It was gunfire and screaming, and the acoustics of violence inside a metal box, every shot amplified and reflected until the individual sounds blurred into a single roar. Two of their guards went down in the first fifteen seconds. A third tried to run and took a round from Valente's rifle at forty meters. The rest surrendered, which was disappointing and useful in equal measure.
Inside the containers we found mattresses. Stained and thin and laid on the bare metal floors of shipping units meant for industrial equipment. Chains bolted to the walls at intervals, some with cuffs still attached, wrists-width, too small for a man. Buckets in corners. The smell of sweat and urine and fear, sharp and animal, the body's honest response to sustained terror.
In one of the containers, three women huddled against the far wall, hands over their ears, eyes shut, rocking. None of them washer. I knew before I looked, because I would have felt it, the way you feel a change in air pressure before a storm. But I lookedanyway, and the absence of her face in that metal coffin was both a relief and a fresh kind of agony.
And then, between the gunshots still echoing off the steel walls, between the shouts of my men securing the perimeter, and the moaning of wounded guards on the concrete floor, I heard her scream.
Not real. I knew it wasn't real even as every nerve in my body went electric with it, because the scream came from inside my own skull, pulled from the memory of a sound she never made. She doesn't scream. That's the thing about her. She compresses, folds inward, makes herself small and silent in the face of things that would break other people open. But my mind supplied the scream anyway, manufactured it from fear and guilt and the madness that comes from loving someone you can't find. For three full seconds I stood frozen in the doorway of a shipping container with my gun raised and the world tilting on its axis. The most powerful crime family in Western Sicily at my back, paralyzed by a phantom.
Valente's hand on my shoulder brought me back. A grip hard enough to hurt.
We moved on.
The women were taken to safe houses. The surviving guards were moved to a basement in Catania that belongs to a man who owes me three favors and was about to repay one of them. I gave my men instructions. Find out where the women were being moved next. Find out who ran this operation. Find out where the compound is. Find out any-fucking-thing.
For over two weeks, no one talked. Foot soldiers who feared their boss more than they feared Elio Marchetti. They were less scared of death than the man in charge. This should have told me everything about the kind of operation I was pulling apart, but all I could process was the waste of hours, the accumulation of days she was somewhere I couldn't reach. I stopped sleepingproperly. The bruises from Cicero's warehouse faded from purple to yellow to gone, and I didn't notice because the pain had become background noise, as unremarkable as my own heartbeat.
On the eighteenth day, a guard cracked. Not from anything my men did. He cracked because another guard, three cells down, started screaming about his children, and the first guard heard it and broke.
"Bianchi," he said, teeth chattering, blood from his nose making his words liquid and imprecise. "Mauro Bianchi. He's above me. Above all of us here. He knows where things go after they leave Catania."
It took my men five more days to find Bianchi. Five days of tracking a man who moved between three cities and four aliases and never slept in the same bed twice.
She has been gone for almost a month.
I open my eyes.
The bare bulb above me buzzes, and on the other side of this door Mauro Bianchi is waiting, and I am no longer the man who sat across from Lombardi in Messina, letting silence do the work. That man had a plan. That man believed in patience as a weapon, that control applied correctly would always yield faster results than force. He was right, and then Dario Sala yielded nothing for weeks, and that man started to disappear somewhere around day ten, somewhere around the fourth time Valente put food in front of me and I couldn't remember what I was supposed to do with it.
This man just wants her back.
I push the door open.
Bianchi is smaller than I expected. Lean, wiry, mid-forties, with the hard eyes of someone who's lived inside the machinery long enough to know how the gears turn. Not a paper-pusher like Lombardi. His hands don't shake. His breathing iscontrolled. His gaze tracks me from the door to the chair across from him with the calm of a man who has prepared for this.
I don't sit.
I hit him.
The punch comes from somewhere below rational thought, powered by almost a month of dead ends and cold trails and the phantom echo of her scream that I still hear in the moments between sleep and waking. My fist connects with his jaw, his head snapping sideways as the chair rocks on its bolts. I follow with a second blow before he's recovered from the first, this one to the ribs, and a third to the same spot, and by the fourth his composure has crumbled into the biological reality of a body under assault, gasping and flinching and trying to curl inward against restraints that won't let him.
My ribs scream. I don't notice. Haven't noticed in days, the dull throb so constant it's become indistinguishable from the rest of me, folded into the baseline of what it feels like to exist in this body at this moment.
"The women." My voice doesn't sound like my own. Too raw, stripped back to something that hasn't been modulated or controlled, or filtered through the version of me that runs boardrooms and negotiates with men in expensive suits. "Where are they?"
Bianchi spits blood onto the concrete between his feet. His left eye is swelling shut. When he looks up at me, there's a calculation running behind the remaining eye, how much pain versus how much information versus how long until the pain stops.
I grab a fistful of his hair and pull his head back until he's looking at the ceiling, and I lean in close enough that he can feel my breath on his face.
"You don't get to decide how long this takes. I do. And I have nothing left but time and the will to fill it."
He talks within minutes. Not because he's weak, but because whatever armor he'd constructed was built to withstand a certain caliber of violence, and what I'm offering him tonight exceeds it.
"Hills outside Palermo." He's breathing through his mouth, jaw clicking where it might be fractured. "There's an old agricultural compound. Stone buildings, fenced, twenty... twenty-five guards on rotation. More during transfers."
"Transfers."
"Girls come in, girls go out. Three-week cycle. The American comes every..." He coughs. Blood and spit. "Every ten days. Never stays more than a few hours."
