Chapter 10
Donatello
I’m in position in the alley across from the safe house.
Four-story building, pre-war construction, the kind of thick-walled block that absorbs sound efficiently and designed with that specific utility in mind.
Two guards visible on the ground floor through the smoked glass of the entrance—not Bratva soldiers, hired muscle.
The security arrangement that suggests the Bratva want this location to be low-profile enough that their own men aren't standing outside it.
Two more on the second floor, confirmed by my contact who did the walk-by at midnight.
Minimal movement on the upper levels for the last ninety minutes.
He confirms what the building registration already suggested—the safe house is Sobol's operation, running under one of his Cyprus shell companies. The same network that ran the Mayfair auction. The same man whose name Faustino put on Marcello’s desk in London.
We’re dismantling Yuri Sobol's European circuit one location at a time, and he doesn’t yet know how much of it the Luccheses already own.
Good. Let him find out slowly. Slow discovery is more expensive than fast discovery.
A soldier is at my left, close enough that I can hear him breathe—slow and measured, the operational breathing of a man who’s been doing this since he was fifteen and his body has long since stopped treating danger as an exception.
His skullcap blocks the rain. His eyes focus on the second-floor window—the one where the contact confirmed the Bratva placed Katya.
The one that has shown a faint backlight for the last twenty minutes, which means someone is awake up there.
Marcello, Faustino, and Gala are on a flight to the Perm Krai region right now with six men, landing in Perm in forty minutes and driving two hours to the farm staging point.
I know this because Faustino sent a two-word message ninety minutes ago, on schedule.
That’s all I will hear from him until the operation is complete. Faustino does not narrate his work.
Two operations. One clock. Four minutes of acceptable variance between them.
I reach into my left breast pocket without looking down.
My fingers find what they're looking for and press it flat for two seconds, then release.
Cosima's photograph. I’ve done this before every operation since the night she was born—Catania and Palermo and London and twice in New York, always the same: two seconds, flat palm, release.
Two minutes, the soldier says. Low, Italian, barely a breath.
I check my Glocks. Both chambers full. Both safeties disengaged.
The weight of them is as familiar as my own hands.
I’ve been carrying these specific weapons since I was nineteen years old, and I know their balance the way I know my heartbeat, which is currently steady at approximately fifty-five beats per minute, which is where it goes before an operation.
Not slow—precise. My body has learned the difference between rest and readiness.
One minute.
The clock strikes 2 a.m.
We move.
The ground floor goes fast and clean. Both guards down in under twenty seconds, subdued rather than eliminated because low-profile matters, zip-tied and gagged in the service corridor before they process what's in the room with them. My men know how to do this.
First floor cleared. Second floor stairwell.
The hallway on the second floor is narrow and low-lit, with the fluorescent overhead flickering at one end. Three doors. The contact said the third. We move to it.
The soldier tries the handle. Locked. He looks at me. I nod.
The door comes off the frame in one movement—his shoulder, his weight, the particular application of force that sixteen years of MMA training makes look effortless. It is not effortless. It is the product of ten thousand hours of work compressed into a single instant.
The room is small and smells of confinement—damp, stale air, the specific human smell of people kept in a place too long with insufficient ventilation. Three women on cots along the far wall. Thin blankets. A single window, painted shut. A plastic chair. No other furniture.
This is where they kept her. For how long before Warsaw? How many rooms like this, in how many cities, since the van took her from a yard in Russia fourteen months ago.
We will dismantle every node of this network. This is not strategic. This is personal.
One woman is standing at the window. Back to us, hands pressed to the glass, the particular posture of someone who has been standing at windows for a long time, hoping for something different on the other side.
Ash blonde hair. Nearly waist-length. The particular tilt of the head—I recognize this head.
Katya.
She turns at the sound of the door coming off its frame.
Her face moves through three complete expressions in under two seconds.
First, the raw animal terror of someone who has learned that loud sounds in this room mean something bad—the flinch, the body coiling back, every survival instinct firing at once.
Then a freezing stillness, processing, reading the room—the men, the tactical gear, no one is moving toward her with intent.
Then the third thing, the one that undoes me slightly, a collapsing, a questioning.
The face of someone who has stopped allowing themselves to hope because hope costs too much and is now being asked, against every learned instinct, to hope anyway.
“Romano,” I say. “Tell her.”
My soldier steps forward and speaks in Russian, low and even, “Your sister Gala sent us. You're going home.”
Katya's legs collapse.
I’m across the room before she reaches the floor—reflexes catching her at the shoulders and holding her up with the same steadiness I apply to everything. Nothing spoken, explained, or reassured. I hold her upright and let her feel she’s held and wait.
She grips my forearm with both hands. Her knuckles go white.
There it is. That is the grip of a woman who has been falling for fourteen months and has just found something solid.
The other two women in the room sit up on their cots now, watching us with the wary calculation of people who have learned not to move too fast when things change. I look at them. I look at the soldier.
He gives me a single nod.
“All three,” I say. “We leave no one in this hellhole.”
We’re in the vehicles and moving inside eleven minutes of entry.
Eleven minutes from breaching the door to three women in SUVs headed for the airport, which is eighteen seconds slower than our operational target and acceptable given that two of the three women required physical support on the stairs.
The hired muscle in the service corridor was still zip-tied and conscious when we left, which means the Bratva will know about this within three hours. Three hours are sufficient. We’ll be in Sicilian airspace before they assemble a response.
Katya is in the car with me and the team medic.
He gave her a light sedative—not enough to disorient, enough to take the edge off the shaking that has not stopped since the room.
Four times she’s asked for Gala. The Russian coming out in fragments around the sedative's fog, and each time I’ve told the medic to tell her she's safe, she sent us, you'll see her by morning.
The medic tells her. She subsides each time. Then, after a few minutes, asks again.
I would answer that question a hundred times. I would fly to Warsaw a hundred times for the particular sound of a sister asking for her sister.
My phone goes off at 2:17 a.m. Warsaw time. Faustino.
The call lasts forty seconds. When it ends, I sit with the phone in my hand for a moment and look out at the Warsaw streets going past the window.
The old city, visible now as we move toward the airport, its rebuilt spires and its careful facades, the particular stubborn beauty of a place that was razed and rebuilt itself and went on.
Done. Both operations. Every name on the list. The farm secured, the family out, and Borislav Zhukova zip-tied to a post in a barn, waiting.
Waiting for Gala.