Chapter 13
One Month Later
Gala
The villa differs from a month ago—the heat has thinned, the lemon trees heavy with fruit that Cosima has appointed herself the guardian of, permitting harvesting only on a schedule she alone has determined.
The compound has settled into a shape that makes room for everyone in it.
My family settled in a villa near the east section—Irina with Borya and Yeva in one wing, Syuzanna in another room with a window seat and her first-ever stack of books, Tasha in her library corner with the notebooks she’s begun filling, slowly, with words.
Words. My sister is writing words.
Katya came out of the medical wing ten days ago.
She came out quietly, the way she moves through everything now—testing each floor as though checking whether it will hold.
Gemma was there, and Paolina was there, and I was there, and we did not make a ceremony of it, and we did not ask her to be further along than she was.
She sat in the garden that first afternoon and looked at the lemon trees for a long time without speaking, and Cosima came and sat beside her in complete companionable silence, and after a while Katya put her arm around Cosima who did not move and that was that.
She’s healing. Not the way she was before. Before is gone. But she’s healing into a new shape, and the new shape has room in it for sitting in a Sicilian garden with a child and lemon trees and silence that is not afraid.
I wake early, as I always do now—not from vigilance, but from habit that is slowly becoming preference.
The habit of being awake when the light first comes, of having the first hour of the day before anyone else needs anything.
I learned this habit on the farm, where the first hour was the only safe one.
Here the safety persists past the first hour and into the second, and the third, and the entire day.
But I keep the early waking because it has become mine.
Marcello sleeps.
I watch him—the baby face at rest, the hands open, the particular stillness of a man whose waking hours are all motion and attention and forward momentum.
He looks like someone's younger brother.
He looks exactly like what he is underneath all of it.
The youngest of the four brothers. The one who learned early that he had to hit harder and move faster and be more certain than anyone else in the room.
Then he carried that into adulthood and turned it into a weapon.
Also, quietly, into the way he holds me when the nightmares come.
They still come. Less often. He has never once made it about him when they do—never asks what they were, never offers solutions. He simply holds on.
I will keep waking early in this house for the rest of my life. I will not always know what to do with the silence and the safety, but I will learn.
We will learn together.
The pendant rests warm against my throat. I touch it in the mornings before I get up, a habit formed in the second week without my noticing—the way you touch something when you are checking it’s real. The plumeria and the dagger. Order and love, and the capacity for both at once.
Gemma touched hers the same way the morning I noticed, and caught me watching, and raised her coffee cup without a word.
The kitchen is full by eight. This is the rhythm of the house now—Irina and Gemma have become a collaboration in the kitchen that neither of them planned and both of them take seriously, comparing methods across the language gap with the focused pragmatism of women who understand that feeding people is a form of love.
This morning Irina is laughing at something Gemma has done to a batch of dough. The sound of it is still doing something to my chest—still landing the way it did the first time, like a door opening in a wall.
Tasha appears in the kitchen doorway. She has her notebook under her arm, and her eyes go to me first, the way they always do. I meet them and nod. She crosses the kitchen to the table, sits down, and opens the notebook. She begins to write.
A word. Then another. The pen moves carefully, as though she is relearning the connection between thought and language and is choosing not to rush it.
I bring her tea. She looks up when I set it in front of her, and her mouth moves—not quite a smile yet, but the form of one, the muscles learning the shape.
There you are, Tasha. There you are.
Donatello and Paolina are leaving tomorrow. Their island calls them back—Donatello has operations to run from it, and Paolina has her own life there, the life she’s built from a private island and a devoted man and a daughter who names fish. Before she goes, she finds me in the garden.
She doesn't say much. She looks at the pendant, at my face, at the villa behind me with all its noise and life. Then she says, “I’m glad Marcello asked Donatello to call me.”
“I am too,” I say with a bright smile.
She hugs me properly—moss green eyes warm and raven hair falling forward. She holds on with the sincerity of someone who’s decided you’re family and means the implications of that word. I hold on back.
When Donatello and Marcello say goodbye, they do it in the courtyard in Italian too fast for me to follow, with the hand-clasp and the weight of thirty years of brotherhood in it.
Then Donatello looks at me over Marcello's shoulder and gives me a single nod that contains approximately thirty observations about the state of affairs, all of them approving.
Faustino, who’s staying—Faustino is always staying, Faustino is as permanent a feature of this compound as the olive trees—watches the departure from the gate with one raised eyebrow and says nothing.
These men, I think. I’m surrounded by these men, and I am not afraid of a single one of them.
My mother would have liked Faustino. He is exactly the kind of man she would have assigned the most gold stars to.
The lesson starts at four o'clock.
Tasha's idea. She brought me the notebook three days ago, open to a page where she had written in careful block letters: TEACH ME, underlined twice.
So I teach her.
The way our mother taught me—reading comprehension, then English vocabulary, then mathematics, then history. I use the same progression, the same patience, the same gold stars drawn in the margins when she gets something right. I bought the gold star stickers in Catania.
Tasha looked at the first one for a long time before she put the notebook down and pressed both hands to her face and breathed.
Today we’re outside on the low garden wall, the light warm on our shoulders, the notebooks spread between us. Borya and Yeva play in the grass below, narrated by Cosima, who provides a running commentary on everything they do in Italian they don't speak yet and considers this educational.
Tasha works through a reading exercise. Her mouth moves slightly with the words—she’s reading silently. But the muscle memory of sound is returning. I can see it. The way the lips shape the syllables even when the voice doesn't come.
The exercise ends. She looks up.
I draw a gold star in the margin. Large. Deliberate.
She looks at the star. Then she looks up at the villa behind us, at the stone walls and the lemon trees and the valley beyond and the distant sea, and her face does the thing it has been slowly, carefully, incrementally doing for a month. It opens.
She reaches up and touches the pendant at my throat. Her fingers trace the plumeria, the dagger.
Then she looks at me. And she says, in a voice that is still finding its shape, rough with disuse but entirely certain, “Home.”
I look up, and Marcello is at the garden gate.
He came quietly—I didn't hear him, but Tasha did, I think, because her eyes went to the gate a moment before I looked.
He’s standing with one hand on the gatepost, dark suit jacket gone, white shirtsleeves rolled, and he’s looking at us the way he looked at me coming off the stairs in Sicily on the first day—registering something he intends to remember.
The lesson. The gold star. Tasha's hand on my pendant. The word she just said.
He heard it. I can see it in his face—the thing that happens when Marcello Lucchese is moved and does not move away from it. Face open. The eyes that miss nothing, full.
He stays at the gate, doesn’t come in and interrupt the lesson, and he does not walk away. He stays where he is and watches.
The evening comes down around all of us—the children in the grass, Tasha with her notebook and her new word, the pendant warm at my throat—and he stays.
Tasha writes something in her notebook and holds it up for me to see. One word, the letters careful and deliberate and underlined, GOLD STAR.
I laugh.
It’s not an almost-laugh. Not a quiet one.
It fills the garden and startles the birds from the lemon trees and Borya and Cosima look up and Yeva, who’s been watching the birds with intense concentration, loses her balance and sits down hard in the grass and is immediately fine and outraged about it simultaneously.
From the gate, in Italian, Marcello says something to Faustino that I catch because my Italian has been getting better: something about the birds, and the laugh, and a word I had to look up the first time I heard it—casa. Home.
Home.
Yes.
This is what home sounds like.
Thank you for reading Taken by the Capo!