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Stella crossed to the bedside table and switched on a lamp.

“There are towels in the bathroom. I’ll bring you some clean clothes to wear.”

“Thank you.”

She pulled back the bedcovers with brisk, practised movements.

“Dinner will be downstairs later. I’ll come and collect you so you don’t sleep through it.”

“I won’t.”

The certainty in my voice would have been more convincing if another yawn hadn’t caught me halfway through the words.

14

DEMITRI - FLASHBACK

Years before I became Father Demitri Marco, I was DeMarco Cavalho.

Back then, my name didn’t need to be shouted to be heard. It moved ahead of me into rooms. It changed the way men stood, the way conversations flowed, the way certain doors opened before my hand reached the handle. In some places, it commanded respect. In others, it brought fear.

Officials lost paperwork. Guards looked away. Enemies remembered God only when they heard I was coming. And on certain streets, mothers pulled their children closer, not because they knew what I had done, but because they’d heard the stories.

Cavalho was not just a family name. It was an empire, a dynasty, a promise of protection to some and ruin to others.

My cousin Atlas, Don of one of the five families, carried his name with the ease of a man born to rule. His brother Marcello followed quietly, yet no less deadly. And my brother Raze…well, he’d made a life out of making things go boom. My sister Antonella carried what remained after the rest of us were done breaking things. She stepped into the ruin, looked at what was left, and decided we could all still be saved.

And me? I listened. That was what most men underestimated about me.

They expected Atlas to give orders and Raze to build beautiful, terrible things with the patience of a man who could wait hours for one perfect second. But they never knew what to expect from me.

I didn’t need to raise my voice or break things. I watched the direction men looked when they lied. I heard the breath caught too late, the prayer swallowed before it reached the tongue. By the time they realized I had been listening, they had usually told me everything I needed to know. That was where my usefulness lay; not in being the loudest Cavalho son, but in being the best at making guilty men confess.

At thirty-six, I had already learned the shape of fear in a man’s mouth. Some men spat it out. Some swallowed it until they choked. Some covered it with arrogance. Others tried to bargain with it, as if fear could be bribed by the same dirty money that had touched their hands.

I had no patience for bargaining. But confession interested me. Because truth, when dragged out of a dying man, had a peculiar purity to it.

FLASHBACK

Rain had fallen earlier, leaving the concrete slick beneath my shoes and the shipping containers shining under the harsh floodlights. The sea moved, a black hole beyond the docks, slapping lazily against the pylons.

Men liked to believe the sea kept secrets. It didn’t. It only held them so long before it spat them back out again.

Eventually, everything surfaced. Bodies. Cargo. Lies.

I stood inside an empty storage building near the eastern loading bay, my jacket unbuttoned, my hands resting at my waist.

Two of our men waited near the doors. Neither spoke. They had learned not to fill silence simply because it made them uncomfortable. Around me, silence had a purpose. It pressed on men. It made them think too much. It made them hear their own guilt before I asked a single question.

In the centre of the room, a man sat tied to a metal chair. His name was Vittorio Neri. He was forty-eight and had been married twice. He was the proud owner of three legitimate children, two mistresses, and a villa near Portofino. His yacht was named after his mother, which had always struck me as a particular kind of obscenity given what he used it for.

He moved girls through port routes.

Some were taken from refugee lines and promised work. Some were sold by men who had once sworn to protect them. They passed through his ledgers as numbers and initials, easier to erase than names.

He had made the mistake of moving two through a corridor my family controlled, which is how he came to our attention.

One had been fourteen. The other had died before we found her.