When Moretti spoke, his voice was barely a whisper.
"What do you need?"
I told him.
Men. Not soldiers — operators. The kind the Morettis kept off the books, the kind who moved through cities like ghosts andleft nothing behind. Intelligence. Everything Moretti's network had ever collected on Valenti properties, safe houses, the places Enzo went when he wanted to disappear. And communication — a direct line, open all night, because when we found her location I would not have time to negotiate chains of command.
"You'll have it within the hour," Moretti said. His voice had changed. The whisper was gone, replaced by something harder — the don's voice, the one that had built and maintained a criminal empire for half a century. The father had spoken first. Now the patriarch was answering. "My son Carlo will coordinate. He knows the networks. He knows the people."
Carlo. Gemma had spoken fondly of him.
"One more thing." Moretti's voice dropped again. Not to a whisper — to something lower. Something that existed beneath the register of business, in the frequency where men said things they meant with every atom of their being. "When you find her. When you have her back."
A pause. The sound of an old man breathing across a thousand miles of distance.
"Tell her — tell her I'm sorry." His voice cracked. A single fracture in fifty years of granite. "She won't believe it. But tell her."
I closed my eyes. Felt the weight of his words settle into the cavity where my emotions would live again when I could afford to let them back in. A father's apology, delivered through his daughter's husband, because he'd spent twenty-six years making himself someone she couldn't hear it from directly.
"I'll tell her," I said. And meant it.
"Caruso."
"Don Moretti."
"Bring my daughter home."
The line went dead.
Chapter 18
Gemma
ThefirstthingItasted was chemicals. Sweet and thick, coating the back of my throat like something medical, something that belonged in a hospital or a nightmare. For a long, formless moment I couldn't tell which one I was in.
Silk. Under my cheek, against my forearm, the unmistakable glide of fabric that cost more than it should. This was good silk. Six hundred thread count, minimum. Cool against my skin, carrying the faint scent of lavender detergent. Something European. Something chosen.
My eyes opened. Closed. Opened again.
The ceiling was high. Ten feet, maybe twelve. Crown moulding ran the perimeter in clean white plaster — egg-and-dart pattern, classical, the kind you found in houses built before the First World War by people who believed ornamentation was a form of moral expression.
The room assembled itself around me in pieces. A four-poster bed in dark walnut, the posts turned and carved, substantialenough to anchor me to the mattress by sheer aesthetic authority.
The nightstand.
White orchids. Three stems in a crystal vase, the blooms immaculate, waxy, arranged with the deliberate asymmetry of someone who understood ikebana or had hired someone who did. They were beautiful. They were also familiar.
Enzo's orchids.
Of course.
I sat up. The headache arrived like a freight train — a dense, pounding pressure behind my eyes that turned the elegant room into something that swam and pulsed. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eye sockets and breathed through my nose. In. Out.
My wrists weren't bound. My hands were free. My ankles were free.
I swung my legs off the bed. The floor was hardwood — dark, polished, cold under my bare soles. I crossed to the door.
Locked.
