Chapter 2 - The Scent from Six Years Ago
The rain had stopped by 4:00 AM, leaving the manicured grounds of the Marchetti compound wrapped in a heavy, cold mist.
Aldo did not sleep. He had traded sleep for survival decades ago, but tonight, the image of that small, frail silhouette kneeling in the mud refused to fade.
He stood inside the vast master kennel building. The structure was state-of-the-art—heated stone slabs, individual drainage channels, and reinforced steel bars. Yet inside their open enclosure, Rocco and Ulisse refused to eat their morning ration of raw prime beef.
The two giant mastiffs sat pressed against the iron gate, staring fixedly toward the southern tree line where the girl had vanished.
"They haven't touched their bowls, Don Aldo," Franco, the head kennel master, whispered nervously from behind the safety rail. "In three years, they've never missed a feeding. They're waiting."
Aldo walked up to the gate. Rocco, who usually required a firm verbal command before allowing anyone near his territory, pushed his broad black snout through the bars, letting out a low, mournful whine.
Aldo reached down, stroking the dog’s scarred brow. On the animal’s collar hung a heavy brass medallion engraved with the Marchetti crest. But as Aldo looked closely at Rocco’s muzzle, he noticed something unusual.
Faint traces of dry cedar ash and wild chamomile clung to the dog’s coarse fur.
It wasn't a scent native to his manicured estate. It was a scent Aldo hadn't smelled in over half a decade—the unmistakable herbal poultice used by the mountain breeders of the Apennine ridge.
Six years ago, before Aldo had consolidated his reign over the northern transport corridors, he had suffered an ambush in the mountain passes near Bologna. Bleeding from two rifle wounds, he had been dragged into a rustic stone cottage by a legendary animal behaviorist named Mateo Rinaldi.
Mateo had not only hidden the wounded Don from his enemies; he had set his broken ribs and treated his fever using traditional cedar-and-chamomile salves. In the corner of that cottage, two newborn Cane Corso pups—orphaned after their mother had been struck by a poacher's vehicle—had been kept alive in a wooden crate, bottle-fed with warm goat's milk by Mateo’s six-year-old daughter.
Elia.
Aldo’s heart struck his ribs with the force of a sledgehammer.
Mateo had died in an unexplained barn fire three years ago, just weeks before Aldo had purchased the two fully grown, traumatized mastiffs from an underground livestock auction in Milan. The auctioneers had claimed the dogs were wild, unmanageable beasts whose master had perished.
Aldo had taken them in out of honor for Mateo’s memory, spending years earning their reluctant tolerance.
He had never known what happened to Mateo's daughter. He had sent men to search the province, but the local police had recorded that the child had vanished into the state orphanage system.
"Franco," Aldo said, his voice dropping into a register of cold, absolute steel.
May you like
"Yes, Don Aldo?"
"The girl who stood on my lawn tonight didn't tame wild beasts," Aldo murmured, his dark eyes burning with revelation. "She came home to the brothers she raised with her own hands."
