Chapter 6 Violet #2
So. Like it's the simplest equation in the world. Kid in danger. Body available. Math done.
I tear a strip from my shirt hem and push it through the fence. "Press this to your nose. Pinch the bridge. Lean forward, not back."
He takes it. Presses. Winces. "Is it bad?"
"Looks broken."
"Thought so." He tilts his head, adjusting the cloth, as the blood pools in the crease of his upper lip before he spits it clear. "I was never going to win any beauty contests, but this really closes the door."
"You're not funny."
"I'm a little funny."
I press my forehead against the cold fence, my eyes burning, but I don't let them spill. Not now. "Thank you. For what you did."
"Don't thank me. She's still up there."
Yeah. She is.
His breathing is wet and labored through the broken nose, and he keeps tilting his head, trying to find an angle that doesn't hurt. After a while the blood slows and his breathing evens out, but neither of us speaks, this place having taught us silence is the safer bet.
"Vi?"
"Yeah."
"The person you're missing. When you wake up crying." He's looking at the ceiling, the cloth pressed to his face, his voice easy in the way that means it isn't. "Is there someone? Here, or back home? Someone who'd come for you?"
I should lie. Every instinct I have says lie. Keep your cards against your chest and play this close.
I open my mouth to do exactly that. To say I don't know, maybe, the same non-answer I gave last time. It's right there, the safe version, the version Elena would approve of.
But Matt just got his face rearranged for a girl he'd never spoken to, and there's blood in his teeth and warmth still in his eyes despite all of it, and I am so tired of carrying this by myself in the dark.
"Not home," I say. "Here. In Italy."
Matt turns his head on the mattress. His eyes find mine through the fence. "Tell me about him."
So I do. Not everything. Not the crime family, not the empire, not the art worth more than most people will earn in three lifetimes. But the real parts. The parts that live in my heart, warming me from the inside out, when I feel lost and hopeless at four in the morning.
"He plays piano," I say. "Usually when he thinks no one's listening.
Einaudi, mostly, and he plays it angry, like the keys owe him something.
" Matt's mouth curves slightly. "He reads constantly, history, philosophy, poetry, and he dog-ears the pages, which should be a crime.
He once spent forty minutes explaining the structural reinforcement of a fifteenth-century bell tower without realizing I was the wrong person to lecture about architecture until I started correcting him on the buttressing. "
"Smart guy."
"Too smart. That's part of the problem." I pick at a thread on my shirt.
"He's possessive in a way that should terrify me.
Does terrify me. He makes decisions for people like he's the only one qualified to make them.
He's done terrible things, Matt. Things I can't pretend away.
And when he looks at me it's like I'm the only painting in the gallery and he's never going to let anyone else through the door. "
Matt listens without speaking, not waiting for his turn to talk.
"You love him," he says. Not a question.
"I don't know what I feel. I know I chose to stay when I could have left. I know that when I close my eyes in here, he's where my brain goes. I know that probably says more about me than it does about him."
"It says you're human."
"It says I'm an idiot."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive." He adjusts the cloth against his nose. "Is he the kind of man who'd look for you?"
"He'd burn this place to the ground."
"Even the difficult parts of him? The possessive, makes-decisions-for-people parts?"
"Especially those parts."
Matt nods, slow, like he's fitting something together, and there's a sharpness in his focus that passes before I can name it.
"He sounds like the kind of man who doesn't let go easily."
"He doesn't let go at all." I pause. "That's the problem… and the hope."
Matt reaches through a low gap in the fence. His fingers, swollen and bloodied, rest against my hand on the concrete. Not gripping. Just present.
"We're getting out of this, Vi. Both of us."
"You don't know that."
"No. But I'm choosing to believe it. And I'm choosing you as the person I believe it with."
My throat aches. My hand stays where it is under his fingers.
"When we get out," I say, "I'm buying you a steak."
"Can't. I'm vegetarian."
"Since when?"
"Since my nose decided to redecorate itself. Meat suddenly lost its appeal."
I breathe out. Somewhere in the compound a van engine turns over, new arrivals or a shipment going out, and through the gap in the wall panels headlights sweep across the loading dock.
Matt's hand stays against mine as the headlights fade and the engine dies and the compound settles back into its rhythm. I keep my eyes open. Elena might be gone tomorrow. The one-shoed girl is still upstairs. The van will come back.