"Then you’re going to hate me," she quips lightly.
The door hisses; one of my men passes the glass with a coffee he doesn’t drink. She tracks him in the reflection, looks at me, then her phone. "You don’t trust me."
"I like accurate statements," I say. "Trust is a forecast."
"And your forecast?"
"Storms," the words come easily. "Localized. High winds."
She smiles into her cup. "Tempesta."
The word hits center mass. I don’t move. "Go take your shower," I tell her, because I can’t say what the word actually does to me. "You look like a variable I didn’t account for."
"And yet here you are, Marito." She arches a well-sculpted eyebrow in challenge.
The Italian word lands easily in her mouth. Wife, husband.Zhena. Marito.We’re building a house out of words and lies, and I’m not sure which ones will stand when the first real hit lands.
I stand. "I’ll be back at six."
"Bring a lead," she says. "Or more pajamas."
"Red?"
She lifts the pocket with the thong, smiles without teeth. "Dealer’s choice."
The next day…
…tastes like gauze and boredom.I’ve already walked the length of the room twice—keeping the IV pole next to me like a badly behaved dog—before I give up and go back to work. The sun hits the foot of the bed, hot and square, like it’s daring me to try the window. I settle for the phone.
After I logged onto his hotspot yesterday, I built a sandboxed ghost of his phone. Read-only. Air-gapped. Nothing that touches my own system. His device is as stingy as a priest with the good wine. Last night’s scrape gives me a neat, sterile sandbox: SMS threads trimmed to the bone, his contacts are all nicknamed, M, D, Choir, Hammer—no socials, multiple comms apps nested inside folders that look like tax software, each one wanting a password that's not stored on hisphone. No cached passwords. No sloppy screenshots. Whoever built his opsec taught him to starve the curious.
"My, aren’t you a cyber genius," I murmur to the empty room. Silicon Caesar. Cute.
He’d brought dinner last night—real food, not hospital beige—set it up like we weren’t just pretending to be a happy couple, and I actually let myself enjoy it for the length of one forkful, then filed it underGestures That Complicate Strategy.
My phone dings. Once, twice, then the steady tap of findings from my cyber guru, Anita Kemp, arrives in a long message. I thumb it open.
Anita:
Matched Margarita Giordano to one Margarita Capato, née Margarita Viktorovna Voronina, raised outside Tver, Russia.
Russia? The Italian Matriarch was born and raised in Russia?
Anita:
Mother: Caterine Bellini // father sealed (working on verification, but rumor has it the father was Viktor Voronin.
I stop there, feeling as if a bucket of ice water has been emptied over my head and is now making its way down my spine. Viktor Voronin. The Bratva Pakhan, until my father took him out. A man who made Ivan the Terriblelook like a motivational speaker. Blyad, that explains something about Donna Margarita's iron will.
I skim over some of the information Anita sent, like Donna Margarita getting out of Moscow when she was sixteen, working as a prostitute, getting to Italy, marrying one Hugo Capato, who was a lowlife runner for La Famiglia when they still had Italian connections. Hugo died not long after—a fall off a cliff? I shake my head, amused. Donna Margarita sure has a way… she then married Ricci Giordano and became the respected mafia wife she is today.
I stop again at a new name.
Anita:
Margarita escaped Russia with a half-brother, Igor Pavlov, aka Igor Viktorovich Voronin, who is also rumored to be Viktor's son. I'm still working on his background; he vanished from any data points at eighteen (coincidentally, the same time Hugo fell off the cliff).
"Zdra’vstvui, brat." Hello, brother, I say to no one.
