Chapter 16 Elio
ELIO
My phone lights up with Valente's name. I mutter a curse and pull my arm from under Violet's head, placing a small kiss on her temple and pulling the sheet up to cover her naked body.
It's not even six a.m and if he's calling at this time, things must be serious. I get out of bed, grabbing a shirt and slacks from the chair and pulling them on.
Valente is waiting outside the door already.
"What's going on?" I ask quietly, closing the door behind me.
He swallows, then meets my eyes. "It's one of the women we rescued."
I start walking toward the guest wing, motioning at him to follow me. Might as well deal with the problem in person.
Valente reaches out, touching my arm to stop me. I do so, reluctantly, already annoyed that he is making this longer than it should be. If I can resolve whatever situation has arisen in five minutes, I could be back in my bed with Violet in the next ten.
"It's the Italian one, who had trouble adjusting."
"The one Violet likes to spend time with?" Okay, fine. I can spare ten, maybe fifteen minutes for this one. Only because Violet likes her.
"Yes. She, um—"
Valente never minces his words.
"What is it?" I snap.
"She's dead."
Fuck. Violet will be devastated.
I take a deep breath and resume walking until Valente stops me in front of one of the doors. Most of the women have left already, back to their home countries, back to their families. Only a few remain, not ready to face the society just yet. Elena being one of them.
She refused the therapy we offered, or the plane ticket home.
There wasn't much we could do bar forcing her to deal with her PTSD, yet… I can't help but worry that Violet will think I should have tried harder.
Tried fucking harder… Goddamnit, I've already allowed strangers into my sanctuary, and all for her. Because she asked me to make sure they were okay.
I failed her.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
The door to Elena's room is open. Sicilian morning light pouring through the corridor windows. It has no business illuminating a dead woman's doorway. But light doesn't know that. It just falls where it falls.
I used to be like that.
The medical team I've hired to live on site while the women are here has already cut her down. Elena is on the bed, positioned with the careful dignity of professionals who arrived too late and still believe in procedure.
The knotted bedsheet is on the floor. Already bagged.
There's no note, she didn't leave one. I check everywhere. The nightstand. The writing desk. Nothing. Maybe she had nothing left to say to a world that took everything from her and then offered her a beautiful room as compensation.
I saved her. Pulled her from that compound. Gave her clean sheets and doctors and food…
And she used my clean sheets to hang herself.
Fuck this.
My fists curl at my sides. The fury is wrong. Directionless. No throat to put my hands around. No face to hit. She is the enemy and the victim and both are already gone.
"Cover her," I tell the medics. "Get Dr. Ferretti on the phone. She'll need to be moved out of here as soon as possible. The Syndicate will need a report too, they'll have to decide how to deal with this," I say, already walking out.
The morning light follows me down the corridor and I want to put my fist through every window it touches.
I can't go to Violet, if I go to her, I'll have to tell her and that will break her heart.
I need to think, and there's one place I can do it, without the entire world interrupting me. I go straight to my study, closing the door behind me and drawing the blind, shutting the rest of the estate out.
This room has clean lines and dark wood and problems I know how to solve, which is more than I can say for the dead woman in the guest wing and the living one in my bed who doesn't know yet.
I pour a whiskey. Put it on the desk. I won't drink it, not this early in the morning, but having it there makes me feel like I have one thing in this room I control. Pathetic. But there it is.
I should call Gio. He's been chasing leads from the compound for weeks now, working through the documents we recovered, cross-referencing the names we pulled from Lombardi and Bianchi, trying to trace the operation back to whoever was actually running it.
The American. The one every survivor mentioned and nobody could describe beyond "educated, mid-thirties, American accent.
" A ghost with an accent and an operation that spanned three countries.
The phone is in my hand before I can even consider if Gio is awake yet.
He answers on the first ring, which tells me he's been waiting for this call. He doesn't hover by his phone unless he's sitting on something.
"Tell me you have good news," I say. "I've had a shit morning."
"Depends on your definition." He pauses. That's not like him. Gio reports clean and fast, so when he pauses, something's complicated. "I found one of the survivors. A woman who escaped the compound."
That gets my attention. "Who."
"An exchange student from Spain. Her name is Maria Perez, she was enrolled at the University of Catania before they took her. She was inside that compound for about three weeks and managed to get out the same day they brought Violet in."
"How the hell did she escape?"
"Still working that out. But she's been running ever since.
Used her own name in Catania, which was stupid, then got smarter.
Moved to Syracuse under a friend's passport.
Then Messina under a completely fabricated identity.
She's been working in a cafe off Via dei Verdi for the past two weeks, calling herself Ana Herrera. "
"And you found her how?"
"Credit card fragment from the Catania hostel she forgot to scrub, matched to a train ticket purchase in Syracuse, matched to a hostel registration in Messina she filled out wrong. She's smart enough to run but not smart enough to cover every trail."
Smart girl. The kind of scared that keeps you moving, keeps you alive. Unlike the kind that makes you knot a bedsheet.
"I need to talk to her," I say. "She was inside that compound. She might know things the others couldn't tell us. She might know who the American is."
"That's what I was thinking." Another pause. "But there's something else, and this one I don't have an answer for yet."
"Go on."
"While I was going through the compound's communication logs, the ones we pulled from that office during the raid, I found an anomaly. An outbound signal that doesn't match any of the operators we've identified. Not the guards. Not the logistics chain. Not Lombardi's people. Not Bianchi's."
I stop turning the pen between my fingers.
"Someone inside that compound was communicating with someone on the outside," Gio continues.
"On a channel that doesn't appear in any of the operational records.
Encrypted, routed through at least four different proxy servers.
I've got enough to confirm it exists but not enough to trace where it goes. "
Someone was running their own communications out of a compound that was already running off the books. Not a guard moonlighting. Not a logistics glitch. A separate line, encrypted, hidden from the operation's own records.
That's not a loose end. That's another player.
"Keep digging," I tell him. "And set up the meeting with Perez. Somewhere neutral, somewhere she'll feel safe. A public place, not a back room."
"Done."
"And Gio. Be gentle with her. Whatever she went through in that compound, she doesn't need another man showing up to scare her."
"Understood, boss."
I hang up. The address Gio texts me a minute later glows on my phone screen. A cafe in Messina. A woman who might be able to put a name to the ghost running that operation, or at the very least tell me what she saw inside those walls that the other survivors couldn't.
And the signal. The hidden communication channel. Someone talking to someone from inside that compound, and I don't know who, and I don't know why, and it's annoying as fuck.
Violet is still asleep when my father arrives at ten. No call. No warning.
Because Cicero Marchetti does not announce himself to anyone. He just arrives, the way weather arrives, the way a debt arrives, the way the worst part of your day arrives when you thought you'd already lived through it. The black Mercedes with the tinted windows rolls up the hill to my estate.
I meet him outside by the gates. The iron line where my property starts and his authority, on any other day, ends.
He will not walk these hallways. Not today.
The women in the guest wing don't need to share air with a man who'd calculate their market value before asking their names, and Violet doesn't need to know he was here at all, and if I'm being honest, the real reason I'm standing at these gates like a bouncer at my own house is that I don't trust myself to be in a room with my father today without one of us drawing blood.
Not because I care about their comfort.
Definitely not.
He steps out, buttoning his jacket. His smile is warm, his eyes are cold as he steps toward me. The combination that's been making people bleed since before I was born.
"Elio."
"Cicero"
He takes in the gates, me standing in front of them, the fact that he's not being invited inside. There's a calculation running behind his eyes the way it always does, fast and quiet, trying to figure out what I'm hiding.
So many things, Father.
But something is different today. The patronizing edge, the one he's worn since I was seventeen, the one that says I'm still the boy playing at being a man, is gone. What's there instead is something I recognize because I do it myself when the variables change.
Reassessment.
My father is looking at me like a chess piece that just made a move he didn't anticipate, and he hasn't decided yet whether to be proud or worried. Knowing Cicero, he'll settle on both.