1
ELIO
The water hits me like a fist.
Cold and industrial, faintly chemical. The kind of cold that doesn't wake you so much as drag you back to a place you don't want to be. It floods my nose, my mouth, mixes with the blood I've been swallowing for however long I've been hanging here.
I know this ceiling. The rusted beam, the hook where the chain loops over, the cracked concrete floor with the drain that never quite drains all the way. I know this place the way you know a recurring nightmare, every detail burned in, nothing you can do with the knowledge except endure it. The warehouse on Via Lenora, three miles from the port, where my father has been teaching me lessons since before I could legally drive.
My wrists are numb. That's the first thing.
The second thing, clawing through the fog of whatever they drugged me with, is the question.
The accounts. Does he know?
Fourteen offshore accounts spread across six jurisdictions. Three hundred and twelve million euros siphoned over four years, routed through shell companies in Cyprus, the Caymans, and a boutique bank in Liechtenstein that asks no questionsbecause I own forty percent of it. If Cicero found even one thread?—
I blink. Water runs into my eyes. The fluorescent light buzzes and flickers, same as it did when I was sixteen and chained to this exact beam for the first time. Back then it was a shipping container at the port. And it was about fourteen girls from Moldova, the oldest maybe fifteen. I'd called the Carabinieri from a burner phone, an anonymous tip I didn't think could be traced back to me. I was wrong. Cicero broke two of my ribs and fractured my orbital bone and told me I'd cost the family three hundred thousand euros.
He said I'd learn.
I did. Just not what he wanted me to.
The door opens as three men walk in, rotating faces I half recognize from the outer circles. Not Cicero. He never comes himself, that would require getting blood on his Brioni suit. These guys are his dispensable soldiers. Nobodies. The kind who follow orders because thinking for themselves was never an option.
The biggest one steps forward. He's carrying a length of pipe.
"Your father sends a message."
"The wedding will happen at the end of this month" He rolls the pipe between his palms. "Get the American whore out of your head, or he'll get her out for you."
Not the siphoning then.
Violet.
The relief is cold and immediate. Four years of work, intact. Then the next thought, right behind it—where is she? Still at the estate? Did Cicero move her as insurance, or is this just the message? Take the beating, get your head right, the woman stays put?
"Where is she." Not a question. The big one doesn't answer. Keeps rolling the pipe between his palms.
That's an answer too.
The pipe connects with my left side. Same ribs as last time. They always aim for the same ribs.
At twenty-two, I'd refused to execute a man's wife, as a result I spent a week in this place. When Valente managed to finally get me out I found the couple had been dealt with by someone with fewer principles. Once, after my mother's funeral, I made the mistake of asking the coroner questions he didn't have answers for. Cicero doesn't argue. He sends me here instead.
This is his language. Pain as punctuation. I learned it young enough that I stopped finding it remarkable.
I don't scream. Haven't in years. Silence is its own kind of weapon, it takes the transaction out of it. They want sound. I give them nothing. My thoughts circling to Violet, focusing on the memory of her body against mine instead.
My memory gets unreliable.
Not because I lose consciousness, though I do, twice, the second time for long enough that I wake to a different man holding the pipe and a fresh cut above my eye I don't remember earning. It gets unreliable because the body starts lying to you. Tells you the pain is less than it is so you can keep functioning. Tells you the ribs are bruised, not broken, even when you can hear the grinding every time you try to draw a full breath and can't. My left eye has swollen to a slit. My jaw keeps trying to lock. At some point one of my shoulders dislocates, not cleanly, not dramatically, just a slow wrong slide as my weight shifts in the chains, and for twenty minutes the pain is so specific and total that I stop thinking about anything at all. Just the shoulder. Just that one white point of it.
They don't fix it. They don't have to. My body eventually does something on its own, some small mercy of anatomy, andit grinds back into place when one of the guards grabs my arm to reposition me for a better angle. I don't make a sound. But my vision goes gray at the edges for a long moment, and when it clears I'm biting through the inside of my cheek and the blood is running down my throat and I can't actually remember deciding to do that.
Hours pass, maybe. Time doesn't work the same way in the warehouse.
They rotate. One hits while two rest. Efficient. Methodical. They don't enjoy it, which in some ways makes it worse. This isn't violence. It's maintenance. Cicero servicing his investment.
