Chapter 9
Gala
The operations room smells of espresso and the particular charged air of men who are very good at dangerous things and are in the process of planning one.
Maps cover the long table—satellite images of the Perm Krai region printed on heavy paper, Warsaw street grids with handwritten annotations in Faustino's precise script, photographs of the farm that I have not looked at directly yet because I am not ready and I know it and I file that knowledge and keep my eyes on the men instead.
Marcello is at the head of the table. He has a quality in rooms like this that he doesn't quite have anywhere else—a completeness, like a weapon taken off a shelf and is now being used for its actual purpose.
The baby face sharpens. The mink brown eyes go still differently, not the watchful stillness of a man in a garden at dusk but the operational stillness of a man for whom this room is his most natural environment.
He uses his hands when he talks, quick illustrative gestures as he speaks rapid Italian to Faustino and Donatello, and watching him I understand for the first time what the baby face actually is—misdirection.
The face that makes rooms underestimate him while the hands and the mind and the absolute unhurried certainty of him are already three moves ahead.
Last night was not a mistake. Whatever it complicates, it was not a mistake.
He held me until the stone walls went pale. He didn’t make it smaller than it was. Nor did he make it about himself. He simply stayed, and in staying said everything he has not yet said out loud.
Faustino sees me in the doorway and tips his head toward the chair at Marcello's right. Not the chair at the far end, but the observer's position. The chair at his right hand—the seat that means you’re part of this, not an object of it. I cross the room and sit in it and Donatello, who’s leaning over the Warsaw street grid with a red pen, glances at me with those dark Romano eyes and gives me a look that contains approximately eight separate observations about the current state of affairs, none of which he voices because Donatello Romano is constitutionally incapable of saying anything that doesn't need to be said.
Marcello glances at me. One look, brief—his eyes doing what they always do, encompassing, accounting, checking whether I’m all right without asking out loud because asking out loud would make it a thing and making it a thing would compromise the operational efficiency of the next two hours.
Something in them warms by one degree, and then he returns to the map.
“Good morning,” he says, in Italian, deliberately, without looking up from the satellite image of the Perm Krai region.
“Buongiorno,” I say back. My accent is better than it was two weeks ago. His mouth moves at the corner.
Faustino clears his throat. The briefing begins.
Two operations. Simultaneous. That’s the structure of it. As Faustino lays it out, I follow every piece with the attention of someone who’s been planning a version of this since she was fourteen years old standing outside a bedroom door in the dark.
Warsaw: retrieval of Katya from the Bratva-adjacent safe house on the Praga side of the river.
Donatello leads a four-man team. Entry at 2 a.m. local time, when the building will be at minimum occupancy and the guards most likely to be at their least alert.
The goal is extraction with minimum engagement—though engagement is anticipated, and Donatello's equipped his team for it the way he always equipped it, comprehensively.
Faustino traces the Warsaw street grid with one finger, showing the approach routes.
The safe house is on a block with two exits—one to the main road, one to a service alley that connects to a parallel street where they’ll stage the extraction vehicles.
Simple in concept, meaning the variables are all in the execution, which means this is exactly the operation Donatello was built for.
Russia: simultaneous extraction of Irina, Syuzanna, Tasha, Borya, and Yeva from the farm.
Faustino leads that team himself—six men, vehicles standing by at a staging point eight kilometers from the property.
The farm is remote enough that the nearest neighbors are unlikely to be involved.
The window is the same 2 a.m. slot, which, accounting for time zones, runs parallel to the Warsaw operation within a margin of four minutes.
Four minutes is acceptable. Four minutes is nothing.
Then Faustino says, “The problem.”
He says it without emphasis, the way Faustino says everything—flat, factual, the information presented without theatrical framing. The problem is that the farm has one approach road, one lane wide, visible from the farmhouse kitchen window for three hundred meters.
A man named Borislav Zhukova who has spent four years in that farmhouse developing the particular hyper-vigilance of a man who has done things that require watching for consequences.
Unknown vehicles in the night, on that road, approaching that house—he will barricade.
He will drag the people inside to the most defensible position before Faustino's team can reach them, and the most defensible position is the interior rooms, and interior rooms complicate extraction.
Faustino does not say he will harm them.
He does not say it because saying it aloud in this room, with me sitting in the chair at Marcello's right hand, is unnecessary. Everyone in this room knows what Borislav Zhukova has been doing to the people in that farmhouse. The report was twelve pages long. They’ve all read it.
The room is quiet for three seconds.
“I'm ready to go,” I say.
My voice comes out steady. I’ve been preparing this sentence since they confirmed Warsaw.
Since the moment I saw Katya's blurred silhouette in the second-floor window and understood that the plan was real and moving and that my role in it was not optional, regardless of what anyone in this room preferred.
Marcello nods.
“You stay on comms at all times,” he says.
“You have a signal—three clicks—and if you give it, my men come through that door before he can breathe. Do not go inside. Do not go anywhere on that property without my men in position first. You say what you need to say at the door, you step back, and you let the team work.”
I nod.
He looks at me for another moment. Something in his face is doing what it does when he’s containing something he would prefer to act on but has decided—correctly, rationally—not to act on.
The something is unmistakable now that I know what his face looks like without the management.
Worry. Specific, personal, directed at me.
He’s worried about me walking back to a pig farm in Russia. Marcello Lucchese, who has never in his adult life displayed fear for himself, who walked into a Mayfair auction room and lifted me off a stage with the calm certainty of a man rearranging furniture, is worried about me.
I file this. Hold it carefully. I don’t let it show on my face because showing it will make this harder for both of us, and we have work to do.
“Good,” he says and turns back to the map.
Good. One word. What it contains acceptance, reluctance, respect, and the particular quality of a man who has decided protecting someone sometimes means trusting them to protect themselves.
I know, I think. I know what that cost you. Thank you.
The briefing continues for another hour.
Routes, timing, communication protocols, extraction vehicle positions, medical assets staged at the Catania airport for Katya's arrival.
Faustino has thought of everything, which is his function and his nature.
The man whose name means lucky is the least lucky person in any room because he plans for every contingency so luck doesn't have to show up.
I contribute what I know: the farm's layout from memory, the positions of the outbuildings, the fact Borislav sleeps in the back bedroom and will take at minimum forty-five seconds to reach the front door from a standing start.
Faustino makes notes.
Donatello marks the approach positions on the satellite image.
Marcello listens to everything I say without interrupting. When I’m done, he looks at Faustino.
“She knows this property better than the satellite,” he says. “Adjust the positions accordingly.”
Faustino nods and adjusts.
He deferred to my intelligence. In his own operations room, in front of his men, he adjusted the plan based on what I know. He did not check with Donatello or look for confirmation. He simply accepted it.
I’ve been in this room for ninety minutes, and I feel more like myself than I have since the van.
Paolina finds me in the garden afterward.
She appears around the corner of the east wing with Cosima and reads my demeanor—my face, the set of my shoulders, the particular quality of the afternoon light on a woman who has just agreed to walk back into a place she escaped—and she sits beside me on the stone wall and says nothing for a full minute.
The minute is a gift. I use it.
Then she says, “I need to tell you something about the night Donatello brought me to his private island. About what it cost me to decide to trust him, and what I found when I did.”
She talks for a while, there in the lemon-tree light—about what it is to be taken by a man you had no reason to trust, and what it costs to decide to trust him anyway, and the specific terror of finding that the decision was correct.
About the night she discovered she was pregnant, and the night Cosima was born, and the morning she woke up on the private island and understood that the life she was building there was actually, genuinely hers. Not a comfortable cage. Hers.
She talks the way she talks about everything—with the frankness of a woman who has survived something and sees no reason to make it prettier than it was. I listen the way I have learned to listen in this villa—completely, without planning my response.
Then she says, “Whatever you need to do on that farm, I understand. I won't ask what it is. But I understand.”
She does not ask. She already knows.
She knows because she looked at Donatello the same way I look at Marcello—with the particular mixture of clarity and terrified hope of a woman who has found something real in an impossible place and is still not entirely sure she may keep it.
I may keep it. I decided this in the gym at midnight and deciding it again here, in the lemon-tree light, with Paolina beside me.
That evening at dinner I watch the table the way I always watch it now—not for threats, not for exits, but for the texture of it, the warmth, the way this collection of people has arranged itself into something that functions like a family even though it assembled itself from loyalty and history and the particular stubbornness of people who refused to let the worst things be the final things.
Gemma tells a story about something that happened in Catania that afternoon that involves a fish market and a misunderstanding about directions and escalates rapidly into something involving a Vespa that I do not follow entirely because my Italian is still catching up but that makes Donatello laugh—a real laugh, deep and short and slightly surprised, the laugh of a man who does not laugh often and forgets to manage the sound when he does.
Paolina catches my eye across the table. She raises her wine glass a fraction of an inch.
Marcello refills mine. He does it without looking at me, mid-conversation with Faustino about something operational, his hand finding my glass and filling it by instinct the way I imagine he has filled the same glass in the same way every night for years, except that my glass has only been at this table for three weeks and he has already learned where it sits.
I love him.
I will not tell him yet. Not until the farm is done and my sisters are safe and Borislav Zhukova is dead in his own barn.
Because if Marcello knows I love him before this operation, he’ll fold the knowledge into his risk calculations in a way that will cost him something I don't want to cost him—the clarity he needs to run this cleanly. He’ll think about me instead of the mission, and the mission requires his full attention.
After. Everything honest, after.
He glances at me. His eyes find mine for one second—a check, a confirmation, the private language we’ve been building since London. I hold his gaze for the count of it and give him what I’ve learned he reads in my face as I am all right, here, with you.
He looks back at Faustino. The conversation continues.
I eat everything on my plate. Every last bite. No rationing. No saving for later. All of it, here, now, at this table, with these people, in this life that I chose and will keep choosing every morning I wake up in it.