Chapter 6
Marcello
The Gulfstream banks over the Ionian Sea on approach to Catania and from the window the water is the color of hammered bronze in the afternoon light, and Sicily rises from it the way it always does—like something that preceded the world and will outlast it.
I’ve flown this approach hundreds of times.
Today, for reasons I refuse to examine, I look back down the cabin to check that she is seeing it.
She is. Eyes stare out the window, something in her face that she hasn't locked away in time—a kind of stilled wonder.
The expression of someone who has received nothing beautiful without a price attached and is bracing for the invoice.
Paolina says something low beside her. Gala's expression closes again, but the wonder leaves a ghost.
She has been nowhere.
Someone kept her somewhere small on purpose. I want to find that someone and take them apart slowly.
The fury is clean and specific. I set it aside. Fury without information is wasteful. Faustino is already running the investigation. I will have what I need soon enough. For now, land, drive, install her at the villa, deal with Luca.
The SUVs wait at the edge of the tarmac, black and low in the Catanian heat—four vehicles, eight soldiers, the welcome that is both escort and statement.
My men know how to communicate significance without a word being spoken.
The Bratva have been making noise since London. Let them hear this noise in return.
Gala comes down the stairs with Paolina at her shoulder and stops at the bottom, and the Sicilian heat hits her the way it hits everyone who arrives from the gray north—like a physical thing, a hand on the chest. She breathes it in.
One deliberate breath, eyes closing for half a second, and I watch something in her posture shift: the shoulders drop one degree.
Just one. But on a woman who has been holding herself at full tension since the moment I put her over my shoulder in a Mayfair club, one degree is significant.
Good. Let the island do some of the work.
I open the Cullinan's rear door and wait.
She sees it, glances at me, and something passes across her face—not gratitude, not submission, but a kind of measured acknowledgment.
She gets in without being told twice. Paolina follows with Cosima, who has apparently decided that Gala is now her primary person of interest and is attempting to share the rabbit with her again.
Donatello slides into the front without a word. Faustino takes the vehicle behind us. I get in, pull the door, and the convoy moves.
The drive from Catania to the family compound at Lucca Sicula takes an hour through the interior of the island—past the volcanic black rock and the citrus groves and the ancient dry-stone walls that divide the hillside terraces, past the small towns with their Baroque churches and their old men outside bars playing cards in the shade.
Sicily doesn't perform for visitors. It simply is, and you either understand it or you don't.
Gala watches all of it from the window with that same careful attention she turns on everything. Her reflection in the glass shows me what she's hiding from the room—a jaw that has slowly unclenched. Eyes that have gone a fraction softer.
Sicily is doing its job.
Cosima falls asleep on Paolina's lap somewhere past Enna, the rabbit tucked under her chin. The vehicle goes quiet in the particular, comfortable way of people who do not need to fill silence with noise.
Donatello's eyes find mine in the rearview mirror once. I give him nothing. He gives me the same. Between us, thirty years of knowing each other handle the entire conversation without a syllable.
The villa appears above the tree line as we climb the last approach road—the compound walls first, pale limestone against the blue sky, and then the main house, low and spreading and rooted in the hillside as though it grew there.
Three generations of Luccheses have lived within those walls.
We buried my parents in the family chapel at the east end of the property.
I don’t look in its direction when we pass it. I never do.
Gemma is on the front steps.
My older sister, at twenty-eight, is the most dangerous member of this family in the way that the family least expects—not with guns or strategy but with a social intelligence so precise it operates like a scalpel.
She reads people the way I read threats—instantly, completely, without apparent effort.
She takes one look at Gala stepping out of the Cullinan and, in the two-second window before anyone speaks, I see her assess, conclude, and decide.
She moves past me entirely.
“Gala.” She extends both hands, not to shake—but to take Gala's hands in hers, warm and direct. “I’m Gemma. Welcome.” Her accented English is fluent, and her voice carries the specific warmth of a woman who has decided you matter before she knows your name.
“Come inside. The heat is impossible, and the lemon granita is cold.”
Gala blinks. Expectation braced her for something else—for the household to mirror its owner, cool and contained and waiting to be explained to. Instead, she has Gemma, who explains nothing and welcomes everything. I watch her look at my sister for one long moment.
Then, quietly, she lets Gemma lead her inside.
Gemma. Good.
I catch my sister's eye over Gala's shoulder as they go through the door.
Gemma's expression is the one she used to make when we were children and I had done something that required managing—half-exasperated, half-approving, entirely aware of what it means that I have brought a woman to this house for the first time in my adult life.
Her arched eyebrow says, we will discuss this.
My expression says, not yet.
Luca calls before I've made it through the front door.
I take the call in the study—the room that was our father's, that still smells faintly of the Havanas Vincenzo Lucchese favored and the particular leather of the chair behind the desk.
Luca's voice comes through the line at the temperature it reaches when he is containing something significant—precise, level, each word placed with the care of a man who knows the weight of them.
“Tell me you're at the villa.”
“Just arrived.”
“And the girl?”
“Settled.”
A silence. I know this silence. It’s the one Luca uses to let the weight of a situation establish itself before he applies pressure. He learned it from our father. I learned the same silence from the same source, which means we are both aware of what it means and it fool neither of us.
“The Bratva have been on every channel since London,” he says. “Three of our cargo holds in Palermo flagged for inspection this morning. Coincidental, of course.”
“Of course.”
“The Mayfair club is asking questions through Tommaso. The auctioneer—”
“The auctioneer should ask himself whether he wants to continue to have a larynx,” I say. “He put a girl on a stage who did not belong there. The Bratva brought her to London. I removed her. The sequence is simple.”
Another silence. Luca's kind.
“First Donatello takes someone he shouldn’t, now you. You went to that auction to observe,” he says. “To form an opinion and report back. That was the assignment, Marcello.”
“I formed my opinion. The Bratva are using our club's infrastructure to traffic women and calling it a partnership. My opinion is that we don't partner with people who do that. My opinion is that the girl comes home with me.” I pause. “I’ll write it up if you need it formally.”
The silence this time is shorter.
“She stays a week.” His voice is final. How Luca's voice is always final. The tone of a man who’s been Boss since twenty-five and has never needed to repeat himself.
“Then she goes. Wherever she chooses to go. We find a solution for the Bratva situation that does not involve a liability living in our family compound indefinitely.”
“No.”
The word lands in the silence and sits there. Faustino, who’s appeared in the doorway to deliver something, goes still.
“Excuse me?” Luca says.
“Gala stays. She's not a liability, and she's not a week's problem to be solved. She stays.”
I keep my voice level, which costs me something, because the thought of Gala being loaded into a car and driven away from this compound in seven days produces a response in me that is neither level nor professional.
“I’ll handle the Bratva, Tommaso, and the cargo holds in Palermo. That is what I do, fratello. Trust me to do it.”
The longest silence yet.
I wait it out.
Outside the study window, the olive trees at the edge of the courtyard move in the afternoon wind. Somewhere inside the villa, Gemma's voice drifts—she’s talking to Gala, the warm, unhurried cadence of someone introducing a place to a person they've already decided belongs there.
“Flavio wants to speak to you,” Luca says finally. “He'll be in Catania by Friday. Dinner at the villa. Be there.” A pause. “And Marcello, whatever this is, keep it controlled. The family cannot afford sentiment as a strategy.”
The line ends.
Faustino raises one eyebrow. He sets the folder he's carrying on the corner of the desk—the preliminary investigator's report. He taps it once with two fingers and leaves the room without speaking.
He’s added a second sheet to the front of the folder.
A name at the top: Yuri Sobol. Beneath it: London-based, runs the Bratva's European auction and trafficking network, operating through three shell companies registered in Cyprus.
Estimated seven years running this specific circuit.
Answers to a Pakhan whose identity Faustino's network has not yet confirmed—recently inherited the organization, Moscow-based, believed to be in his early forties. The investigation is ongoing.