His brother waited.
"She's on foot. She has a limp. She—-" The sentence dissolved. He rebuilt it. "She's on foot."
"I know." Aivan's voice carried something Olivio had never heard in it before. Not pity. Recognition. The sound of a man who'd once stood on a doorstep in the rain for seven days waiting for a door to open, and who understood, with the authority of someone who'd survived his own version of this, exactly what Olivio was feeling. "We'll find her."
The call ended.
He scrolled to the next name. Giancarlo Marchetti.
Calling Giancarlo was the equivalent of activating an intelligence service. It was also the kind of favor that would be remembered, catalogued, held in the invisible ledger of obligations that families like theirs maintained across generations.
Olivio didn't care.
He made the call. He explained. He asked.
Giancarlo listened with the focused stillness of a man who'd been raised to hear what wasn't being said, and when Olivio finished, the response was immediate and without conditions.
"Consider it done. I'll have people checking transit, airports, hotels within the hour. If she's still in the city, we'll know."
"Grazie."
"You don't owe me thanks for this. You'd do the same."
The call ended, and Olivio stood in his office with his phone in his hand and the weight of what he'd just done settling over him. He'd called Adriano and killed a twenty-three-million-dollar deal. He'd called his brother and let him hear the fracture in his voice. He'd called Giancarlo Marchetti and asked for help, which was something Olivio Cannizzaro had never done, because asking for help meant admitting that your own resources were insufficient, and his resources had never once in his adult life been insufficient for anything.
Until now.
Until a girl with a limp and a Bible and a chipped white mug had walked out of his building, and every system he'd built couldn't tell him where she was.
He called his father.
Miguel answered on the first ring, and the sound of his voice, firm, unsurprised, carrying the weight of a man who'd been expecting exactly this call at exactly this moment, did something to the last remaining wall inside Olivio.
"I know you already know what's happening." His voice came out rougher than he intended. "You have eyes everywhere."
A pause. Then his father, gently: "Tell me anyway."
And the gentleness was worse than anything else. Worse than Adriano's directness, worse than Aivan's recognition, worse than the efficient competence of Giancarlo's response. Because his father's gentleness was the gentleness of a man who'd waited fifteen years to hear his son ask for something real.
"I need help finding her."
"Finding who?"
The question was not a question. It was an offering. A door held open.
"Don't, Father." Olivio gritted out. "You know who I'm talking about."
"I do. But I want to hear you say it."
Olivio's free hand closed into a fist against his thigh. The skyline blurred beyond the glass. Somewhere out there, in a city of three million people, his wife was walking on a leg that would be hurting, carrying a quilted Bible case and the wreckage of a trust he'd spent nine days earning and one afternoon destroying.
"Chelsea. My wife. She's gone, she left, and I don't know where, and my security team is useless, and Adriano's people haven't found anything, and I've called in every favor I have, and she's—-" He stopped. Breathed. "She's given me the slip. I honestly don't know how. Maybe God told her how."
He heard his father's breath catch. Not at the desperation. At the word.
God.
Olivio Cannizzaro, who'd spent his entire adult life politely declining his family's invitations to faith, had just invoked the name of God in a sentence that wasn't casual and wasn't performative and wasn't a figure of speech. It was the involuntary appeal of a man who'd run out of his own resources and was reaching for the only one left.
