Chapter 6 #2
Sobol is the face. Someone above Sobol is the architect. I want both names on my desk before this is over. Not for the family—for the girl upstairs and her sister who got put on a London stage by the network this man runs.
This man. Worth his weight in gold and whatever the metal above gold is called.
The report is twelve pages long.
Borislav Zhukova, fifty-three. Pig farmer.
Remote settlement in the Perm Krai region of Russia, two hundred kilometers from the nearest city of any size.
No criminal record—in this part of Russia, what he does to his daughters does not produce a criminal record because no one in authority has noticed it or cared to.
Father of six daughters, all born of one wife—Nina Zhukova, née Sorokina—who died delivering the youngest approximately eight years ago.
The oldest daughter, Irina, currently twenty-two, has remained on the farm.
I read that sentence twice.
Currently, at the farm. With him.
The second daughter, Ekaterina—Katya—their father sold to traffickers approximately fourteen months ago.
The investigator traced her to London, then Warsaw, then a last known location: a safe house in Warsaw run by Bratva-adjacent operatives.
Three more daughters: Syuzanna, sixteen; the youngest, Natalya—Tasha—eleven, reported mute.
And Gala, eighteen, second oldest after Irina, sold four weeks ago to clear a recurring debt the father carries with local traffickers who pass the women up the chain to the Bratva auction circuit.
The folder shakes. I realize it’s my hands.
I set it on the desk. Flatten both palms against the leather surface.
Breathe, slow and deliberate, the way Donatello's father taught me before a fight—from the diaphragm, not the chest, let the oxygen do the work before I make any decision.
Our father taught us to suppress reactions entirely.
Old man Romano taught us to process it first and then act.
Between the two methods, Romano's produces fewer mistakes.
He sold her. Her own father sold her. And the sister before her. And there are three more still in that house.
The fury is not clean this time. It’s dense and specific and personal in a way that has nothing to do with La Cosa Nostra or the Bratva or Luca's warning about sentiment as strategy.
A pig farmer in the Perm Krai region sold his daughters to clear a debt, and one of those daughters is currently in my villa eating Gemma's lemon granita and trying to decide whether to trust me, and she has been carrying this since she was fourteen years old.
I know now.
I pick up my phone. Dial.
Faustino answers on the first ring.
“Warsaw first,” I say. “Katya Zhukova, the last known location, the safe house. Eyes on it by tomorrow morning. Quietly. No movement yet, just confirmation she's there.”
“Already tasked,” Faustino says. “Donatello has a contact in Warsaw who can confirm by tonight.”
Of course he does.
“The farm in Russia. Layout—buildings, access roads, how many people on the property at any time. Everything.” I pause. “The father stays alive until I say otherwise. He's not touched.”
A beat of silence.
“Understood,” Faustino says. Not asking why. Not asking what comes next. In eighteen years of working together, Faustino Romano has never once asked why.
I end the call. Sit for a moment in my father's chair in my father's study with the olive trees moving outside the window and the family chapel just visible at the far end of the property.
You built this empire so your children would be safe. You put us in this life so nothing could touch us.
And something touched you anyway.
The thought is familiar, and I put it back in its drawer. There is work to do.
I stand, button my jacket, and go to find Gala.
I find her in the garden off the east wing.
Gemma's domain, the one with the lemon trees and the low stone wall where the view opens onto the valley below, and on a cloudless afternoon you can see the sea.
Gemma has apparently installed her there with a glass of granita and then diplomatically disappeared, because Gala is alone, sitting on the wall with her bare feet on the warm stone, looking out at the valley with the expression of someone given too many things at once to process.
The light here in the late afternoon is the amber that painters come to Sicily to chase.
It hits the ash blonde of her hair and turns it to something warmer, and the dove gray eyes, when she turns at the sound of my footsteps, catch it too.
She looks different outside than she did in the penthouse.
More real. Less like a woman bracing for impact and more like a woman who has briefly allowed herself to be somewhere.
I sit on the wall at a distance that is not intimate but not indifferent. She does not move away. We look at the valley for a moment.
“Your sister Gemma,” she says. “She doesn't ask questions.”
“No. She asks them later, privately, and already knows the answers. She just waits to confirm.”
A momentary silence. Then, almost despite herself, the corner of Gala's mouth moves.
There it is. There's the smile she's been keeping locked up since London.
It's gone in a second. But I saw it.
“Tell me about your family,” I say.
The stillness that moves through her is immediate. The particular freeze of someone asked a question they’ve been rehearsing an evasion for and are now being caught before the evasion is ready. Those gray eyes find mine. Read me. Look for the motive behind the question.
I wait. I have learned more patience in forty-eight hours than I have exercised in the previous twenty-six years.
She looks back at the valley. When she speaks, her Russian accent thickens on the edges of the words.
“My mother was a teacher,” she says. “She taught us every morning. Reading, English, mathematics. She drew gold stars on our test pages and hung them on a wall in the hallway.”
She stops.
“She died eight years ago,” she continues. “Tasha—my youngest sister—was born, and our mother didn't survive it. Tasha never speaks. She hasn't spoken in eight years.”
I do not speak. I keep my eyes on the valley and let her feel that I am listening without making the listening about me.
“My father became someone else after our mother died. The someone else he became sold Katya. My second oldest sister.” Her voice is flat.
The flatness is not detachment. It’s the specific tone of a person who has told themselves a story so many times that the telling has worn smooth.
“That was fourteen months ago. I haven't seen her since.” A pause. “I don't know if she's alive.”
The last sentence costs her something. I can hear it in the fraction of a second before she says it, the breath she takes to steady herself.
“She's alive,” I say.
Gala turns to look at me. Fast, sharp, those gray eyes cutting.
“How do you know?”
“Because I started looking,” I tell her. “Donatello has a contact in Warsaw with eyes on a location by tonight.”
The silence that follows is not the wary silence she’s been keeping since London. It is a different kind—denser, more fragile. The silence of someone receiving information they didn’t allow themselves to want, because wanting it was too dangerous.
Her throat works.
“You were looking for her before I said anything,” she says. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The honest answer is in the twelve-page report on my father's desk, and in the sound of my own hands shaking over it, and in the specific quality of the fury that has been burning in my chest since I read the word currently regarding Irina still at the farm.
The honest answer is that she walked off that auction stage trembling and defiant, and something in me recognized something I cannot yet name.
I look at her for a moment.
“Because someone should have stopped this long before now,” I respond.
Her eyes hold mine. Something passes through them—a wave of something vast and unguarded.
The thing she has been locking away since the van and the stage and the penthouse and the flight, the thing that Paolina's kindness and Gemma's warmth and Cosima's rabbit have been quietly working at for twenty-four hours.
It arrives all at once, and it hits her like the Sicilian heat hit her at the bottom of those stairs.
She doesn’t cry loudly. The tears arrive without sound, tracking down those pale cheekbones, and she doesn't raise her hands to stop them because her hands are gripping the edge of the wall. She’s holding on.
I don’t reach for her. I sit still and let her have it. All of it, every tear, the van and the stage and the eight years of carrying this alone have owed her. Because she’s earned it, and because the one thing I will not do is make this about me.
When the wave passes, she takes a breath. Both hands press flat against her face for a moment, then drop. Her spine returns to vertical. Her chin lifts.
Composed again. Armor back in place. But the armor is different now—less brittle. As though something inside it has shifted to make room for the fact she’s not carrying this alone anymore.
I reach into my jacket and produce a handkerchief—linen, with my initials, which she finds as absurd as I expected her to. Her eyes flick to it, then to my face and back. This time the corner of her mouth moves for longer than a second.
“Of course you carry a handkerchief,” she smirks.
“I’m Sicilian,” I say. “We're prepared.”
She takes it. Presses it briefly to her face. Returns it with the precise care of someone raised to handle other people's things carefully, because replacing them was never possible. I put it back in my pocket without comment.
We sit for a while in the amber light, looking at the valley.
Below, the citrus groves step down the hillside toward the flat plain and the distant glimmer of the sea.
The air smells of lemons and warm stone.
The evening comes in slow and golden, the way Sicilian evenings do—as if the day is not ending so much as deepening.
“Your other sisters,” I say eventually. “Irina. Syuzanna. Tasha.”
Her jaw tightens.
“Still at the farm,” she tells me. “Irina stayed because she had nowhere to go. Because our father—”
She stops. The accent thickens. She’s deciding how much to tell me, measuring the risk of it, and I do not push.
She tells me enough. Not everything. The surface of it. The shape. Enough for me to understand what the farm is and what it costs, and what needs to happen.
My hands are still in my lap.
He dies. That’s already decided. The only question is when and how, and who gets to do it.
And I already know the answer to who.
“We’ll get them out," I say. “All of them. Irina. Syuzanna. Tasha. The children. Katya too. We find her in Warsaw, and we bring her here.” I hold her gaze. “This is not a maybe, Gala. This is a plan.”
She looks at me for a long time.
The light is going now. The amber deepening toward rose. Her face in this light is the most complicated, beautiful thing I have ever looked at. The survivor's wariness, and the underneath of it, the woman who drew stars on test pages in her head and waited eight years for the world to be different.
“Why?” she asks again. The same question. Quieter this time.
This time I don't answer with a line about what should have been stopped. I look at her for one moment longer than is strictly professional.
“Because you are mine to protect,” I say. “Even if you don't know it yet.”
The words land between us, and she doesn’t flinch from them the way I expected. She looks at them—considers them with those filing, measuring, survival-trained eyes. Something settles in her face that’s not agreement but isn’t rejection either.
The villa lights come on behind us, warm gold spilling from the windows.
Somewhere inside, Cosima is announcing something loudly to Paolina, and Donatello's voice follows—patient, amused, the bass note of a man who has entirely rearranged his life around two people and found the arrangement suits him.
From the kitchen comes the smell of whatever Gemma is making for dinner, something with herbs from the garden and the olive oil pressed from the trees at the compound's edge.
Gala turns back to the darkening valley. She doesn’t tell me I’m wrong.
Good enough. For now, good enough.
I stand. Button my jacket. Look down at her—barefoot on the warm stone wall, the light leaving her hair.
“Dinner is at eight,” I say. “You’ll offend Gemma if you're not there.”
“Would I actually offend Gemma, or would she just want me to think she is?”
“Both,” I say. “Simultaneously. She's very skilled.”
This time the corner of her mouth moves and stays. Small. Private. Real.
I walk back inside before I do something inadvisable. Behind me the Sicilian evening finishes arriving, and the stars begin.