Chapter 5 #2
The woman who steps out is not what I expected, and I realize, cataloguing my own assumptions, that I have been braced for another version of the auction—another version of beauty deployed as currency, all performance and surface.
What I get instead is a woman in dark jeans and an oversized cream sweater, raven hair loose and waist-length, moss green eyes that take in the room with a single sweep and land on me with an expression so immediately, genuinely warm that my chest does something I am not prepared for.
She looks at me the way my mother used to look at us after a hard day on the farm—like I matter. Like she is relieved to see me upright.
Behind her, Donatello steps out of the elevator with a small, dark-haired child balanced on his forearm, as if she weighs nothing, which she nearly does.
The child's eyes are enormous and serious as she clutches a worn stuffed rabbit by one ear with the absolute conviction of someone who has never considered that the rabbit might have somewhere else to be.
Donatello and Marcello exchange a look over the tops of everyone's heads—the look that contains an entire conversation compressed into half a second—and then Donatello moves to the kitchen with his daughter and his brother and leaves Paolina standing three feet from me.
She doesn't extend her hand. She tilts her head slightly, her eyes read my face with a frankness that is not intrusive. It is the frankness of someone who has been exactly where I am standing and wants me to know they survived it.
“Gala,” she says. Her English carries the lilt of Italian beneath it, warm and unhurried.
“I’m Paolina. I came from the island.” A slight pause.
“He called Donatello at midnight and said bring me. So.” Her chin tips toward Marcello—not possessively, not with resentment, with the particular exasperation of a woman who has long since made peace with the fact that the men in her orbit do not ask, they simply act. “Here I am with Cosima.”
I don't know what to say. The honest answer is that I don't know why she is here, what role Marcello expects her to play, whether this is surveillance in a softer form.
The honest answer is that I want to sit down with this woman and her stuffed-rabbit child and not move for a week. Happy to be around family once again.
I reveal none of these thoughts. “Thank you for coming.”
Her expression does something complicated—a flash of understanding so precise it makes my throat tighten. She nods once.
Then she says, quietly, so only I hear it, “I know what this is. I know what it feels like when someone takes you out of one world and drops you in another one and doesn't explain the rules. I'm not here to watch you.” A beat. “I’m here because I wanted someone to do this for me, and no one did.”
Oh.
I look at her for a long moment. She looks back without flinching. Behind us, from the kitchen, Cosima announces something in rapid Italian that includes the word coniglio—rabbit—and Donatello's low voice responds with patience that sounds thoroughly practiced.
Marcello appears in the kitchen doorway. His eyes move from Paolina to me and back, and whatever he reads in the distance between us makes that almost-smile pull at the corner of his mouth again.
“We leave in ninety minutes,” he says. “There's breakfast.”
Paolina touches my arm—light, brief, asking nothing—and tips her head toward the kitchen. I follow her. Cosima, upon seeing a new face, fixes me with the solemn stare of a child conducting a serious evaluation, then extends the rabbit toward me with both hands. An offering. Or a test.
I take the rabbit carefully in both hands and hold it with the gravity it deserves.
Cosima nods. Apparently, I have passed.
For the first time since the van, I almost smile.
The flight to Sicily is three hours long.
Paolina sits beside me and talks, not about anything that matters, not at first. The easy surface conversation of a woman who understands that one cannot rush trust. She tells me about her Mediterranean private island—the light there in the mornings, the way Cosima has learned to say the names of every fish Donatello brings in from the boat, the lemon trees that grow almost to the water's edge.
She talks the way my mother used to talk during lessons—understanding the actual subject is not the subject. That what she is actually doing is making a space I can choose to enter.
I watch Sicily appear beneath the plane—golden-brown and ancient, pushing up out of the blue Mediterranean like something that has always been there and always will be, indifferent to the history that has washed over it.
The light here differs from Russia's. Thicker.
As though the air itself is made of something warmer.
Marcello is three rows ahead of me, talking low with Faustino and Donatello, his dark head bent over something on a phone.
He hasn't looked back at me since we boarded. He’s giving me the space—consciously, deliberately—to exist on this plane without his attention pressing on me.
The observation makes something complicated move through my chest.
Stop noticing him.
Stop noticing the things he does that are not what you expected.
Paolina leans slightly toward me. Her voice drops. “He's not what you think,” she murmurs. Not reading my mind—reading my face, the way women who have survived difficult things learn to read each other.
“What do I think?” I ask.
She considers.
“That he took you because he wanted something. That there are conditions on the food and the safety and the room with the lock.”
Her eyes are steady on mine.
“There aren't. I know, because Donatello took me too, and I spent three months waiting for the conditions to arrive. They didn’t.” She pauses.
“That doesn't mean it isn't complicated. It is. These men are”—she searches for the word—“a lot.” A small, wry curve to her mouth.
“But they don't take without giving back. That's the thing no one tells you.”
I look at her for a long moment. The plane banks slightly, Sicily tilting in the window, the sea flashing gold where the sun hit it.
“He said he would find my sister,” I say. The words come out quieter than I intend.
Paolina doesn't flinch or soften or fill the statement with reassurances I haven't asked for.
She simply nods. “Then he will,” she says.
“That's not a line with Marcello. When he says something, he means it. And when he means it—” she glances toward the front of the plane, toward the dark head bent over the phone, and something in her expression is both fond and faintly awed—“nothing in the world gets in his way.”
I file this. I file everything.
But underneath the filing, underneath the cataloguing and the survival math and the careful measurement of every door and every exit and every man in every room—underneath all of it, something very small and very cautious lifts its head.
Something that might, in a different life, in a safer world, be called hope.
I press it back down. Not yet. Not until I understand what this place is and what it costs and whether the man who brought me here is worth the trust I can feel, against all my better judgment, beginning to form.
Sicily rises to meet us. The wheels find the runway.
Marcello is on his feet before the plane stops moving, phone to his ear, already thinking three moves ahead of this moment.
I can see it in the set of his shoulders, the particular tension of a man who does not experience stillness as rest but as inefficiency.
Paolina stands and lifts Cosima, who immediately demands coniglio, and Donatello produces the rabbit from somewhere without breaking his conversation with Faustino, which tells me everything about the daily choreography of that family.
Marcello pauses at the front of the plane and looks back.
Not at the group—at me. Directly. Eyes find mine across the length of the cabin, and he holds them for exactly two seconds, and in those two seconds, I read something I am not supposed to read, something he is not aware he is showing.
He is checking. Making sure I am all right.
Making sure the landing wasn't frightening, or the flight, or the proximity to all these large, armed, complicated men.
He looks away before I can decide what to do with that.
Don't. Don't do that. Don't let him be someone who checks up on you.
Too late.
Sicily smells of citrus and sun-warmed stone and something wild underneath that I have no word for. When I step off the plane, the heat lands on my skin like a hand.
I stand at the top of the stairs for one breath and let myself feel it—the warmth, the light, the blue of the sky above an island I have never imagined being on. The world is bigger than the farm. The world is bigger than the van and the auction room and the cold Russian dark.
I will save my sisters. I will burn my father's world to the ground. And then I will figure out what this is.
Below, black SUVs wait.
Marcello is already moving toward them, the men fanning around him like a tide, the operation of his life continuing without pause. He uses his hands when he speaks, I notice—a quick, illustrative gesture as he says something to Faustino, the Italian quick and liquid between them.
Paolina appears at my shoulder. “Ready?” she asks.
No. Yes. The two answers exist in me simultaneously, and I am not sure which one is the truth.
“Yes,” I tell her.
She nods.
We walk down the stairs together, into the Sicilian light, and the heat wraps around me like something I didn't know I needed, and below, without looking back, Marcello opens the door of the Cullinan and waits.