Chapter 7
Gala
Dawn arrives in Sicily differently than anywhere else I’ve been, which is nowhere and everywhere now.
The light comes in pale gold before it warms. The birds begin before the light.
By the time the sun clears the ridge behind the villa, the air already smells of the lemon trees and the dew on the stone walls and something else underneath, something ancient that has no name in Russian or in the English my mother taught me.
I’ve been awake for an hour. Not from fear—that is the first thing I notice. I woke because I’m not accustomed to silence, to the particular quality of a house where no one is coming through a door with harmful intent. My body doesn't know what to do with safe. It keeps checking.
Learn. Adapt. This is what survival looks like now—adjusting to the absence of danger as quickly as you adjusted to its presence.
The room they've given me is on the east side of the villa—my choice, I discovered, when Gemma showed me three options last night and simply waited while I walked through each doorway and assessed each window.
She didn't ask why I needed to assess the windows.
She just waited. The east room has two exits, a view of the courtyard, and a bathroom with a lock.
I chose it in under a minute, and Gemma said only, Good light in the mornings.
She was right. The light is extraordinary.
I’m in the library when I hear him. Not footsteps—a presence, the shift in the air's quality that I’ve been cataloguing for a week now without meaning to.
The specific atmospheric change that announces Marcello Lucchese before I see him.
I don’t look up from the Italian grammar book immediately.
I make myself finish the sentence I was tracing with my finger: il verbo essere, the verb to be. To exist. To be present in a place.
Appropriate.
He leans in the doorway.
I can feel it. The weight of his attention, which differs from other men's attention in a way I have been trying to quantify since London. Other men's attention lands on you. His attention encompasses you. The way a room encompasses furniture. Ss though you’re a thing he’s already accounted for in the architecture of his thinking and is now simply checking against reality.
I look up.
He’s in a white shirt this morning, sleeves already rolled to the elbow, the expensive watch at his wrist catching the early light.
Dark hair, still damp from a shower. Clean-shaven, the baby face that the Mayfair room underestimated until the SUVs appeared at the side exit.
Those mink brown eyes find mine and settle there with the comfort of something that has found its preferred location.
Stop noticing the details. You’re gathering intelligence, not making an inventory of a man you—
Stop.
He pushes off the doorframe and comes to sit beside me on the reading bench without asking, the way he enters all spaces—as though the question of permission has already been answered.
He leans forward and looks at the open page.
His shoulder is an inch from mine. The space between us is warmer than the rest of the room.
“Il verbo essere,” he says. His Italian is silk over stone—effortless, native, the accent of a man for whom this language is but breathed, not learned. He taps the page. “You're pronouncing the e too closed. In Sicilian Italian it opens more.” He says it, “Essere.” Then waits.
I repeat it.
His mouth moves—a slight correction at the corner, showing me the shape of the vowel without making it a lesson. I say it again. He nods.
His mouth is—
The verb. Focus on the verb.
“Why Italian?” he asks.
“Because I'm here,” I say. “If I'm going to be here, I should understand it.”
He’s quiet for a moment. The morning light moves across the spines of the books on the shelves—old ones, some of them, the kind that get passed down rather than purchased. A family's reading life, accumulated across generations. My mother would have stood in this room and been unable to leave it.
Mama. I will hang so many stars for you. I will teach your grandchildren the way you taught me, and I will draw stars on every page.
The thought arrives with the grief attached, the way it always does—sudden and whole, a wave I can either drown in or ride. I ride it. I press my finger to the next word in the grammar book. Avere. To have.
Marcello watches me do this. He says nothing about what he sees on my face, and his not-saying-anything is so carefully chosen that it communicates more than speech would.
“Tell me about your family,” he says. And something in his voice differs from the first night in the garden—softer. Not the commanding patience of a man waiting for intelligence, but the genuine question of someone who wants to know.
I consider the risk of it. I’ve been considering the risk of everything since I arrived—every meal, every kindness, every unlocked door.
Paolina told me there are no conditions attached.
Gemma welcomed me before she knew my name.
Cosima offered me her rabbit. And Marcello, who could have taken everything from me on a London stage, gave me a locked door and a handkerchief and said, because someone should have stopped this.
He ordered the investigation before I told him anything. He was already looking for Katya.
I tell him about our mother. Not the performance of it, not the surface version I gave him in the garden—the real one.
Nina Sorokina, who married a pig farmer against her parents' wishes and brought her books with her and taught us to read in a farmhouse kitchen and hung gold stars on the wall.
Who made a feast of thin soup and called it rich.
Who loved our father until he gave her no choice but to stop.
Marcello listens. He doesn’t interrupt. Nor does he offer the reflexive reassurances that people use to manage their own discomfort with someone else's pain.
He simply listens, his forearms on his knees, his eyes on the middle distance, receiving everything I say with the full weight of his attention.
When I stop, the library is quiet.
Then, without planning it, without the cost-benefit analysis I have been running on every word since London, I tell him about Irina.
Not all of it. Enough. The shape of it. The terrible simple shape of what our father has been doing since our mother died, and the way Irina carries it, and the way we all carry it for her, and the way I have dreamed of ending it since I was fourteen years old lying awake in the room next door listening to the bedsprings.
My voice stays level. I’ve told myself this story so many times that the telling has worn grooves, smooth and passable. But my hands—I look down and find them gripped together in my lap, the knuckles pale.
A warm weight settles over them. His hand, covering both of mine, not gripping—just present. Covering. Still.
I look at his hand on mine, and something in my chest does something I will not name. His thumb moves once across my knuckles—one pass, deliberate, acknowledging—and then stays still.
“He dies,” Marcello says. Quiet. Certain. Not a question, not a threat, simply a fact being stated into the room. “When this is over. He dies.”
I lift my eyes to his.
His eyes are steady on mine, and what I see in them is not the cold professionalism of a man arranging the logistics of a problem.
It’s something much more personal. Something that looks, if I’m reading it correctly, like fury on my behalf.
Fury that has been sitting in him since before I told him any of this.
Marcello read the file. He already knew. He’s been carrying this fury for me since the report arrived, and he said nothing, just sat with me in the garden, and let me decide when to speak.
The wave arrives again. This time it is not grief. It’s something else. Something I have no Russian or English word for, something that lives in the space between relief and terror and the first fragile understanding that you are not alone.
The tears come before I can stop them. Not the silent ones from the shower or the garden—these shake me, just briefly, just once, before I pull them back.
His hand stays over mine. He doesn't move toward me, doesn't make it a rescue, just keeps his hand where it is and lets me feel what I feel without making it smaller.
When I’m done, I straighten.
His hand lifts from mine, allowing me back to myself.
He produces another handkerchief from his pocket.
I press it to my face. When I lower it, I find him watching me with that expression I’m still learning to read. The one that’s not possessive or calculating, or performing tenderness. But something underneath all of those, something quiet and specific and aimed entirely at me.
“Keep it,” he says, nodding at the handkerchief.
I almost laugh. The almost-laugh surprises me more than the tears did.
“I’ll return it laundered,” I say.
“I have thirty others,” he says.
“Of course you do.”
This time the almost-laugh becomes a real one—brief, quiet, escaping before I can contain it. It sounds strange in this room, in this life, in this version of me that has been composure and calculation for four years. It sounds like something I forgot I owned.
Marcello looks at me when I laugh. Just looks, the way he looked at me arriving in Sicily—like he’s registering a thing he intends to remember. The expression lasts three seconds, then he stands, rolls his sleeves down one precise turn.
“Donatello has the Warsaw confirmation,” he says. “Come.”
The confirmation is a photograph taken at a distance. A window on the second floor of a Warsaw building. In it, blurred but unmistakable to me—the particular tilt of a head, the line of a jaw, the light hair that matches mine—is Katya.
I press my fingers to the photograph and cannot speak for a moment.
Alive. Twenty-one months after the van took her from our yard in the snow, my sister Katya is alive in a second-floor room in Warsaw. I’m looking at proof of it in a Sicilian villa with a Lucchese capo standing three feet behind me.
Faustino is at the operations table—laptops, maps, files arranged with the precision of a man whose mind categorizes constantly.
He meets my eyes when I look up, and he gives me a single nod.
Donatello stands by the window, arms folded, and he gives me nothing.
But his jaw sets in the way I have learned means something has engaged the part of him that solves problems with his hands.
Marcello comes to stand beside me. Not behind, not opposite, but beside. His shoulder almost touching mine, looking at the same photograph, and his voice when he speaks is low and even and as certain as the stone walls of this villa.
“We bring her here. Both operations—Warsaw and the farm—run at the same time, so there's no warning sent ahead.” His eyes stay on the photograph. “I need your help on the farm, Gala. Your father won't open the door for my men. He will for you.”
I have been waiting for this—I knew it was coming. I’m the best intelligence asset for this operation, and I knew from the moment Faustino spread the maps that they would need me to be more than a woman in a guest room.
“Yes,” I say. Before he can qualify it, before he can soften the ask with reassurances I don't need. “Yes. I go. I open the door.”
He turns to look at me. Searching, the way he searched my face in the garden—looking for the fear underneath the yes, checking that the agreement is real and not performed.
Marcello finds the fear. He sees it. He also sees what is underneath it.
“Good,” he says simply.
Paolina appears in the doorway with Cosima on her hip and reads the room in one sweep—the photograph, my face, the set of the men's shoulders—and says nothing. She comes to stand beside me, and her free hand finds mine and squeezes once. Cosima holds out the rabbit.
With both hands, I take it, and for a moment, I think I have a plan. I have people beside me. I have a photograph of my sister alive in a window in Warsaw.
And I have something I have not had since I was eight years old, standing in the farmhouse kitchen watching my mother hang gold stars on the wall.
I have something that might be hope.
I hand the rabbit back to Cosima with the gravity it deserves. She nods. The operation begins.