Page 11 of Taken By the Enforcer

“You gave a bride a drink,” I say, and lay money down without looking. “What did she say?”

His mouth barely moves. “Less with the words. More with the eyes.”

“Did anyone approach her?”

He shakes his head, then stops. “A nun came in. Small. Old. Asked for a bottle of water, left with two. The bride was gone by then.”

“A nun,” I repeat, deadpan. He spreads hands.

“Sicily,” he says, which is an answer and a shrug and a prayer in one word.

“Bathroom?”

He tips his chin toward a door. I check the single stall—clean, freshly used, paper in the bin, watermarks on the sink lip. The air smells of soap and orange blossom. I see her there: tugging stubborn buttons, breathing hard, cursing in a whisper as she fights a dress designed to make a woman feel precious and helpless in the same stitch.

Back on the street, clouds stack over Etna. Heat leaches into the stones. I dial as I walk.

Faustino answers on the first ring. “Fratellino.”

“Club,” I say, and turn toward the villa where the wealthy go to buy whatever they cannot otherwise take. “Now.”

Club Petali rises behind wrought-iron gates and cypress sentries. A Roman prince built the bones to house a mistress; the Luccheses trimmed the hedges with money and sin. The drive is long, a corridor of shade and expectation. Men study men here, everyone armed with cash and reputation. Women float in silk and intent. I ignore what usually entertains me. Tonight, the music grates, the perfume cloys, and laughter sounds like cutlery.

Security opens the doors. Crystal drips light over marble in blossoms. A maid passes with a tray of prosecco; I wave her off. The office sits beyond twinstaircases, through a passage papered in velvet the color of old hearts. Two soldiers nod me in. I don’t knock.

Marcello sprawls on a leather sofa, legs long, gun holstered but never far, the baby-face that makes women obey him utterly at odds with the merciless mind behind those mink brown eyes. Faustino stands by the wet bar, pouring whiskeywith surgical care. He always looks carved from the same dark stone as me, only older by a year and more measured when blood runs hot.

They both turn, reading me for what a lesser man would call emotion and what my brothers—one through the bond of friendship and the other blood—recognize as fire in a steel drum.

Faustino lifts the glass like an offering. “Drink?”

I take it. It lands harshly and cleanly on my tongue, scorches down, and does nothing but gives my hands something to do. I tell them in a handful of lines what I learned, what I saw, what I intend.

Marcello whistles low. “You show a girl the sky and expect her not to try her wings,” he says, dry. Then his gaze sharpens. “We’ll find her.”

I pace. The office is big; it still feels too small when my body wants to hunt. “I don’t want eyes. I want answers.”

“You’ll have both,” Faustino says. Calm, certain. “Give me markers to start.”

“Non-family clinics for early tests,” I say. “Cash rooms in cheap hotels within three miles. Shops that sell jeans and a black T-shirt at noon to a woman who looks like arunaway bride.Tabaccaiwith back-room phones. Station lockers. Bus stations. Boat charters that don’t log what they should. Everyone who sprays bedding in hotel rooms and launders sheets in the quarter near Santa Maria del Carmelo. And every asshole who owes Aldo a favor; he’s the kind ofcoglionewho calls in favors for the wrong reasons at the wrong times.”

Marcello’s mouth twitches. “I’ll have Rafe pull camera grids and scrape purchase logs. He loves a hunt.”

“Rafe?” I repeat, and he nods toward the door.

“Raffaele Costa,” Marcello says. “You call him a hacker, and he gets offended. ‘Intelligence architect,’ he says, like he builds skyscrapers out of zeros.” He grins a little at the memory. “He’s the one who found that Bratva off-grid storage farm underWembley, remember?”

“I remember,” I say, because the operation ended with three Russians in a river and a crate of very pretty Glocks no longer belonging to Moscow. “Tell him it’s personal. Tell him if he brings me a trail I can put my boots on, I’ll buy him a new server farm and a summer house to hide it in.”

Marcello is already typing. “He’ll do it for the sport, fratello.But he’ll take the house.”

Faustino hands me a second drink. I set it down untouched. The floor hums a little under our feet—music, sex, money, a thousand appetites fed like lions in the basement. I want none of it. I want one woman. The surprise hits my ribs like a palm. I’ve wanted thousands of bodies. I’ve taken hundreds.

Desire used to be simple: pick, hunt, own for a night, leave before dawn turns the edges soft. This is not that. This is me standing in a room full of every vice I could pay to taste and aching for a stubborn Sicilian girl with lemon blossoms in her hair and a spine that wouldn’t fold even when I pressed my weight on it.

Faustino sees it in my face and doesn’t flinch. “She’ll be afraid,” he says, pragmatic as a blade.

“Maybe ashamed, because society teaches women to carry shame that belongs to men. She’ll choose places where eyes slide off her.”