is the last thing this man will ever be useful for, and when he's finished and his mouth stops moving and his one good eye searches my face for the mercy I don't have, I draw the blade across his throat in a single line and step back from the spray.
Valente is in the doorway, arms folded, his face doing that thing it does when he disagrees with me.
"That wasn't sensible."
"No."
"He could have had more. Contacts. Names. The American's identity."
"I know."
"If she's at that compound, we could have used him to get in clean. Fewer casualties. Better odds."
"I know, Valente."
He looks at the body, then back at me, and what I see in his face isn't judgment.
It's the expression he wore in Catania when he put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me back from a scream that wasn't there.
Concern worn down to its bare essentials, stripped of comfort, offering only the fact of its presence.
"You're losing it, Elio."
I wipe the blade on Bianchi's shirt. Fold the knife. Return it to my pocket.
"Find the compound," I tell him. "Confirm the location, the guard rotation, the access points. Get Gio on the case. Pull in Alessandro's contacts in Palermo if you need additional men. I want satellite imagery, I want ground reconnaissance, and I want it in forty-eight hours."
"And then?"
"Then we go in."
Valente nods once, pushes off the doorframe, and pulls his phone from his jacket.
Behind me, Bianchi's blood runs into the seams of the concrete floor, following the path of least resistance toward the drain in the center of the room, and I stand watching it pool and spread while Valente's voice carries from the hallway, already making calls, already putting the pieces in motion.
She's been gone for almost a month, and now the distance between us has collapsed to forty-eight hours and a compound in the hills outside Palermo.
She was so close all this time.
Valente reappears in the doorway, phone still pressed to his ear.
"Alessandro can have eight men in Palermo by tomorrow night.
I need to verify the road Bianchi described, cross-reference with the provincial maps.
If the compound is where he says it is, there's only one approach that gives us cover, and it's a three-kilometer hike through agricultural terrain in the dark. "
"Then we hike."
He holds up a hand, listening to whoever is on the other end, and nods.
"Satellite imagery will be ready by morning. Ground team can scout tomorrow afternoon if we move fast."
"Move fast then."
He disappears back into the hallway. I hear his footsteps on the stairs, the creak of the door above, and then I'm alone with what's left of Mauro Bianchi and the bare bulb buzzing overhead, and the sound of my own breathing.
All I can think about is whether she's eating, whether she's sleeping, whether whoever has her has touched her, and if anyone has laid a hand on her—