Chapter 30 Two Islands

Chapter 30 Two Islands

Giulia waited. She counted to three in her head, then to five, and Vicenzo showed no sign that he intended to put her down.
She shifted, trying to use the weight of her own body to slide off his shoulder, calculating the angle, almost managing it when his hand came down and landed on her backside with a sharp smack.
“You’d better stay still.”
He said it quietly, without stopping his stride, as if he were merely commenting on the weather. Giulia froze. Not from surprise, but from a burst of anger so clean and immediate that she needed a full second to decide what to do with it. She decided to do nothing. For now.
The driver was waiting beside the limousine with the door open, and it was only when they reached the car that Vicenzo set her down, with a naturalness that irritated her almost as much as the slap had. Giulia straightened her dress, tossed her hair back, and climbed into the car without looking at him, because looking right then would waste energy she still didn’t know where she would need to direct.
Vicenzo got in after her. The driver closed the door, took his seat, and the glass partition was half-open when he asked where they were going.
“Drive.”
The car began to move, and Vicenzo added nothing else. Giulia stared out the window with the expression of someone watching the street, but what she was really doing was calculating. He hadn’t spoken since they left the hotel. He hadn’t looked at her in a way that offered clues. And his silence was never empty; it was always something happening underneath that she hadn’t yet managed to read.
The chill ran up her spine before she could stop it. She knew that sensation; it was the body reacting before the mind finished processing. Valentina. She had hit Valentina at their wedding party, and Vicenzo had seen it. So the question wasn’t whether there would be consequences—the question was what form they would take.
Giulia ran her tongue across her teeth and looked at her reflection in the window. Nothing he did would surprise her. She had grown up inside the mafia; she knew the vocabulary, knew the methods, knew the cold logic of men who treated punishment like administration. She was ready for anything.
Then Vicenzo’s phone vibrated, and he picked it up without hurry, leaning back in his seat with the posture of someone who had all the time in the world.
Giulia kept looking out the window.
“Prepare the jet,” he said calmly, almost bored. “We’re going to the island.”
She turned her head slowly, as if she hadn’t heard correctly. Vicenzo had already ended the call and was looking at the screen with his usual closed expression, showing no sign that he had said anything unusual.
The island.
The flashback came before she could stop it.
She and Luca lying in bed, the lights off, his back turned to her with that tension in his shoulders that he thought he hid well but she always noticed. Giulia had watched him for a while before nudging his arm.
“What’s going on?”
He took his time answering. When he did, it was short. “Vicenzo went to the island.”
She laughed, more at his serious tone than at the information. “I want to go to an island too.”
“You don’t want this one.”
She stopped laughing. She knew Luca well enough to recognize when he was being literal. “What’s on that island?”
Luca stayed silent for a few seconds, and she let the silence stretch because she knew pushing wouldn’t help. When he spoke, he was staring at the ceiling, as if he preferred not to see her reaction. He said it was where Vicenzo took people who needed to disappear. Not quickly. In a way that served as a message to those who remained.
Giulia had gone quiet for a moment. Then she exhaled slowly. “Only a man like him would use the beauty of an island to do that.”
“He has another one.” Luca’s voice had changed, grown slightly defensive, the way it did when he felt someone was judging Vicenzo from an angle he considered unfair. “One he goes to when he wants peace. Only he knows about that one.”
She hadn’t answered at the time. She had stared at the ceiling beside Luca, thinking there were two parallel worlds: a man who killed in one beautiful place and rested in another he kept only for himself.
The limousine stopped, and Giulia came back.
The airport. The private runway, the cold light of the early morning outside, and the jet already lit in the hangar ahead. She recognized the model; she had flown in one like it once with her grandfather. Expensive, fast, the kind of plane that didn’t need a commercial airport.
Vicenzo already knew she was looking. He said nothing.
She thought of Luca describing the island. She remembered the way his voice had sounded when he said you don’t want this one, and at the time she had thought it was exaggeration, or unnecessary protection, or that she had seen enough things not to be impressed. But there was a huge difference between knowing such a place existed and sitting inside a car parked in front of a plane that was about to take you there.
She had imagined punishment. She had mentally built an entire catalog of possibilities and prepared herself for each one. Silence used as a weapon, calculated coldness, some form of private humiliation he would never allow to leak outside. Things she knew how to absorb without letting them reach the place inside her that remained untouchable.
She had not considered the island.
The driver opened her door, and the night rushed in with the smell of fuel and cold wind. Giulia didn’t move. Her hands rested quietly in her lap, but her fingers were slightly curled, and when she noticed it she slowly opened them, carefully, because she would not allow her hands to reveal what her face did not.
Outside, Vicenzo had already walked around the car. He stood on the pavement, watching her with that expression that was neither anger nor patience—only waiting, as if he knew she would step out and was simply waiting for the moment she reached the same conclusion.
Vicenzo was surprised with himself, but he wasn’t going to show that to anyone—not to her, not to the driver, not even to the version of himself that existed somewhere more honest. The plan had been to go home. Work the next day as if the previous night had been just another move in a game he controlled. No honeymoon, no gesture that might give people the impression Giulia was happy beside him, nothing that might feel too real. And yet there he was, standing on the runway of a private airport in the middle of the night, the jet ready and the bride still sitting inside the car refusing to step out.
If he were honest, he knew there was a small and irritating part of him that wanted to put an ocean between her and Enzo. He knew it and preferred not to examine how much longer he could keep calling that strategy.
Vicenzo tilted his head slightly, his eyes fixed on her, his voice quiet but carrying the full weight of what he meant.
“Are you getting out, or do I have to come get you?”