Chapter 9: Arrival on Millan

Valentina POV

Milan smelled like diesel fuel, wet asphalt, and money.

The moment I stepped off the iron steps of the bus, the sheer weight of the city hit me in the face. It was a massive, grey beast that roared with the sound of thousands of tires splashing through puddles. Everywhere I looked, things glittered. High-end designer boutiques line the wide avenues, sleek luxury sports cars idle at the stoplights, and women wrapped in wool coats.

I stood completely frozen on the cracked concrete outside the terminal station. Matteo was strapped flat against my chest in his cloth sling, his tiny weight the only warm thing in this entire freezing province. My shoulders throbbed from the weight of my single canvas bag. I allowed myself to stare at the towering glass buildings for exactly thirty seconds, feeling smaller than I ever had in my life.

Then, I shifted the bag’s strap and started walking. I didn't have time to be intimidated.

Finding a place to live took five grueling hours of dragging my feet through the slush. The apartment I eventually found was located in a grim district far from the glittering center, in a concrete tenement building that looked like it should have been condemned a decade ago. The hallway smelled of boiled cabbage and damp rot.

The landlord was a short, thick-framed man with a prominent stomach that stretched the fabric of his stained ribbed undershirt. He stood in the doorway, picking at his teeth with a wooden matchstick as his eyes took inventory of me. He looked at my pale face, the dark purple shadows under my eyes, the tiny baby sleeping on my chest, and the single, battered bag at my feet. He knew exactly what I was before I even spoke.

"How long do you want the room for?" he asked, his accent thick and northern.

"As long as you'll have me," I replied, keeping my voice steady despite the tremor in my knees.

He leaned against the doorframe, his small eyes narrowing. "Four hundred euros a month. But for you, since you have the kid and no papers from a employer, it's eight hundred. Six months upfront. Cash."

It was a blatant robbery. The room wasn't worth two hundred. But my coat lining held the four thousand euros I had taken from the Espositos' cash box in Castelmare. I knew he was gouging me because I was desperate, and he knew I had no other choice. We understood each other perfectly in that silent, transactional moment.

"Fine," I said.

I reached into the hidden slit of my coat, pulled out eight crisp one-hundred-euro bills, and counted them into his rough palm. He didn't give me a receipt. He just tossed a rusted iron key onto the laminate kitchen counter and walked away, grunting under his breath.

When the door clicked shut, I finally let my shoulders drop. The apartment was nothing but a single, drafty room. The kitchen sink had a steady, rhythmic leak that echoed against the metal basin—drip, drip, drip. The single window was warped from old water damage and wouldn't close all the way, letting a thin ribbon of freezing mountain air whistle into the space.

That first night, after I finally got Matteo to take my breast and fall asleep, I sat on the bare floorboards with my back against the cold plaster wall. I pulled the remaining cash from my coat and counted it out in the dim light of a streetlamp outside.

Three thousand two hundred euros left.

A knot of pure panic tightened in my throat. Three thousand euros to buy food, winter clothes, medicine, and somehow build a criminal empire or a legitimate business from scratch. I stared at the green paper bills until my eyes blurred, then tucked them away under a loose floorboard. I couldn't afford to think about how fast that money would disappear if I failed.

The next morning, the real survival began.

I bought a heavily scratched, secondhand wooden crib from an old woman living on the second floor for twenty euros, just so Matteo wouldn't have to sleep on the cold floor. Then, I spent two hundred euros at a dusty pawn shop down the street on an ancient, heavy black iron sewing machine.

At eleven o'clock that night, after finishing a dinner of cheap bread and broth, I cleared the kitchen table and hoisted the heavy iron machine onto it. It was a mechanical relic. The foot pedal caught every three rotations, the bobbin case was choked with lint, and the tension disk was so rusted that the cheap thread I bought kept snapping every five minutes.

I spent the first two hours just trying to understand the machine's temperament, my fingers staining black with old mechanical grease.

Right at midnight, Matteo woke up in the crib, his sharp, thin cry cutting through the flat. I stopped working immediately, lifted him into my arms, and rocked him in the dark room until he fed and his little eyes closed again. My back felt like it was being compressed by iron weights, but the moment his breathing evened out, I laid him down gently and sat right back at the wooden table.

By two in the morning, my eyes were burning from the dim bulb overhead, but I finally managed to run my first clean, straight seam down a scrap of cotton fabric.

The hardship of those early weeks was a physical trial. The first week, I made absolutely nothing good. My hands were stiff from the cold apartment, and the fabric puckered under the needle. The second week, I managed to produce three very ordinary, uninspired day dresses using cheap grey cotton remnants. By the third week, however, my fingers remembered the fluid movements from my youth. I worked through the night on a piece of heavy black silk I had found in a bargain bin at the textile market.

I stayed up until dawn tailoring it, ensuring every internal seam was completely flawless. When I finished the hem, I held it up against the morning light. It was a black slip dress with incredibly clean, minimalist lines. It didn't look like it came from a dilapidated tenement flat; it looked expensive.

At nine o'clock that morning, I carefully pressed the silk dress with an old iron, folded it into a clean sheet of paper, and carried it down to Via Monte Napoleone—the heart of Milan's luxury fashion district.

I walked into a small, high-end boutique that smelled of expensive perfume and polished marble. A woman in her early fifties was standing behind a glass counter, carefully arranging leather handbags on a shelf. She wore a perfectly tailored cream-colored wool suit, her blonde hair cut into a sharp, expensive bob.

"Can I help you?" she asked. Her voice was utterly bored, her eyes completely bypassing my faded jacket.