I should call Gio. He's been chasing leads from the compound for weeks now, working through the documents we recovered, cross-referencing the names we pulled from Lombardi and Bianchi, trying to trace the operation back to whoever was actually running it.The American.The one every survivor mentioned and nobody could describe beyond"educated, mid-thirties, American accent." A ghost with an accent and an operation that spanned three countries.
The phone is in my hand before I can even consider if Gio is awake yet.
He answers on the first ring, which tells me he's been waiting for this call. He doesn't hover by his phone unless he's sitting on something.
"Tell me you have good news," I say. "I've had a shit morning."
"Depends on your definition." He pauses. That's not like him. Gio reports clean and fast, so when he pauses, something's complicated. "I found one of the survivors. A woman who escaped the compound."
That gets my attention. "Who."
"An exchange student from Spain. Her name is Maria Perez, she was enrolled at the University of Catania before they took her. She was inside that compound for about three weeks and managed to get out the same day they brought Violet in."
"How the hell did she escape?"
"Still working that out. But she's been running ever since. Used her own name in Catania, which was stupid, then got smarter. Moved to Syracuse under a friend's passport. Then Messina under a completely fabricated identity. She's been working in a cafe off Via dei Verdi for the past two weeks, calling herself Ana Herrera."
"And you found her how?"
"Credit card fragment from the Catania hostel she forgot to scrub, matched to a train ticket purchase in Syracuse, matched to a hostel registration in Messina she filled out wrong. She's smart enough to run but not smart enough to cover every trail."
Smart girl. The kind of scared that keeps you moving, keeps you alive. Unlike the kind that makes you knot a bedsheet.
"I need to talk to her," I say. "She was inside that compound. She might know things the others couldn't tell us. She might know who the American is."
"That's what I was thinking." Another pause. "But there's something else, and this one I don't have an answer for yet."
"Go on."
"While I was going through the compound's communication logs, the ones we pulled from that office during the raid, I found an anomaly. An outbound signal that doesn't match any of the operators we've identified. Not the guards. Not the logistics chain. Not Lombardi's people. Not Bianchi's."
I stop turning the pen between my fingers.
"Someone inside that compound was communicating with someone on the outside," Gio continues. "On a channel that doesn't appear in any of the operational records. Encrypted, routed through at least four different proxy servers. I've got enough to confirm it exists but not enough to trace where it goes."
Someone was running their own communications out of a compound that was already running off the books. Not a guard moonlighting. Not a logistics glitch. A separate line, encrypted, hidden from the operation's own records.
That's not a loose end. That's another player.
"Keep digging," I tell him. "And set up the meeting with Perez. Somewhere neutral, somewhere she'll feel safe. A public place, not a back room."
"Done."
"And Gio. Be gentle with her. Whatever she went through in that compound, she doesn't need another man showing up to scare her."
"Understood, boss."
I hang up. The address Gio texts me a minute later glows on my phone screen. A cafe in Messina. A woman who might beable to put a name to the ghost running that operation, or at the very least tell me what she saw inside those walls that the other survivors couldn't.
And the signal. The hidden communication channel. Someone talking to someone from inside that compound, and I don't know who, and I don't know why, and it's annoying as fuck.
Violet is still asleepwhen my father arrives at ten. No call. No warning.
Because Cicero Marchetti does not announce himself to anyone. He just arrives, the way weather arrives, the way a debt arrives, the way the worst part of your day arrives when you thought you'd already lived through it. The black Mercedes with the tinted windows rolls up the hill to my estate.
I meet him outside by the gates. The iron line where my property starts and his authority, on any other day, ends.
He will not walk these hallways. Not today. The women in the guest wing don't need to share air with a man who'd calculate their market value before asking their names, and Violet doesn't need to know he was here at all, and if I'm being honest, the real reason I'm standing at these gates like a bouncer at my own house is that I don't trust myself to be in a room with my father today without one of us drawing blood.
