19. Milan #2
“So, the cost, Mr. Lucca,” the agent said, but my attention was focused on the small snippet of my wife that I could see past the window. “Mr. Lucca?”
“What?” I grumbled, turning back to the agent and narrowing my eyes until my face was uncomfortable.
“The cost?”
Sicily was fine, right outside, except it did not feel fine. I looked again, the edge of her checkered skirt below the unnecessary cluster of window advertisements still only just visible, but there. She was there. She just required air.
“Milan,” Francesco said sternly, placing a hand on my forearm. “She’s fine, she—”
I blinked at the window. I blinked until my eyes blurred, until they could confirm that the window was empty.
She was…gone.
The edge of her skirt was missing, replaced by the sight of the concrete pavement and something dark on the street.
I shot up from my seat. The chair toppled over and I did not pick it up. My fingers found the gun in my waistband, and I ran. I ran past Francesco, past waitstaff and diners, past the door, and only stopped where my wife should have been standing but was not.
“Where the fuck is she?” Francesco panted as he followed, checking corners and alleyways as though she was simply hiding. “Sicily!”
Perhaps once she would have hidden from me, but not now.
A scream clogged in my throat with all of the unsaid words between me and my wife, between her and the rest of the world.
I crouched where the dark splotches were, dipping my fingertip into the droplets to confirm that they were what I did not want them to be.
Blood. A droplet still formed, so unbroken it was still warm.
Someone had taken my wife and made her bleed.
My body did not function without her. It refused. It desired to crawl along this street until I found her, but this time, I refused, and I did what I had not been capable of before.
I felt.
I permitted the sacrificial love of Adriano and Francesco into my heart.
I allowed the anger of my three brothers to replace my blood with ice.
I powered my brain with Sicily’s intelligence, and I felt it all.
This time, I did not stop or lose my mind. I did not wring my hands or forget what I was doing, but I detached, thinking only of her, not caring that I had touched blood because it was hers.
“Where did the building come from?” I demanded, my pupils tracking the pavement as if a piece of her still resided there.
“I-I don’t really know.” Francesco shuddered, running a hand through his hair. “She said that woman reached out to her and said it was available.”
My body spun to face him. “When?”
“It was the day after that night you saw me and Adrian. I didn’t go to that event you all went to, that’s why I could sneak into the house. She talked to me about it the next day.”
The gala.
The night Brenno had threatened her. The night she had spoken to Cesare’s wife.
My sharp inhale was full of anything but air. It tasted like blood; the blood Brenno had promised to shed if I did not amend the contract.
He had done this; he had hired that estate agent to gain my sweet wife’s trust, and then he had taken her.
I dashed back inside the restaurant, Francesco at my heels, and sprinted past the dishevelment of flipped chairs, not caring for the gasps and murmurs.
I tried to focus on our empty table, on anything, but the dark walls and dim lights seemed to make everything blur together.
My thumbs found my eyes, pressing and pushing as if doing so could wake me up.
Sicily could not be gone. I needed her; I needed her more than I needed air.
“Where did that woman go, the one sitting here?” I demanded to no-one in particular, perhaps the entire restaurant.
Silence answered me.
It was a silence that was not silence at all; there was jazz music playing softly over the speakers, the quiet clatter of cutlery against plates, and the sound of my breath beginning to pant. The world was still turning, still functioning, when mine was not.
A loud crack tore through the restaurant, and it was only when pieces of plaster snowed between us that I realized Francesco had shot one round into the ceiling. I was grateful for it; I would have slaughtered them all mindlessly otherwise.
Francesco’s voice boomed as he began, “Where the fuck did she—”
“The back door,” a waiter dressed in black answered from across the tables. Her finger pointed toward an open fire door at the back of the small space, one that was propped open with a chair.
Francesco and I shared one brief glance before we barreled through it, finding ourselves in a small brick alleyway.
It was dark, the walls blocking the sun, the breeze carrying the sickly sour sweetness of rows of overflowing trashcans.
It was somewhere you did not want to spend too much time in, somewhere you would run to if you were escaping.
The long, narrow alley echoed with the sounds of discarded paper and plastic wrappers scraping along the paved floor, but it also captured the sound of frantic heels clipping along the stone.
“There you are.” Francesco seethed as we began to run, picking up speed against the wind tunnel that the small street had become. It whipped our faces with the putrid scent of decay and damp, but there was little I cared for other than getting my wife back.
The agent remained out of sight until we reached a chain-link fence, and we found her trying to break the rusted lock on the gate, her breath heaving as she tugged and pulled on it.
She did not notice us, not until I lunged for her, grabbing and yanking her by the hair, using it as a leash. The agent yelped like a puppy as she stumbled backward into my panting chest, trembling as I pressed my gun to her temple. “Where is my wife?”
Her tears were aggravating, the sounds of her upset time-wasting.
My thumb cocked the gun, slowly exaggerating every mechanical click against her skeleton. “You will tell me, or your brains will be splattered along this pavement, and whatever Brenno is using you for will never happen again. Do you understand me?”
She seemed to steel her spine at this as though the thought of never seeing Brenno again caused her significant reevaluation. “I don’t know where she is.”
My fist tightened on her hair, and she winced as I ripped strands away from her scalp.
“Stop! Stop,” she sobbed. “I—I don’t know anything about Brenno Fera, but his brother didn’t tell me anything, only that he needed me to sell her the building and drug her enough to get her outside so he could take her.”
“Give me a name,” I growled.
“Cesare!”
That could not be correct. Cesare was kind, he had always been the softest of us all. He would not have harmed my wife. I unlocked my phone, finding a photograph of my brother and his wife, Bella, at their recent wedding that I had located online. “This man?”
“I know her,” Francesco said surprisingly, pointing at the bride. “She was in the Outfit. Went missing a few months back. Nice girl, conservative parents though.”
The agent nodded slowly, but it did not answer the questions swarming my mind.
Why had the kindest, sweetest boy become my wife’s tormentor?