Page 5 of Valentino

"I'll start tomorrow," I say.

"Good." A beat. "Valentino. Quiet. Promise me, quiet."

"I'll be quiet," I say.

The man across from me drinks his espresso like he has all the time in the world.

His name is Renzo, and he's been feeding the Sartoris information out of Milan for nine years. Small things, mostly. Which clubs are dirty. Which judges take money. The kind of intelligence that keeps a family from walking into a room it shouldn't. I've met him twice before. Both times he talked too much.

"You wanted to know about the agency," he says. He keeps his voice low, even though the café is half empty and the espresso machine hisses loud enough to bury us. "Agenzia Luce. You picked a strange one."

"I picked the one that didn't add up." I leave my own coffee untouched on the marble table. "Tell me why it doesn't add up."

He leans in. "Girls come in from the east. Romania, Ukraine, Moldova. All legal. Real contracts, real visas, real shoots. Luce books them for the big labels. Runways, campaigns, the whole circus." He turns his little cup in slow circles. "But the numbers are wrong."

"Wrong how."

"Forty, fifty girls a season come through that door." He stops turning the cup. His eyes flick to the window, then back. "Maybe thirty leave the country again. The rest just—" He spreads his fingers. "Gone. No flights home. No new bookings. Nothing."

"And nobody asks," I say.

"Who asks?" Renzo shrugs, but there's no ease in it. His jaw is tight. "These girls have no people here. They sign with the agency, the agency owns their paperwork, their housing, their phones half the time. A girl disappears, the agency says she went home. Who's checking? Her mother in some village outside Cluj?"

The machine hisses again. A barista laughs at something behind the counter, bright and ordinary, and the sound feels obscene against what I'm hearing.

"Who owns it?" I ask.

This is where he hesitates.

He glances at the door. Then he says it, barely above the hiss of steam. "Shell companies. Layers of them. But you peel them back far enough, and you get to a name. Basile."

I keep my face flat.

"Which Basile," I say.

"The young one. Aldo. Don Enzo's youngest." Renzo finally drinks his espresso, all of it, like he needs it now. "His father's name opens every door in this country. Aldo just opened the wrong ones."

They have a code, the Basiles. The kind of brutal, ugly honor the old families dress up and call tradition. Don Enzo would put a bullet in a man for an insult and call it justice. But this? Girls vanishing into the dark for money?

This is the kind of thing the old men say they're above. The kind of thing that brings shame down on a name they'd kill to protect.

Which means either Don Enzo doesn't know, or he knows and he's looking the other way. Neither answer is good.

"That's everything I have. Don't call me again for a month."

He's gone before I finish nodding, swallowed by the bright street and the noise.

I sit with an untouched coffee in front of me. The marble is cold under my forearms. I run it through, the way I always do, looking for the angle. Two families. One vanishing operation. The Sartoris brushed against the edge of it without knowing.

I need to know how deep it goes. How the names connect. Whether this touches the family I'm built to protect.

My phone buzzes on the marble. The screen reads Mamma.

I answer because I always answer. "Pronto."

"Valentino." Her voice is warm and worn, all the years in it. I can hear her kitchen behind her. "You're alive, then. I was beginning to wonder."

"I'm alive yes."