Chapter 5
Gala
The bed is the first thing I notice when I wake up .
Not the unfamiliar ceiling, not the gray London light pressing through the gap in the blackout curtains, not the distant sound of a city I have never seen in daylight.
The bed. The mattress is so deep and so clean that for one disoriented moment I think I am still dreaming—still in the place my mind builds when it needs somewhere safe, the imaginary room I have retreated to since I was fourteen years old, the one with the door that locks and the window that faces something other than a pig field.
Then the events of last night reassemble themselves in the correct order, and the dream dissolves. I’m fully awake.
Marcello Lucchese's penthouse. London. Mayfair.
My eyes move to the room's other details with the methodical sweep I learned not from any school but from living in a house where danger could come through any door at any hour: a single window, curtained, no fire escape visible through the gap.
One interior door, the bathroom. No connecting door to another room.
The furniture is sparse and expensive. Pieces too heavy for me to move, which means none of it is useful as a barricade.
But some of it could serve as a weapon in the right circumstances.
Old habits.
I sit up and push my hair back from my face.
The shirt I slept in—his shirt, charcoal cotton, the monogram ML at the left cuff—is warm and absurdly soft and smells of something dark and clean that I refuse to think about.
The sweatpants still knotted at my waist. My bare feet find the floor, cool marble, real beneath my soles. I press them flat and breathe.
The lock I turned with my own hand still engaged—I check it before I check anything else, a reflex so practiced it happens before thought. Engaged. Good.
Alive. Unhurt. Fed, even, which is more than I can say for most mornings of the last four years.
What does he want from me?
The question circling since the moment he lifted me off that stage—not with cruelty, not with the casual brutality of the men in the van, but with a kind of absolute certainty that was more frightening than either.
He carried me like a decision he had already made. He gave me a locked room and food with no conditions attached and the name of the man who built the cage around me, spoken simply: I am Marcello Lucchese. As though that explained everything.
Perhaps it is.
I learned a long time ago that the most dangerous men do not need to shout.
My father shouted. The men in the van shouted.
The auctioneer, with his oily voice and glossy brochure, spoke in the tone of a man who has never needed to raise his voice because the room was already arranged for his bidding.
Marcello Lucchese does not speak loudly.
He speaks once, and the room rearranges itself.
I need to understand him before he understands me. Whoever gets there first has the advantage.
He stocked the bathroom the way I imagine hotels in cities I have never visited are stocked—bottles lined up in a row, shampoo and conditioner and something labeled body wash in a font that implies it costs more than my father's monthly earnings from the pig market.
I stand in front of the mirror for a moment before I turn the shower on, looking at the face that stared back at me from that stage last night.
Oval. Pale. The shadows under eyes that have not slept properly for longer than I can calculate.
The old scar at the corner of my lip, the one I tell myself I have stopped noticing.
He noticed it. I saw his jaw tighten.
The observation sits in me, neither comforting nor alarming. A data point. I file it and turn on the shower.
The water is hot.
This is the thing I am not prepared for—not the luxury of the products lined up on the shelf, not the size of the shower enclosure or the weight of the white towel, or even the absence of a mildew smell. The hot water.
Back home, we heated water by dragging a pot to the wood stove and waiting, and in winter the waiting was longer. The pot was never large enough. We learned to wash fast and without complaint because complaints changed nothing and used energy we could not spare.
Here the water arrives hot from the wall without asking, steady and inexhaustible. The temperature is adjustable with one hand.
I stand under it and let the water hit my shoulders and the back of my neck as I think. Syuzanna. Tasha. Irina. Borya and Yeva, who have never had hot water from a wall tap in their lives.
I will come back for you. I will find a way.
The tears fall before I can stop them, soundless, lost immediately in the steam and the water, and I let them come for exactly sixty seconds—I count—because grief without a limit is a luxury I cannot afford.
At sixty, I press both palms flat against the tile and breathe until I am steady.
Then I wash my hair with the expensive shampoo that smells of something floral and European, and I do not cry again, and when I step out and wrap myself in the white towel, I am composed.
Composed is the only armor I have ever had that no one can take away.
The penthouse is different in daylight. Larger, somehow, the floor-to-ceiling windows turning London's gray morning sky into something almost beautiful.
The city spread out below in layers of rooftops, spires, and the River Thames—a pewter ribbon in the distance.
I stand at the glass for a moment, my reflection ghosted over the cityscape, and I think how I have been nowhere this high.
The tallest thing near our farm was the pine forest on the ridge, and that was not tall so much as dense, pressing down rather than lifting.
Here, everything lifts.
The kitchen is to the right. I catalogued it last night, but daylight changes rooms. Marble countertops. A coffee machine that requires separate education to operate. And behind the counter, already doing something efficient with cups and a small pot, stands a man Marcello called Faustino.
He looks up when he hears my silent footfall.
My presence is enough to alert him. His eyes—dark, careful, reading me with precision—move across my face once and then return to the cups.
He’s built like Donatello but differently arranged: the same height, olive skin and dark coloring, the same broad-shouldered frame that speaks of a man who could break things effortlessly and chooses, in this moment, not to.
Where Donatello's stillness is imposing, Faustino's is measured.
Watchful rather than waiting. The difference between a predator at rest and a predator at work.
Brothers. Not twins—different jaw, different set to the eyes. But the same blood is obvious.
He sets a cup of coffee on the counter and steps back without a word. The gesture is neutral, not servile, not threatening. Simply, here is coffee. It’s yours if you want it.
I want it.
The first sip is strong enough to make my eyes water slightly, rich and dark in a way that has nothing to do with the instant granules dissolved in lukewarm water that passed for coffee at home.
I wrap both hands around the cup and let the warmth travel up my arms as I think, with a clarity that surprises me: I could think clearly here, if I am careful.
There are resources in this place—money, men, reach.
Marcello Lucchese said the Bratva cannot touch me while his name stands between us.
If that is true, even temporarily, then I am safer now than I have been in a while.
Use it. Think. What do you need, and how do you get it?
What I need is Katya. And Irina and Syuzanna and Tasha and the children. And Borislav Zhukova dead in the dirt of his own yard.
One thing at a time.
Marcello appears from the hallway at the exact moment I finish the coffee, as though the apartment has alerted him. Dark suit, freshly pressed, jaw clean-shaven—the baby face that I watched last night. He is devastatingly put together for a man who looks like he’s stayed up all night.
Mink brown eyes find mine across the kitchen counter. Something moves in them—there and gone, a flicker of something that is not the cold assessment I expected—before his expression settles back into that particular neutrality that tells me nothing and everything at once.
“You slept,” he states. Not a question.
“Yes,” I set the cup down. “You didn’t.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. Not quite a smile. ''No.''
He crosses to the machine, does something to it with practiced efficiency that produces an espresso in under thirty seconds.
He leans against the counter with the cup, watching me with the same sidelong attention he used last night—the kind that is not quite looking directly, which means it misses nothing.
“We fly to Sicily in two hours.”
“You said this morning.”
“I say it again so it’s not a surprise.”
This consideration is so unexpected that I simply look at him for a moment. He doesn't explain it, doesn't underscore it, doesn't seem to notice that he’s just done something no man in my life has ever done—warned me of something in advance so I could prepare.
Careful. That is not kindness. That is strategy.
Isn't it?
Before I can decide, the sound of rotor blades cuts through the double-glazed quiet of the penthouse windows.
Marcello's eyes flick to the ceiling—not in alarm, but in recognition—and something in his posture shifts.
A fraction of a degree. The neutrality warms, marginally, in a way I would have missed if I were not watching him as carefully as he is watching me.
"Paolina," he says. To Faustino, not to me. Though his eyes stay on mine.
Faustino moves toward the elevator without being asked. The rotor sound grows and then changes pitch—landing, I realize. On the roof. There is a helipad on the roof of this building, and apparently, this is simply a normal thing that happens.
Who are these people?
The elevator opens four minutes later.