Page 18 of The Mad Don
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Lucia is asleep, and her hand is in mine. Her breathing has steadied into something slow and fragile, and her face in sleep looks younger.
A new doctor is in the room.
“The episodes are psychological,” he says. He has the careful voice of a man choosing every word like he’s crossing ice. “She isn’t losing her mind, Don Mondi. She is reliving. The chronic pain, the disrupted sleep — her brain is returning to the original trauma. The nightmares bleed into waking.”
I look at my sister’s face.
“Can you fix it?”
“We can manage —”
“I didn’t ask if you could manage it.”
“The nerve damage from the original injury is extensive. The surgical options have been —”
“Can you fix it?”
He is quiet for long enough that I have my answer.
“You can diagnose her,” I say. “You can name what is happening to her. But you cannot cure it?”
“Don Mondi, medicine has —”
“Limitations.” I finish it for him.
I wave my hand, and he stops talking. He leaves the room.
I sit with her for a moment longer. I look at the way her chest rises and falls, at the lines around her mouth that pain put there years before they had any business being on a twenty-six-year-old face.
There is a man in Palermo. Old enough that most people in this world have forgotten he exists, which is why he is still useful. The oldest practicing traditional physician in Italy, the kind who trained before medicine became an industry of liability waiversand managed expectations. He does not advertise. He does not accept new patients through any channel. Three people in the world know how to reach him, and I am not yet one of them.
The port corridor generates twelve million annually. What it generates in access to the routes that run through it, in the contacts who operate along it, and in the infrastructure that cannot be replicated from scratch is worth considerably more. With these ports, I could raise the money needed to secure a meeting.
That is what the deal with Pavlovich is for. Not the route itself. The route is a means. The route buys me the man in Palermo, and the man in Palermo is the one shot I have left at giving my sister back her leg, her sleep, and the face she had before our father got to it.
If Pavlovich holds his end.
I think about this. I think about the version of events in which Kirill decides the arrangement is not worth honoring, which he might because he is not a stupid man. He will eventually calculate that I am more dangerous with the route than without it. I think about what happens then.
I would take it. Everything I’ve spent two years building toward, the men I placed, the information I have, the particular map of Kirill’s operation that I know better than most of his own people. I use all of it at once, and I take the port. I would take whatever else needs taking, and I do not particularly care what the landscape looks like after.
If he hands over the girl, I am patient. I wait. I learn what I can from having her close, which I suspect is a considerable amount. I could wait a month while I raised more money from other sources.
If he doesn’t.
It’s been four days since we met at the warehouse. Deep in the part of me that runs underneath strategy, deep where the wanting lives, I hope he doesn’t. I hope he calls my bluff and sends men and gives me the excuse to burn the whole arrangement to the ground and take everything at once. Lucia gets her doctor, and I get what I came for. No one knows she exists, and she will be somewhere safe and well cared for. I will deal with the rest from whatever rubble is left.
She is not in any file, any database, any record that connects to my name. She is the one thing in this world that I have kept completely clean of what I am.
Which means she is the one thing no one can use against me. Which means I can afford to burn it all if I have to.
I tuck the blanket up around her shoulders. I smooth it at the edge. She doesn’t stir.
I lean forward and press my mouth to her forehead. Her skin is cold.
“Dormi,” I say quietly. Sleep.
