Chapter 4 #2
“I remember,” I say, because the operation ended with three Russians in a river and a crate of very pretty Glocks no longer belonging to Moscow. “Tell him it’s personal. Tell him if he brings me a trail I can put my boots on, I’ll buy him a new server farm and a summer house to hide it in.”
Marcello is already typing. “He’ll do it for the sport, fratello . But he’ll take the house.”
Faustino hands me a second drink. I set it down untouched.
The floor hums a little under our feet—music, sex, money, a thousand appetites fed like lions in the basement.
I want none of it. I want one woman. The surprise hits my ribs like a palm.
I’ve wanted thousands of bodies. I’ve taken hundreds .
Desire used to be simple: pick, hunt, own for a night, leave before dawn turns the edges soft.
This is not that. This is me standing in a room full of every vice I could pay to taste and aching for a stubborn Sicilian girl with lemon blossoms in her hair and a spine that wouldn’t fold even when I pressed my weight on it.
Faustino sees it in my face and doesn’t flinch. “She’ll be afraid,” he says, pragmatic as a blade.
“Maybe ashamed, because society teaches women to carry shame that belongs to men. She’ll choose places where eyes slide off her.”
“Good,” I say, and mean it. “If the eyes slide off, they won’t catch her until I do.”
Marcello’s phone buzzes. He glances, mouth curving. “Rafe says he’s already in the municipal feeds and three private networks near the church. He also says you look like shit when you’re in love.”
I bare my teeth. “I look like a man who had his woman in his bed and then found air.”
“You’ll have her back,” Faustino says simply. He lifts his chin at the door. “And there’s a rat scratching.”
A knock that isn’t a knock. The kind that belongs to someone who mistakes familiarity for safety.
“ Entra ,” Marcello calls, amusement threaded through the syllables like wire.
Aldo steps in. Smarmy in a suit. He wears a tux again tonight, no blood on it this time, face still faintly marked from the backhand I laid on him in the warehouse. The skin there probably sings when he shaves .
I hope it burns.
“Boss,” he says, trying to pitch his tone to loyalty and landing on obsequious. “You wanted me?”
I turn toward him and let silence spread, a red carpet laced with razors. Then I say, “Tell me where your bride is.”
His mouth does something I don’t like—a curl he thinks he hides and doesn’t.
“My bride?” He almost laughs and swallows it at the last second when he recognizes his own stupidity.
“I haven’t seen Paolina since—” He stops again.
Good choice. The words since I was inside her best friend in the confessional wouldn’t do anything but get him hurt fast.
“You haven’t seen her since you failed to keep her,” I say. “Where is she?”
“I don’t?—”
“Stop,” I tell him, voice flat. “Lie again, and I take things you value.”
He blanches. Men like Aldo don’t value truth, but they do value their tongues, their hands, the parts of themselves that make them dangerous and make women glance twice.
He closes his mouth. Opens it. Shuts it again.
Then throws his father-in-law under the bus because cowards always need someone to land on.
“Corsetti told me to stand down,” he blurts. “Said it was famiglia business if she ran. Said they’d find her, and I wasn’t to show my face at the church again today.”
I step close enough to smell his cologne—expensive, anise bitter, the kind boys wear to feel like men. “And did he?”
“To my knowledge?” He tries for insolence and reaches petulance. “No. She—She humiliated us. She’ll come crawling back when she realizes what leaving means.”
“She won’t crawl.” My hand closes around his tie and brings him forward until his shoes lift just enough to make his calves shudder. “But you might.”
His eyes go wide. His hands stay down. He knows better than to reach for me. A muscle twitches high on his cheekbone. “With respect, signore , I had nothing to do with?—”
“With my woman running?” I suggest. “You had everything to do with it. You taught her exactly what she didn’t want. I should thank you.” I release him with a flick that almost makes him fall.
He catches the desk with a palm, breath flaring. His gaze skitters to Marcello, then to Faustino, hunting for an ally and finding wolves who eat weaker wolves for fun. He doesn’t dare question my possessive claim of his fiancée. Punk.
Marcello smiles like a winter day. “You’ll go back to the warehouse, Aldo,” he says, conversational.
“You’ll supervise the new intake, and you’ll pretend you don’t know why your access levels changed.
If you fart out of line, the system notifies me, and my brother will practice a new kind of surgery. ”
“I— ”
“Say sì, Capo, ” I advise.
He swallows it whole. “ Sì, Capo. ”
“ Fuori, ” I add, and he’s smart enough to obey.
The door closes. I roll my shoulders once, easing tension out of muscles that would prefer to break things. Faustino pours a drink he knows I won’t take and leaves it, anyway.
“I want every ferry manifest in the next hour,” I say, picking up the hunt again because the only cure for wanting is motion. “Every rental car lot flagged for a woman paying cash and not giving a surname. Every shop where a bride might ask for scissors.”
“ Subito, ” Marcello says, already sending the order to soldiers who deal in paper and pixels instead of knives.
“Rafe’s building a live board. He’s overlaying shop grids with our camera maps and the church’s fallout radius.
He just pinged a cash-only thrift on Via Etnea that sold denim and a black tee twenty minutes after your timestamp.
Baggy sizes. The clerk says the woman wore her hair up and paid with crisp euros.
She left in a baseball cap and sunglasses with a plastic grocery bag, your duffle, and—” He pauses, reading.
Then he grins. “She asked for a pair of scissors and a garbage bag.”
My chest loosens a notch I didn’t know had cinched tighter. “That’s her,” I say, certainty like a lock clicking. “She cut the dress. Bagged what remained. Shed the skin.”
“Camera outside the thrift is down,” Marcello adds, annoyed. “Rafe’s cross-checking neighboring cams. ”
“Taxi ranks,” Faustino says thoughtfully. “She wouldn’t walk far in new shoes. She’d want out fast before anyone saw and recognized her.”
“Or she stole a scooter,” I say, and can’t help the flash of a smile because Paolina on a stolen Vespa wearing a baseball cap and defiance is a picture that shouldn’t make me hard but does. “If she did, I’ll buy her three more.”
Faustino’s phone, quiet until now, buzzes once against the bar. He listens, grunts, and hangs up. “Two of ours at the port say a nun bought two bottles of water from La Sirena then walked toward the bus terminus.”
I laugh low. “The bartender saw her too.”
“Everyone sees nuns,” Marcello says. “No one looks.”
“She doesn’t have a passport,” Faustino points out. “If she heads for the airport, we'll catch her in the lobby. If she heads for Stazione Centrale , she disappears on a bus to Palermo or Messina.”
“She won’t go far,” I say, and feel it in my bones like weather.
“Not yet. She’ll want distance before decisions.
Pick a cheap room with a lock first. Buy a toothbrush.
Take a shower so hot she tries to scald the feel of me off her skin and fails.
She’ll sit on a thin mattress with her hands on her knees and breathe until she stops shaking.
Then she’ll sleep like a child who ran until she fell. ”
“Like a woman who ran from wolves and found a cave,” Marcello says, eyes gone not soft but knowing. He’s hunted more than I have. He respects prey that survives .
“I am not her wolf,” I say. “I am the only safe place she’ll ever have.”
Faustino nods once. “Then we bring her home.”
Not to the compound but to my private sanctuary.
The island waits, glittering under a sky so blue it hurts.
A villa with a courtyard where bougainvillea climbs and a bedroom terrace set with a low bed draped in gauze the breeze can lift.
A helipad hums at the far edge, boats shoulder the dock, the sea changes color with the hour.
I built that place to be unreachable. Now I imagine her walking those halls barefoot, hair loose down her back, hand on her belly when she thinks no one watches.
I imagine worship conducted properly—on my knees, on silk, with patience and teeth.
The desk phone trills, a shrill note that has no place in a room like this. Marcello picks it up, says nothing, listens, then slides the handset to loudspeaker.
Rafe’s voice comes through tinned and pleased.
“Got your girl’s cap on camera crossing into Via Pacini ,” he announces.
“Face half turned, but the timestamp is eight minutes after the thrift. She cut through the market, bought a cheap canvas duffel, and disappeared into Vicolo degli Angeli —most cameras blind there. But she emerges three minutes later in trainers, not pumps. Baseball cap, sunglasses, black tee, denim. Dress is gone. She heads south. Loses herself in the Viale della Libertà flow.”
“Bus terminus?” Faustino asks.
“Negative. She stops at Hotel Mirto . Three-star, cash friendly. No bags when she arrives—just the grocery sack. Ten minutes later, a maid exits with a black garbage bag knotted tight and tosses it in the alley dumpster. Want me to pull it?”
“I already am,” I say, and look at my brother. “Who’s closest?”
“Leone,” Marcello answers immediately. “He and Bruno are two blocks off. They’ll knock on the side door and ask for the manager like gentlemen.”