Fuck. My hands shake as I check the second message. It’s from Mauro.
"Are you safe, Eliano?" That is all.
My body tenses up. I quickly pull the SIM card out of the phone. I jump to my feet, run to the bathroom, and flush the phone down the toilet. Then I rush back to the bed, grab Salt around the waist, and haul him upright.
"What the hell," he mumbles groggily, half asleep.
"We have to leave the unit right now! There is no time."
"But what’s happening?"
"Move!"
Almost dragging him with me, I rush to the hidden door in the bathroom, swipe Salt’s card along the wall, and activate the opening mechanism.
"Bend down. We move slowly through the bushes," I mutter through clenched teeth.
At one point I crouch lower and bury the SIM card beneath a clump of grass. I feel Salt trembling under my fingers when I straighten and we resume our escape.
We slip through the undergrowth bent low, then move from shrub to shrub behind the row of units, heading toward the lower-numbered ones.
"What is going on?" Salt whispers nervously, slightly out of breath.
"I got texts from Ennio and Mauro."
"What kind of texts?"
"A warning. Ennio told us to leave our unit."
We crouch in the bushes behind building number eighteen, already a considerable distance from our own. I scan the area carefully but see nothing. There is no sound of alarms either, which would have gone off if the cameras had detected anything. Doubt creeps in, making me wonder if this is a false alarm after all.
"I don’t see anysoldati," I murmur.
"Do you think they could get onto the island without anyone noticing?"
"I don’t know. Security has improved a lot, but the mafia has its ways. Believe me, if they set their sights on someone, it is incredibly hard to escape. They have connections everywhere, in the police, in offices, in banks."
We sit in silence for a moment, huddled together in the bushes. Nothing happens.
"Maybe it really is a false alarm," Salt murmurs, still trembling slightly, mostly from the night cold.
I wrap an arm around him. "Let’s wait a little longer. Ennio wouldn’t send that text without a reason."
At that exact moment, I hear a sound. It is high-pitched and piercing, as if projected from high above, and almost immediately another follows, this time from the direction of the security building. I lift my gaze upward. Something catches my eye, a brighter streak in the sky.
"What the hell is that?"
We both lift our heads, and then a sudden, sharp, shrill whistling sound reaches our ears.
The next instant brings a deafening explosion. A plume of fire and smoke erupts into the air, flooding the night with intense, blinding light.
"Oh, fuck," Salt groans, clinging to me, his lithe body pressed against my side.
"What a piece of shit, what a bastard," I mutter under my breath, a wave of anger surging through me. "I’m sure it’s Rocco!"
Silly me, I had been looking forsoldati, not for moremodernforms of warfare. A drone attack from the air. Of course. These are no longer the days when the mafia simply pulled up in front of someone’s house and opened fire with an old rifle.
"Damn it, that bastard will never leave me alone," I snap, half furious, half crushed. Something inside me breaks at the realization that I will never be free of this threat, even if I run to the other side of the world…
