Chapter 17 Violet
VIOLET
Idon't look at Elena's door. That's the deal I've made with myself.
It's two in the morning, the hallway is dark, the marble is ice under my bare feet, and I am not going to look at Elena's door.
I've looked at it a hundred times today.
Every single time I've passed this hallway.
On the way to the bathroom, the kitchen, the garden, back again.
My head turned like it was on a string, like her room has its own gravitational pull and my stupid neck never got the memo that there's nothing to see.
The door is closed. It's been closed every time I walked past it in the last couple of days.
I look anyway.
Fuck.
It's just a door. Oak, six-panel, brass handle, identical to every other door in this wing. It doesn't know it's a grave marker. It doesn't know that the woman behind decided that surviving wasn't the same as living and she was done pretending otherwise.
Some cages you never leave. Even when the door opens.
My stomach rolls. Not the dull, manageable nausea I've been white-knuckling through for weeks.
This is the middle-of-the-night kind, which is a fun new development, because apparently mornings aren't enough and the nights are fair game now too.
Three weeks of starvation working its way out of my system on a delay, like my organs got the recovery memo six weeks late and are now over-correcting with the enthusiasm of a freshman pulling an all-nighter before finals.
I press my hand flat against the wall and breathe through my nose.
In. Out. In.
The nausea passes. The hallway doesn't.
Elena was stronger than me. Fiercer. She lasted longer in that place, took more, gave less. And then she came out. She had a bed and clean water and food that wasn't stale bread and a door that locked from the inside, and none of it was enough.
If the compound could reach past all of that and still get her...
Don't.
I turn away from the door and walk back to Elio's bedroom. Our bedroom.
There's a strip of light under the door. Warm and thin, bleeding across the dark marble like a lifeline.
He's awake. I hope I didn't wake him up when I got up.
Although the man sleeps in shifts like a submarine captain, anyway.
Three hours here, two hours there, always one ear open, one hand within reach of something that could kill.
I used to find that threatening. Right now, standing barefoot in the dark with my stomach trying to turn itself inside out and Elena's closed door behind me like a period at the end of a sentence I can't finish, it's a rope someone threw off the edge.
I walk toward the light.
He's not in bed when I open the door, but rather sitting on the edge of it, papers fanned across the duvet. He's wearing gray sweatpants and nothing else, hair pushed back from his face like he's been running his hands through it.
He looks up when I come in, those dark eyes sweeping me head to feet and back up in a single pass, reading my face, my posture, the set of my jaw, the fact that I'm awake at two in the morning in nothing but an oversized t-shirt I dug up from his closet.
He's doing that thing he does. Processing every variable, running calculations I can't see, deciding whether to speak or wait.
He waits.
Good.
Crossing the room, I watch his eyes track me the way they tracked me through the hedge maze, steady and focused and completely, utterly still.
The papers are spread across the bed like he's been studying them all night, even though I've been gone less than half an hour. Typed documents, photographs, something with a map, no, a layout of a building I don't recognize. He sees me looking but doesn't move to cover them.
I push them off the bed, watching them slide off the duvet and scatter across the floor. Elio doesn't react, his gaze drifting once to the papers now on the floor, then back to me.
Putting both my hands on his shoulders, I push him back onto the mattress.
He goes.
Six-foot-five, two-hundred-twenty pounds of violence wrapped in muscle, and he lets me push him back onto the mattress like I’m the only force that matters.
I straddle him. My knees on either side of his hips, palms flat on his chest. His heart is slamming under my hand, steady and heavy and alive.
My fingers find his wrists and I drag them up, pressing them into the pillow above his head.
His hands are twice the size of mine. Corded forearms, dark hair, tendons shifting as he fights the instinct to take control.
He could break my grip one-handed. A flick. Less than that.
He doesn't.
"Don't move."
His eyes go black. Not the polished, controlled dark I know. The dark think behind that. The one with no leash. His fingers spread wide against the pillow, straining as his pulse hammers under my thumbs.
"Violet?" My name sounds like a question and a surrender at the same time.
"Don't. Move."
His jaw sets. Every muscle in his arms and chest locking into place, the effort rolling through him like a tremor. The sheer visible cost of holding still when every single thing about this man is engineered to take.
I hold his gaze, and he lets me.
You'd think that wouldn't be the thing that does it.
You'd think it would be the feel of him under me, hard and warm and barely contained, or the way his breathing has changed, shallow and rough and not quite under his control.
And those things matter. But he's looking at me like I'm the only person who's ever asked this of him.
And he's giving it.
I lean down and kiss him slowly. My mouth opening, my tongue finding his. He strains upward for half a second before he catches himself and presses back into the mattress. His hands flex under mine. Not pulling, not resisting, just there. Alive with all the things he's not doing.
I sit up and pull the shirt over my head.
His eyes drop to my body, his expression shifting to raw, hungry and desperately controlled. I watch the muscles in his arms cord as his fingers dig into the pillow above his head.
Good.
My fingers drag across his chest. His heart slams against my palm so hard I swear it shakes the bed.
The skin under my hands is warm and smooth over hard ridges of muscle and old scars, and I'm... I'm a stranger to myself right now.
Every point of contact registering at twice the volume it should.
My skin too aware of itself, of him, of the heat between us.
My nipples are tight, almost painful, and I haven't even taken my underwear off yet.
I've had sex before. With him. And before him, with people who don't matter enough to name right now.
But my body has never done this. This full-system override, where every nerve ending is dialed up to a frequency that makes my soul ache.
Six weeks of damage working its way to the surface, probably.
Weeks of someone else controlling what happened to me, and now every nerve is over-correcting, flooding me with any sensation it can find.
Because Elena can't choose anything anymore.
Swallowing back a sob I rise up on my knees.
Reach between us. His cock is hard against my hand through the fabric, and the sound he makes when I touch him sends a pulse of heat through me so sharp it almost hurts.
I pull at his sweatpants, and he lifts his hips to let me push them down without being asked.
His cock springs free, thick and heavy, and I take him in my hand, making his hips jerk once before he locks them down.
His wrists twist under my grip. Not trying to escape. Fighting himself.
"Eyes on me," I say, and my voice doesn't sound like mine.
His gaze snaps to mine and stays. Dark brown, nearly black, cracked wide open.
I push my underwear aside and line him up to my entrance. I'm not fully ready, but I need this. Need to feel something that isn’t grief and guilt and the ghost of Elena’s closed door.
The sound that comes out of me when I sink down on him isn't pretty.
It's sharp and full and somewhere between a gasp and a sob, my eyes stinging instantly.
What the fuck? I'm not crying. I refuse to be crying right now.
Except my body doesn't give a shit about my refusal because tears are sliding down my cheeks before I've even started to move, and it's not pain, it's just the sheer overwhelming volume of feeling after so long of feeling nothing but terror.
I start to move, setting the pace. Slow.
Rolling. Grinding down on him like I can fuck the grief out of my body.
Every drag of his cock inside me sends sparks up my spine.
My hands brace on his chest, nails digging in.
His wrists are still pinned above his head, trembling with the effort of staying there.
His head tips back against the pillow, the long line of his throat exposed, tendons standing out.
His hands are white-knuckled above his head, fingers twisted into the pillowcase so hard I can hear the fabric strain.
Every muscle in him cords as he fights the instinct to take over, to flip me, and set his own rhythm.
"Violet." His hands are still above his head, twisted into the pillowcase as he warns me. A man running out of discipline.
“Don’t move. Just feel me.”
He groans, deep, guttural, the sound vibrating through his chest into mine. I ride him harder. The wet sound of us fills the room. My thighs shake. Tears slide down my cheeks and drip onto his skin. I don’t wipe them. I let them fall.
Elena is dead.
"Violet." He says my name like a thing he's trying to hold on to it. Like it's the last word he's allowed to say before whatever's barely leashed behind his ribs breaks free and makes decisions for him.
I’m here. Alive. Riding the man who tore the world apart to find me while she chose the door.
The guilt is sharp and vicious and I fuck him through it. Harder. Faster. Chasing the pressure building low in my belly because if I stop moving I’ll have to feel everything at once.
He’s trembling beneath me. Arms locked, jaw clenched, every muscle straining as he fights the instinct to flip me and take. His cock throbs inside me, thick and hot, hitting just the right spot with every roll of my hips.
I lean down and bite his shoulder, making him hiss as his hips jerk up once before he catches himself and forces them back down.
“Come on,” I whisper against his skin, voice cracking. “Feel how alive I am. Feel how much I need you right now.”
His control snaps.
Not all the way. Just enough.
His hands break free from the pillow and grip my hips, bruising, desperate, but he doesn’t flip me. He lets me set the pace while he thrusts up to meet me, deep and relentless. The slap of skin on skin is loud. Messy. My tears keep falling. His breath is ragged against my neck.
The orgasm builds like a wave I can’t outrun.
It starts where we’re joined and rips outward, sharp and overwhelming, almost painful in its intensity.
I come with a sob that tears out of my ruined throat, clenching around him so hard my vision blurs.
He follows right after, buried deep, groaning my name as he spills inside me.
I collapse onto his chest.
He wraps both arms around me immediately, holding me so tight my ribs ache. I don’t care. I bury my face in his neck and cry. Ugly, gasping, real. Not polite tears.
I'm safe and alive and Elena is dead.
"Why did she do it?" I choke out against his skin.
His arms tighten. One hand strokes my hair, slow and steady.
“I don’t know,” he says quietly. No bullshit. No pretty lies. Just the truth.
"She was so much stronger than me," I whisper. "The things they did to her… Daily. She was strong and fierce and..."
His hand stills on my back for a second, then resumes its slow path.
"And it wasn't enough. The compound didn't kill her, but it still got her in the end."
"Violet."
"I know."
"She made her choice."
"I know." And I do. I know that the compound didn't put a gun to Elena's head or a knife in her hand. It just built the architecture of a cage so thorough, that even when the walls came down, the blueprints stayed. I know because I carry blueprints too. Different ones. But I know how they work.
"They never raped me. They said I was reserved for someone up top. They still beat me though, had to make sure I was going to submit when time came to it."
A long pause. His heartbeat under my ear, steady and heavy.
"You survived, baby."
I breathe in.
"I did, but it feels like I was handed a cheat code while everyone else paid full price." A new tear rolls down my cheek. "I survived because of Matt."
Elio goes still.
"Matt kept me together in there." My fingers trace the edge of a faded scar on his ribs. "I don't know if I would have..."
I stop. Start again.
"I know," Elio says. His voice is even. A perfectly flat surface.
I look up at him. His face in the low lamplight, every angle sharp, every expression locked behind something I can't read.
"I was going to say, and because of you."
His breathing stops as his body tenses beneath me.
"Both of you got me out."
He says nothing, but his arms tighten around me as his jaw works against my hair.
I'm drifting. Almost gone. The heaviness pulling me under like warm water, finally, finally surrendering to the exhaustion it's been hoarding for weeks.
"I had a meeting a couple of days ago," he says. "Following a lead about the American."
"Following a lead."
I prop myself up on one elbow. "Did you find anything?"
He meets my eyes.
"Nothing concrete."
I lie back down, my eyes closing with disappointment.
"I need you to trust me, Violet," he says.
I want to reply that I do, but my eyelids are heavy and words are hard to form, and before I know it, I'm asleep.