9. Giovanni
— ? —
Giovanni
The meeting runs past midnight.
By the time Corrado finally signs the last page, my patience has worn so thin I can barely maintain the cordial mask I’ve been wearing for three months.
The handshakes feel endless. The congratulations hollow.
All I can think about is Cielo - the unease that’s been hanging over her all day, the silence stretching between us ever since I surrendered my phone at the security station.
“A drink to seal it?” Corrado offers, and his smile has the satisfaction of a man who thinks he’s won something.
“Another time.” I’m already moving toward the door. “My wife is waiting.”
Ludovica appears at my elbow, and something in her expression stops me - a satisfaction that mirrors her father’s, but colder. Darker.
“Drive safe,” she says, and the words sound like a joke.
I don’t have time to parse it. I collect my phone from the security cabinet and power up the screen as I walk, expecting a string of messages from Cielo, apologies I’ll have to make, a late dinner I’ll have to salvage.
What I see stops me cold.
Two missed calls. Both from her. One at eight. Another at eight-thirty.
Two voicemails.
I dial her back immediately. It rings and rings and goes to voicemail.
“Cielo, I just got out. I’m coming home. Call me back.”
I try again as I reach the car. Voicemail.
Again as I pull out of the compound. Voicemail.
The drive back to the villa takes thirty minutes, and I spend every second of it calling her, leaving messages, trying to explain that my phone was in a cabinet, that I couldn’t answer, that I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m coming.
She doesn’t pick up once.
* * *
I see the damage before I reach the house.
The gate is hanging open, twisted on its hinges like something tore through it. Beyond, the drive is scattered with debris - broken glass, shell casings, things I recognize from a hundred crime scenes I’ve walked through in my years of running an empire.
My foot hits the brake so hard the car skids.
“No.”
I’m out of the vehicle before it fully stops, running up the drive toward the villa that was supposed to be safe, the territory that was supposed to be protected, the house where I left my wife alone because I thought a meeting mattered more.
The front door is splintered. The windows are shattered. Inside, furniture is overturned, walls are pockmarked with bullet holes, and there is blood on the floor.
“Cielo!” Her name tears out of me. “CIELO!”
I search every room. The bedroom where she slept. The bathroom where she got ready in the mornings. The kitchen where I used to find her making coffee, pretending she wasn’t waiting for me to come home. Every space is empty, destroyed, abandoned.
In the dining room, I find what stops my heart.
The table is set for two. Candles, burned down to nothing, wax spilled across the linens. Two plates, two glasses, a meal that was never eaten. She was waiting for me. She set a table and lit candles and waited, and I never came, and someone-
The blood on the floor leads toward the back of the house. I follow it with my breath trapped in my chest, expecting at every turn to find her body, to find the ending I’ve spent my whole life trying to prevent.
But there’s no body. The blood trail leads to the garden door and then disappears, as if she made it out. As if she ran.
I follow the path into the first line of trees, searching for any sign of her. The blood drops end quickly - she must have bound the wound. But something catches the moonlight near a low branch, and I crouch to retrieve it.
A broken clasp. Gold, delicate, the kind that holds a necklace. The star pendant is gone - torn away, lost somewhere in the dark - but I know this clasp. I gave her the necklace it belonged to.
She was here. She made it this far.
I close my fist around the clasp and turn back toward the house.
“Beppe!” I’m calling for my man before I realize I left him in Milan. “Rino! Anyone!”
I find Rino behind the guardhouse, unconscious but breathing, a gash on his head that tells me he went down early in the attack. I slap his face until his eyes flutter open.
“The signora,” I say, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Where is the signora?”
“I don’t-” He’s groggy, confused. “They hit me from behind. I didn’t see-”
I leave him and go back to the house, searching for something, anything - a note, a message, a clue. The blood could be hers or it could belong to an attacker. The trail leading to the garden could mean she escaped or could mean she was taken.
I don’t know. I don’t know anything, and the not-knowing is worse than any wound I’ve ever taken.
On the kitchen floor, half-hidden under a fallen chair, I find a scrap of paper.
It’s torn, crumpled, and when I smooth it out, I see part of a printed form - some kind of shipping manifest or receipt, the words mostly illegible.
Water damage or blood has smeared most of the text, leaving only fragments: a partial date, numbers that could be coordinates or account codes, and in the corner, the edge of what might be a monogram, the lines too incomplete to identify.
It means nothing to me now. I can’t read it, can’t connect it to anyone or anything. But I pocket it anyway because it’s evidence, because it’s something, because I can’t leave this place empty-handed.
I try her phone again. Voicemail.
I call Beppe in Milan. “Get everyone. Now. Something happened at the villa.”
“What kind of something?”
“Someone attacked my wife.” The words scrape out of me. “She’s gone. I can’t find her. Beppe, I can’t-”
“I’m on my way. Don’t move anything. Don’t touch anything else.”
“There’s blood on the floor.”
The silence on the other end is worse than any response.
“How much blood?” Beppe asks finally.
“Enough.” My voice cracks. “Not enough to mean - I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
“Boss.” His voice is steady, the calm that comes from years of cleaning up disasters. “Rino was supposed to be on site. Where is he?”
“Behind the guardhouse. Someone hit him from behind. He didn’t see anything.”
“And the signora’s phone?”
“Goes to voicemail. Every time.”
I hear him take a breath, organizing information, building a picture. “The blood trail - where does it lead?”
“Out the back. Through the garden. Then it stops.”
“So she made it out.”
“Or someone took her out.”
“Someone bleeding.”
“Maybe.”
Beppe is quiet for a moment. Then: “I’ll be there in four hours. Rino’s going to need a medic, and I’m bringing people who can read a scene. In the meantime - boss, you need to hold it together. If she’s out there, if she’s running, she needs you thinking clearly.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I look at the table set for two, at the candles that burned down while I was signing papers in a room full of people who don’t matter, and I feel something in my chest crack open.
“No,” I admit. “But I’m going to try.”
I hang up and stand in the middle of the ruin I made of my marriage. The table set for two. The candles she lit for me. The meal she cooked while I sat in a meeting with people who don’t matter, signing papers that mean nothing now.
Cielo is gone.
My wife is gone, and I don’t know if she’s alive or dead, and the last thing I said to her was a voicemail about being sorry.
* * *
I search until dawn.
The trees around the property. The roads leading to the village. The village itself, where a bartender tells me a woman matching Cielo’s description drove away around ten o’clock, alone, heading north.
Alive. She’s alive.
But she’s not answering her phone. She’s not coming back. She ran from a house under attack, and she kept running, away from Sicily, away from me, into a world where I can’t find her.
I stand in front of the ruined villa as the sun comes up, and I make a list.
The attack was planned. The timing was deliberate. Someone knew I would be unreachable, knew Cielo would be alone, knew exactly when and how to strike.
Ludovica’s voice in my head: You’ll regret leaving early tonight.
Her smile as I collected my phone: Drive safe.
The cold satisfaction in her eyes, like she was watching a trap spring shut.
I don’t have proof. Not yet. But I know - deep in my gut, in the place where instinct lives - that this was her.
That Ludovica Falcone orchestrated an attack on my wife, and I let it happen because I was too blind, too focused on the deal, too willing to believe that a woman scorned was just dramatic rather than dangerous.
I should have seen it. I should have listened. I should have been here.
The guilt is a physical thing, crushing my chest, making it hard to breathe.
I think about Cielo setting that table, lighting those candles, waiting for me to come home so she could tell me whatever important thing she needed to say.
I think about her alone in this house when the windows shattered, fighting her way out while I sat in a meeting that destroyed everything.
I think about the blood on the floor, and I don’t know if it’s hers.
“I’m going to find you,” I say to the empty house. To the rising sun. To wherever she’s gone, wherever she’s hiding, wherever she’s running. “I don’t care how long it takes. I don’t care what I have to do. I’m going to find you, Cielo, and I’m going to make this right.”
The words hang in the morning air, a vow made to no one and everyone.
I turn away from the ruins and walk toward my car.
There’s nothing left here. No trail, no clues, just the wreckage of a life I built wrong and a wife who finally stopped waiting.
But I’ll find her. If it takes the rest of my life, I’ll find her.
I mean it enough to spend however long it takes.