Chapter 5 Violet
VIOLET
The silk against my cheek is cool and impossibly soft as it slides across my skin like water. It’s odd because I don’t own silk sheets. Can’t afford them. Don’t even like them. They’re too slippery, always made me think of sleeping on a cloud that’s trying to dump you onto the floor.
Where am I?
My eyelids weigh a thousand pounds each. I try to open them and nothing happens. Try again. The muscles refuse to cooperate, like they’ve forgotten how to take orders from my brain.
The headache hits next. A splitting, nauseating throb that radiates from the base of my skull and wraps around my temples like a vice. My mouth tastes like copper and ash. Cotton-dry, tongue thick and swollen.
What happened?
Fragments surface. Broken pieces reassembling in the wrong order.
Hands, catching me as I fell. The smell of expensive cologne and leather underneath. A voice, low and certain, I have you.
I have you.
My eyes fly open.
The room swims into focus slowly, shapes resolving through the fog of whatever is still swimming through my bloodstream.
The ceiling above me is impossibly high, and…
frescoed unless I’m hallucinating, angels and clouds and gold leaf that catches the afternoon light streaming through tall windows.
Beneath me, there’s a massive bed, its frame wooden and intricately carved, draped with a silk canopy overhead.
The furniture around me looks antique, and there’s an expensive Persian rug on the floor.
The room is beautiful, it’s also unfamiliar.
The memory crashes in all at once, a wave breaking over my head and dragging me under.
The café. His face across the table, those dark eyes watching me with an intensity I should have questioned. The coffee. My legs giving out. The world tilting sideways. Falling.
He drugged me.
The panic hits me full force, heart slamming against my ribs, breath coming in short, sharp gasps that don’t seem to bring in any air. I try to sit up, and the room spins violently, bile rising in my throat.
My body won’t cooperate.
He drugged me. The fucking psycho drugged me.
I push myself up on arms that shake like I’ve run a marathon, and the room tilts sideways. My legs feel as though they’re filled with wet sand. Heavy. Useless. I swing them over the edge of the bed, and the floor seems miles away.
Bathroom. I need a bathroom right now or the contents of my stomach will end up on the Persian rug.
There’s a door, half-open, white marble visible beyond. I stand, my legs buckling immediately, and I catch myself on the bedpost, fingers digging into carved wood. One step. Two. The floor pitches beneath me like the deck of a ship in a storm.
I make it to the bathroom just in time.
My knees hit cold marble as I lunge for the toilet, and then I’m vomiting, violent, heaving spasms that empty my stomach of everything.
The coffee. The ricotta pastry Rosa brought me.
Whatever else was in there, whatever he put in there.
The second wave hits before I can catch my breath.
Then a third. My fingers grip the porcelain rim, knuckles white, as my body tries to turn itself inside out.
When there’s nothing left, I keep heaving anyway. Dry, painful contractions that make my ribs ache and my eyes water. I slump against the toilet, face pressed to the cold rim, tears streaming down my face.
I hate this. Hate the weakness, hate the way my body has betrayed me, hate that somewhere in this building he’s probably watching me on a camera, seeing me like this. Broken and pathetic and helpless.
Get up.
I force myself to stand. My legs are still shaking but hold. I grip the edge of the marble sink and stare at my reflection in the mirror above it.
Except it’s not really a mirror. Not glass, but polished metal, slightly warped, the kind they use in prisons and psychiatric wards. The kind you can’t break into a weapon.
The air goes cold in my lungs.
I search the bathroom with shaking hands. Cabinets first. No razors. No scissors. No glass bottles of any kind. The soap dispensers are built into the wall, tamper-proof, pumping out some kind of unscented liquid.
Unscented. He knows. The sick bastard knows what fucking soap I use.
I find a toothbrush in a small holder by the sink.
Purple. Soft bristles. Exactly like the one I have at home, but brand new.
The toothpaste is the brand I use. Floss.
A hairbrush. Everything I would need, everything I would choose, as if someone walked through my apartment in Palermo and took notes.
I barely reach the sink before the dry heaves return, my whole body clenching around nothing, trying to purge something that isn’t there anymore.
He’s been watching me. That’s the only sane explanation.
After a minute, I make my way back to the bedroom, my brain finally coming back online.
I need to assess, analyze, find a weakness.
Every building has one. That’s what I do. I find the cracks, the stress points, the places where time and weather have eaten away at what was once solid. This room is no different. It’s just a structure. Just walls and windows and a door.
Just a cage.
Windows first. I cross to the nearest one, pressing my palms flat against the glass.
Too thick. I tap it with my knuckle, listening to the dull thud instead of the sharp ring of normal glass.
Laminated safety glass, probably. The kind they use in banks and jewelry stores.
The kind that won’t shatter even if you hit it with a hammer.
The frame is interesting. Old iron, the original hardware from what looks like a sixteenth-century palazzo.
But the joins are wrong. Modern welds hidden beneath aged paint.
Someone retrofitted these windows, reinforced them, made them look antique while giving them the structural integrity of a vault.
I try the latch and am overcome with triumph as it opens as it swings inward. Triumph which quickly vanishes when the mechanism catches on a metal bar bolted into the frame. Two inches of freedom, maybe three, just enough to let air in. Not enough to let a body out.
Door next. I cross the room and examine it carefully, running my fingers along the edges. No interior handle. The hinges are on the outside, a deliberate choice. The frame is solid steel, painted to look like wood.
He thought of everything.
I move to the walls. Press my ear against the stone. Knock, listening for the hollow sound that might indicate a hidden passage or a weak point. Nothing. The stone is thick, medieval construction, probably three feet at least. The kind of walls that survived centuries of warfare.
The kind of walls that won’t crumble no matter how hard I beat my fists against them.
I complete a circuit of the room, knocking every few feet. Solid. Solid. Solid. The plaster is new in places, covering what I assume are electrical conduits and surveillance equipment. But the stone beneath it is ancient and unforgiving.
This psycho converted a historical building into a prison. Preserved the beauty while engineering the function. Part of me, the part that spent years studying exactly this kind of architecture, is impressed by the craftsmanship. The rest wants to watch it burn.
Every detail has been planned. Professional. This isn’t something he threw together when he decided to take me. This is months of preparation. Maybe years.
How long has he been watching me? Am I the first? Or just the latest?
I need a weapon.
I scan the room with new eyes, cataloging everything. The furniture is heavy, solid wood, bolted to the floor in places. The lamps are mounted to the walls, wired directly into the electrical system. The books on the shelf—
The chair. By the window. A delicate-looking thing with curved legs and embroidered upholstery, the kind of chair that belongs in a museum.
It’s not bolted down.
I grab it with both hands and swing it at the window with every ounce of strength I have left.
The chair bounces back. The glass doesn’t crack. My shoulder jars painfully, the impact reverberating up through my arms and into my chest.
I swing again.
Same result.
And again, harder this time, putting my whole body into it. My arms burn. My shoulder screams. The glass absorbs the impact like it’s made of rubber, flexing slightly and springing back.
I try to break the chair itself, slamming it against the stone wall. The wood should splinter. Should crack. Should give me something sharp, something I can use. But it holds together like it’s made of iron instead of oak.
Because it probably is. Reinforced. Like everything else in this fucking room.
I grab books from the shelf. Dickens. Dante. Proust. Leather-bound, heavy, the kind of books rich people display without reading. I hurl them at the window one by one, watching each one bounce off the glass and fall to the floor.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Somewhere in the middle of this, I start crying. I don’t notice until the tears blur my vision and I have to wipe my face with the back of my hand. My fingers are shaking so badly I can barely grip the next book.
I throw it anyway.
Stopping means accepting. Stopping means admitting I’m trapped, that there’s no way out, that he’s won before I even had a chance to fight.
Keep trying. Keep trying. Keep—
The last book hits the floor. I stand in the middle of the chaos I’ve created, overturned chair, scattered books, my own ragged breathing too loud in the silent room, and I go down hard.
I sink to my knees on the Persian rug, and wipe my face, forcing the tears back. My gaze lands on the wardrobe dominating the far wall like a sentinel, dark and watchful.
It’s massive. Carved mahogany, the kind of piece that takes four men to move. I don’t want to open it.
I open it anyway.
Inside, I find clothes. Dozens of them, hanging in neat rows. I pull out the first pair of jeans with trembling hands and check the label.
Levi’s 721. Size twenty-seven. My exact brand. My exact size.