Chapter 11 Violet
VIOLET
The thin mattress actually feels soft for once. And luxurious. I don't remember it being so comfortable either, or smelling anything but mildew and sweat, but here I am, surrounded by the fresh scent of linen.
The lights are brighter today too, dancing against my eyelids like actual sunlight, and the annoying buzz of the fluorescent bulb is blissfully gone. I must have fallen into another dimension inside my cell, because I swear I can feel the breeze on my skin.
I peel my eyes open, disoriented at first before the reality crashes into me. I'm no longer there.
Was it all a bad dream? Or is this some kind of a sick joke?
My body doesn't trust this. Every muscle is locked, running the same threat assessment it's been running on a loop since I was taken. Where am I. Who's close. Where are the exits. What's the three-hour rotation.
Is this real? Is this a new kind of trick, a softer cage designed to make me lower my guard? Did they drug me and move me and will I open the wrong door and find concrete again?
Except there's no rotation here. No boots on concrete, no distant screaming filtering through the walls. Just birdsong and the wind in the orange trees and my own pulse slamming against my ribs like it hasn't gotten the memo.
I pinch the inside of my arm. Hard. Fingernails digging into the soft skin above the wrist until it bruises.
It hurts.
The sheets are real. The sunlight is real.
I'm in Elio's room. His bed. His sheets. His space, the one that smelled like citrus and leather, that I tried to reconstruct from memory in a pitch-black cell and couldn't. Because memory is a liar and a cheat, and it dulls everything down to save you the pain of wanting what you can't have.
Memory was wrong. It's stronger than I remembered. Everywhere. In the pillowcase, in the duvet, in the air itself. Like the room has been soaking in him for years and doesn't know how to stop.
He didn't put me in the other room. The gilded cage with the view of the sea I couldn't reach, the pretty suite with the door that locked from the outside.
He put me here. Where he sleeps. Where we were together in those last few impossible days before everything detonated, and I woke up on concrete with blood in my hair.
His room. His bed.
Something behind my sternum cracks. Just a little. Just enough.
"Violet."
His voice comes from the bathroom doorway. Low. Careful. The way you'd speak to something wild that might bolt if you breathed wrong.
I turn my head on the pillow.
He looks like hell.
And I've never been so glad to see anyone in my entire life.
The circles under his eyes go past exhaustion into something medical.
Bruise-purple, carved deep, the kind you get from weeks of not sleeping, not just a bad night or two.
His jaw is covered in stubble thick enough to be almost a beard, dark against skin that's lost some of its Mediterranean warmth.
He's leaning against the doorframe in gray sweatpants and nothing else, and my restorer's eye does what it always does, assesses the damage.
And there's a lot of damage.
Bruises across his ribs. Not fresh. These are the yellow-green of something two, maybe three weeks old, layered over darker purple underneath.
A healing cut along his left side, stitched clean but angry.
Another across his collarbone that looks like it came from something blunt and deliberate.
His knuckles are scabbed, split and re-split, swollen enough that closing his fists must hurt.
"Are you okay?" The words come out rough and stupid and insufficient, my voice scraping against a throat that still feels scoured with sandpaper.
But my gaze is on those bruises, tracing the pattern, and the pattern tells a story.
These aren't combat injuries. These are systematic.
Targeted. Someone did this to him with intention. "What happened to you?"
He doesn't come closer. Stays exactly where he is, shoulder against the frame.
"I'm fine. Just Cicero acting like a toddler when he can't get what he wants."
His father.
His father did this to him.
I shouldn't be shocked. Everything I've learned about Cicero Marchetti suggests a man who treats his son like a dog he's training, alternating between praise and the boot.
But knowing something in the abstract and seeing the evidence written across six feet five inches of a man who snapped a neck with his bare hands are two very different things.
He stands in that doorway and watches me with an intensity that should be terrifying. That bottomless brown, locked onto me like I'm the only thing in the room, in the house, in the world. Like he hasn't looked at anything else in weeks and doesn't plan to start.
It should terrify me.
It doesn't.
And I'm not sure what that says about me anymore.
"How do you feel?" He doesn't cross the threshold.
Six feet of marble floor between the bathroom door and the bed, and he doesn't take a single step.
This man, who killed his way through a compound to reach me, who ripped a metal door off its hinges, who snapped a man's spine like kindling while I watched.
This man is standing six feet away because he won't be one more person who takes my choices.
I want to say, "Come here. Hold me. Don't stand in that doorway like I'm something you're afraid to break."
What comes out is, "Like I've been hit by several trucks and then rescued by a blood-soaked maniac."
A ghost of a smile flickers across his features as the corner of his mouth lifts for half a second before it falls again.
"Fair description."
"You look terrible," I add, looking him up and down.
"You should see the other men."
"I did. You left them in a hallway."
That flicker again. Gone before it's there. "I wasn't keeping a tidy workspace."
And oh, god, I missed this. The dry, cutting back-and-forth, the way he matches me beat for beat without blinking.
Three weeks of surviving on Matt's terrible Shakespeare and stale bread jokes, and here's this man giving me exactly the thing I didn't know I was starving for.
An equal. Someone who doesn't flinch at the sharp edges.
But he still hasn't moved.
Even though his fingers twitch at his sides, even though he's braced against that doorframe like it's load-bearing and he'll collapse the second he lets go. There's tension in his shoulders, and every controlled line of him says he wants to cross this room so badly his bones ache with it.
Three weeks of having no choices. No control over who touched me, when, how hard. And here's this violent, terrifying, beautiful disaster of a man giving me the one thing no one in that compound ever gave me.
A choice.
It's the most thoughtful thing anyone's ever done for me.
It's maddening.
"Get over here."
He crosses the room in three steps. And I'm pulling him down onto the bed, grabbing fistfuls of nothing because he's not wearing a shirt and there's just skin and muscle under my palms, and his arms come around me.
Careful. So careful. Like I'm built of something that cracks under pressure, which, fair, I might be.
His body curves around mine, my face pressing into his chest, my ear against his heartbeat.
He's shaking.
Not a tremor. His arms. His chest. All of him.
The great, terrifying Elio Marchetti, head of the Marchetti empire, a man who walks through rooms like he owns the air in them, trembling against me like something structural just gave way.
Like he held everything together through the siege, and now that the siege is over he's finally allowed to show the fracture lines.
I bury my face into the crook of his neck and inhale. The scent I chased through dreams in the past three weeks. He washed the violence off for me. All that blood, all that death, scrubbed away so that when I reached for him I'd find this instead. Clean. Real.
His arms tighten, making my ribs protest, but I don't care.
He doesn't ask what happened. Doesn't demand a debrief, a timeline, details for whatever hunt is already running behind those brown eyes. Just holds me, his breath ragged against the top of my head, his pulse too fast under my cheek. Way too fast for a man sitting still.
I press closer and let the shaking take us both.
Some time later, before we're both ready to do it, he lets me go and grabs a tray that must have been sitting at the bedside table.
It's full of small things. Torn bread, dark olives in oil, a bowl of clear broth, something soft and white that might be fresh cheese.
Simple food. Recovery food. The kind a doctor would suggest for a stomach that hasn't processed much in three weeks.
My stomach rolls at the sight of it. Not hunger. The opposite. A wave of nausea so thick it pushes up behind my teeth, and I have to close my eyes and breathe through my nose and count.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Three weeks of barely eating. My body should be screaming for food, should be throwing itself at that tray with both fists.
Instead, it's clenching shut, rejecting the idea of sustenance as if it forgot what food is for.
The nausea has been building since before the rescue, since the compound, since those first days when Elena warned me about the water and I stopped drinking it, forcing only a few sips here and there.
Stress, starvation, adrenaline crash. Take your pick.
The engine's running on fumes and apparently doesn't know how to accept fuel anymore.
"I can't." I push the tray back. "I'll throw up."
Elio doesn't argue. Moving to the edge of the bed he looks at the tray, then looks at me. Something passes behind those brown eyes, a decision made and committed to before I can track it.
He pulls me onto his lap.
And oh.
Oh.