It's automatic. It's the same smile I've been using my whole life, the one that's disarmed strangers at investor dinners and softened my brothers' worst tempers and made Nadia laughthrough her own fear in the back of a car once. I dust it off now like a weapon I didn't know I'd need.
"Hi," I say, keeping my voice light, easy, like we're meeting at a party instead of a stone cell. "I'm Iris.” I tap my chest in the universal gesture for my name. It all feels veryme Tarzan, you Jane, and I almost cringe. “I don't suppose either of you speak English?"
The one against the doorframe tilts his head, and for a second, I think it worked, I think I've found the crack. Then he says something to the other man in what is starting to sound more Italian than Spanish, from my limited understanding of each language, and they both laugh. The way you'd laugh at a dog that did a trick you found unexpectedly charming.
"English," I try again, slower, like volume and enunciation are the problem. "Do. You. Speak. English?"
Nothing. The one who slid the plate towards me straightens up, wipes his hands on his jeans, and says something to his friend that makes them both look at me again, longer this time, and I don't need a translator to understand the meaning of that look. I fold my arms over my chest and hug myself without meaning to.
"Okay," I say, mostly to myself now. "Okay. So a different approach is needed."
I try charm. I try my most disarming smile, the one that gets grown men to hand over information they didn't mean to share. I gesture at myself, at the door, try to look small and harmless and pleading, the universal language ofplease let me go, I promise I'm not worth the trouble.
They leave, locking the door with a clank. The sound of another door opening, closing, and being locked somewhere outof my line of sight makes my throat close for a second as panic tries to edge in.
I sit down hard on the mattress and stare at the bread and cheese like it might have answers.
I don't cry. I want to, badly, my throat is tight with it and my eyes are burning, but I don't let it happen. I have exactly one instinct in this room and it’s not to fall apart. It's to figure out where I am and how to get out. Falling apart is a luxury for later.
Not here, and not in front of the men who took me.
I eat the bread, because I'm apparently still capable of being hungry even while being held hostage, which feels like a personal failing but is probably just human. I listen to every sound through the bars, footsteps, the murmur of voices, a television somewhere far off, the clatter of something being dropped and someone shouting about it. I try to pick out repeated words.Capisci. Vieni. Aspetta. I don't know what they mean, but I make a mental note of them anyway. Information is currency. I've always known that. I've just never needed to spend it to survive before.
The light through the high window shifts from white to gold to a deep, dusky pink while I sit there. A full day, or close to it, gone.
My brothers will be looking for me. I know that with a certainty that sits under my ribs like something solid. Liam will have every contact he owns working the phones. Killian will want to burn something down, and Aidan will be the one holding him back with cold logic and a spreadsheet of probabilities. Connor and Rafferty will be doing whatever quiet, terrible things they do when someone they love is threatened. Ma will be lighting candles and praying to a God she only remembers when it matters, and threatening that same God with consequences if He doesn't come through.
They'll come. I believe that the way I believe the sun rises. But believing they'll come and knowing when isn't the same thing, and in the meantime I'm alone in some sort of cell in a country where I can't ask for water without pointing at my own throat like a mime.
I press my back against the cold wall and pull my knees to my chest, and for the first time since I woke up here, I let myself feel it. The fear. The wrongness of a locked door with no handle. The absolute, bone-deep loneliness of not being able to make a single person here understand me.
I've spent my whole life being the person who makes people feel welcome, who turns strangers into family in under a minute, who reads a room and gives it exactly what it needs. And none of it works here. Not the smile, or the charm, or the softness in my voice that usually gets me anything I want.
For the first time in my entire life, I am completely, utterly useless to the people around me. The thought makes something small and stubborn start to burn in my gut.
Fine. If charm doesn't work here, I'll find what does. I'll learn their words. I'll learn their faces, their patterns, their weaknesses. I'll watch every single thing that happens on the other side of that door until I know this place better than they do.
I am an Orlova. We don't wait quietly for someone else to save us.
I wipe my eyes with the heel of my hand, once, hard, and I look at the door like it owes me something.
"Okay," I say out loud to the empty room, to the stone, to whoever might be listening on the other side. My voice doesn't shake nearly as much as I expect it to. "Let's figure out where the hell I am."
Yakob
The bright warmth of Catania hits me as soon as I step off the plane.
“Eight days,” the pilot says to me as he lights up a cigarette.
“Eight days,” I say with a nod. It’s how long he is to remain available to me, to get Iris back home. Anything longer than that and I may end up needing to wait for him, which only adds another layer of risk. All being well I’ll have her out of the compound and at the airstrip in half that time.
My contact came through, and there’s a nondescript car waiting for me on the tarmac. A dark blue sedan that blends into every other dark blue sedan on the road. I drive it north out of the city with both hands loose on the wheel. Nobody follows. Nobody cares about one more tired businessman driving toward the foothills.
By the time I've been in Sicily for six hours, I've confirmed what the Orlovs already told me, because trust is a luxury I don't extend to intelligence I haven't verified myself. Salvatore Ramunno owns three properties within twenty kilometers of Catania. Two are decoys, businesses with legitimate paperwork and legitimate foot traffic, the kind of places a man keeps clean on purpose so no one looks too hard at the third.
The third is on the coastal hills outside Ringata. Old stone, a working vineyard as cover, and a security detail that thinks it's subtle because it wears polo shirts instead of tactical vests.
I've watched compounds like this a hundred times. They’re all the same, but I still confirm that, just in case Ramunno had a rush of blood and wanted to spice things up.
