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‘You don’t like pretty pictures,piccolina?’
‘Why?’ She smiled tentatively. ‘Are you a photographer?’
‘I’m a builder,’ he said. ‘I build things. Fix things. But back then I found an old digital camera on a farm on the outskirts of the village.’
‘There was a farm?’
‘They made cheese there for three generations and sold it to the big cities. Tourists didn’t visit my village, but they visited the farm online, to watch, and I watched them.’
‘You lived on a farm?’ she asked, her heart absurdly lifting at the idea that he’d grown up in a place exactly like her.
He shook his head. ‘I helped there sometimes, because they gave me cheese and bread enough to feed mymamma. To feed myself. But tourists need more than bread dipped in cheese. More than pasta and tomatoes. Tourists need a place to go. They’ve seen the pretty pictures online. They need a place to sleep.’
‘You gave them a bed?’
‘No. I built them one.’
‘You built them a place to sleep?’
‘Where doyousleep, Flora?’
‘In a bed...’
‘Where did the bed come from?’
‘A shop.’
‘Where did the shop get the bed?’
She frowned. ‘From a bed-maker...?’
‘Exactly.’ He applauded without sound, pressing his palms together. ‘Well done.’
‘No need to patronise me.’
‘I’m not,’ he placated. ‘Where I’m from, there weren’t the commodities you have in your village. If I needed something the only option was to travel to one of the major towns or big cities to get it, or to build it myself. I didn’t have the means to travel, so I built things. And I traded for them. I traded my physical strength for a meal. The work of my hands...’
He held them out in front of him and her eyes snapped to them. To the calluses on his palms that would never heal. She remembered their slight roughness against her hips as he’d held her in place and devoured—
‘These hands,’ he continued, ‘wrapped parcels of cheese for seven days straight without sleep. Because I wanted to learn—to listen—to understand what those tourists were doing and to figure out how I could make money from them.’
‘Howdidyou make money from them?’
‘I flipped an abandoned house in the centre of the village, in the middle of everything—near the local shop, the café and the bar—and turned it into a rustic den of opulence. A two-floor haven. Using materials hidden in basements of the local community.’
‘The community?’
‘They...helped me.’
She heard it. The croak of distaste.
‘I’m glad someone did,’ she whispered. ‘I’m glad someone helped you.’
‘It was a long time ago,’ he dismissed. ‘I don’t need help any more. But if I learnt anything from living in the middle of nowhere, I learned two things. If you climb up, you hold your hand out for the next person. You protect your own.I protect my own.’
His voice was fierce—animated—and she sat rooted, listening to every word. She didn’t want to interrupt. She would never have imagined this was how he’d made his money. His billions.
‘My first success was everyone’s. Because money came along with the tourists who wanted to stay in what I’d built. Social media influencers wanted a taste of civilisation in an uncivilised landscape...to take pretty pictures of sunsets burning over windswept olive trees. I brought tourists into the community that had once protected me. And I paid them back tenfold before I sold that little hub of opulence. And then I made it out. I got out of that village because ofme. And with a little luck guiding the way I did it all again. All over Sicily. I took broken things and made them pretty. Sold them for far more than they were worth. It took me to Italia. To Roma. And there I built my business—Russo Renovations. And now my rebuilds are coveted. Worldwide.’
