My hand flew to my mouth.
The betrayal cut deeper than any wound I’d endured underground. “He... betrayed Dmitri?”
Giovanni nodded once, weighed with the sorrow of someone who had seen everything fall apart. “Desperate men make desperate choices. The Albanians took what he offered, then laughed in his face. Bianca stayed exactly where she was.”
“When the other families discovered what he’d done...” He shrugged, a motion heavy with resignation and disbelief. “Lake Como has laws older than Italy itself. You don’t betray the circle to outsiders. The penalty is death—or exile with nothing. Ricci’s family chose execution. Public. In the town square. He’s been dead almost a year.”
My knees nearly buckled. The weight of it all pressed down—betrayal, loss, the years stolen from us, the women still trapped in those Albanian caves.
“Ricci is dead?” I whispered, the syllables breaking into fragments of horror.
“Yes.”
The word landed like a stone in still water.
Ripples of despair spread through me, cold and wide, striking every nerve.
Giovanni’s eyes caught mine, dark, urgent. “Penelope... I tried. I tried to save you, to save everyone. But some things... some things move faster than we can stop them.”
My mind went straight to Bianca—Ricci’s stolen bride.
Her name alone was enough to hollow me out.
I closed my eyes, and the memory came for me anyway—violent, merciless, as vivid as if no time had passed at all.
Eleven months ago. No—twelve now. Time had become slippery after captivity, measured not in days but in wounds, screams, and absences.
Inside that lightless Albanian cell, there had been no sun to mark mornings, no darkness to signal rest. Just stone. Damp. Rot. The metallic tang of blood and rust and despair baked into the air until it felt impossible to breathe without tasting it.
We were seven then.
Seven women chained together in a crude circle, iron links biting into our ankles, wrists raw from where we’d tried—again and again—to pull free.
The floor beneath us was permanently slick, layered with filth that never quite dried. Rats skittered along the edges, bold from hunger.
The guards laughed when we flinched.
Bianca had been taken earlier that day.
When they dragged her back hours later, it took us a moment to recognize her.
She stumbled through the threshold like a marionette with cut strings, reeking of urine and fear and something darker—something that made my stomach revolt.
Her shift hung torn and crooked, barely clinging to her shoulders. Her hair was soaked, plastered to her face and neck. She didn’t look at us. She didn’t look at anything.
An Arab man had paid extra for her. Wealthy. Cruel. One of the so-called guests the guards whispered about with admiration.
He hadn’t wanted sex—not really. He’d wanted degradation. Ownership. The kind of humiliation that hollowed a person out and left a shell behind.
They told us later, laughing.
He’d made her kneel in the corner while he urinated on her face, forcing her to look up at him, mocking her accent, her tears, her broken pleas. He’d laughed when she gagged. When she cried. When she begged him to stop.
The smell clung to her when they threw her back into the cell. It clung to her skin, her hair, her torn clothes—so strong it made Ana retch into the dirt.
Bianca collapsed in the center of our circle, knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped tight around herself like she was trying to hold her body together by force alone. She shook so violently the chains rattled.
I didn’t think. I just moved.