Chapter 10 Violet
VIOLET
The caliper is still in my hand when I wake.
My fingers are cramped around it, locked in a death grip that takes actual effort to break.
I pry them open one by one, knuckles aching, joints stiff from hours of clutching metal while I slept.
The pointed ends have left deep red grooves in my palm, half-moon indentations that throb when I flex my hand.
Good. At least something still works.
I try to sit up but the room tilts and spins, then goes black at the edges like someone’s pulling a hood over my head. Grabbing the headboard for support I freeze, waiting for my vision to clear, waiting for the floor to stop moving.
Breathing feels like hard work now, each inhale shallow and uneven. My stomach stopped growling yesterday. Or the day before. Now it’s just a slow, gnawing emptiness that feels less like hunger and more like my insides are eating themselves. Dissolving from the center out.
The light through the windows says morning, but the hours keep slipping away from me. I fall asleep in the afternoon and wake in the dark. Fall asleep in the dark and wake to gray dawn. Time has become unreliable, warped by the fog that’s settled over everything.
I thought I was being dramatic. Thought I was proving a point, making a statement, winning some tiny battle in a war I’m clearly losing.
Now I know the truth.
I’m close to doing permanent damage. The kind that doesn’t heal. The kind that leaves marks on your organs, your brain, your heart.
I can’t kill him if I can’t even stand up. This isn’t a protest anymore. It’s suicide. And I’m not ready to die. Not yet. Not until I’ve drawn blood.
The lock clicks.
I don’t move. Can’t, really. I’m still half-propped against the headboard, my body a collection of aches and tremors that doesn’t feel like mine anymore.
He steps through the door. Immaculate, as always.
Charcoal suit, pristine white shirt, not a hair out of place.
He looks like he just walked out of a magazine spread while I’m lying here in the same henley I’ve worn for a week, greasy hair plastered to my skull, smelling like something that crawled into a corner to die.
“Dinner is at eight.” His voice is calm. Pleasant. “You’ll be ready.” Not a question. “Will you need help getting dressed?” he asks, his voice too careful, not mocking, not a power play, like he’s holding himself back from more.
I open my mouth to tell him to fuck off. What comes out is a rasp that barely qualifies as speech.
“I can dress my own damn self.”
Even those six words exhaust me. My chest heaves like I just ran a marathon.
He doesn’t argue. Just studies me with those dark eyes, his gaze moving over every inch of me. The pallor of my skin, the tremor in my hands, the way I’m breathing too fast and too shallow, like my lungs have forgotten how to work.
“You can’t stand without the wall.”
I want to prove him wrong. Want to swing my legs over the edge of the bed, plant my feet on the marble, and walk out of this room just to spite him.
But I don’t move.
He tilts his head slightly, considering.
“The chef has prepared chicken. Roasted with lemon and herbs, the skin perfectly crisp.” His voice drops, goes soft and warm and unbearably specific. “Fresh bread from the oven. The crust shatters when you tear it apart. Inside, it’s still warm. Soft.”
My mouth floods with saliva. I can’t stop it. Can’t control it.
“Cold water with ice. It’ll shock your throat going down, but you’ll feel it spread through your whole body.” He pauses. “Vegetables roasted in olive oil, a little lemon, salt. Nothing heavy.”
My stomach twists so hard I actually gasp. Cramps that feel like fists squeezing my insides, wringing me out.
He hears it. Of course he does.
“Eight o’clock, tesoro.” He moves toward the door. “I’ll send help.”
“Go to—”
But he’s already gone. The lock clicks behind him.
I lie there, shaking, my body screaming for everything he just described. The betrayal is complete. My own flesh has turned traitor, flooding with want at the sound of his voice.
Tonight I eat or I break for real.
Possibly both.
The bathroom is no more than twelve feet away, but it still takes me five minutes to get there.
I roll out of bed and land on my hands and knees on the cold marble. The impact jars through my wrists, my shoulders, my spine. I stay there for a long moment, head hanging, breathing through the wave of dizziness that threatens to pull me under.
Then I crawl. Hands and knees across the floor, fingers gripping the edges of the Persian for leverage, until I manage to drag myself to the doorframe. I use it to pull myself upright and cling to it until the room stops spinning.
The sink is my next target. I lurch toward it, catch myself on the edge, and stare into the polished metal that serves as a mirror.
Jesus Christ.
The woman looking back at me is a ghost. Sallow skin stretched over bones that jut too sharply. Dark circles like bruises under eyes that look too big for my face. My cheekbones could cut glass. My collarbones are visible even through the stained henley.
My hair is the worst of it. An oily, matted nest that hasn’t seen a brush in nearly a week. The auburn looks dull. Dead. Like dried blood left too long in the sun.
You look like you’re dying because you are dying, idiot.
I turn away from my reflection and start to strip.
The henley peels off like a second skin, stiff with dried sweat and the ghost of orange juice. My jeans are harder. My fingers fumble with the button, too weak to manage fine motor control. The denim scrapes down my legs and pools at my feet. Underwear. Bra. All gone.
Every piece of clothing I was wearing when he took me. My last connection to the life before.
I leave them in a heap on the cold tile and don’t look back.
The shower is massive. Glass walls, marble floor, rainfall head that’s bigger than Sal’s pizza from back home. I turn the handle and step under the spray before the water has time to warm.
Cold hits me like a slap. I gasp, stumble and slide down the tile wall until I’m sitting on the floor.
Water pounds into the crown of my head, runs in rivers down my face, soaks through the tangled mess of my hair.
I draw my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around them, making myself as small as possible.
Okay. Okay. You can do this.
I lift my arms to reach my hair.
They shake. Violently. My forearms burn with the effort of just holding them up, and my hands are useless, trembling so badly I can barely make a fist. I manage to get my fingers into the wet tangles, but I can’t work them through. Can’t find the strength to scrub.
The tears come without warning.
Not sobs. I don’t have the energy for sobs. Just water leaking from my eyes, mixing with the shower spray, sliding down my cheeks. I’m crying and I can’t even do that properly.
You stupid, stubborn idiot. Look at you. Look at what you’ve done to yourself.
I let my arms fall. Press my forehead against my knees. The water drums against my back, warm now, steam rising around me.
I don’t know how long I sit there.
Long enough for the water to go from warm to hot to lukewarm again. Long enough for my skin to prune and my tears to dry up. Long enough for me to lose track of where I end and the steam begins.
The shower door slides open.
I jerk upright, or try to. My arms cross over my chest, a reflexive cover that’s laughably inadequate. My limbs feel like wet sand, heavy and slow.
“Get out!” The words crack in my throat. “Get the fuck out!”
He stands just outside the spray, shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows, expression infuriatingly calm. Like he walked in on something mundane. Like I’m not naked and crying on his shower floor.
“You’ve been in here for thirty minutes, Violet.”
“I said—”
“You can’t wash your hair.” Not a question. A diagnosis. Clinical and precise. “Stop pretending you can.”
I want to argue. Want to spit venom at him, tell him I’d rather drown than let him touch me. But my arms are still trembling where they’re crossed over my breasts. Pathetic. Useless. The evidence of my failure is written all over my body.
Silence betrays me louder than any words.
He steps into the shower space. Kicks off his shoes, leather, expensive, probably ruined now. His trouser hems darken as water soaks into the fabric.
Instead of facing me, he kneels behind me. Settles onto the wet marble at my back, giving me his chest instead of his eyes.
“Lean your head back.”
I should refuse. Should drag myself up and out and away from him, even if it means crawling naked across the bathroom floor.
Instead, my neck gives up. My head tips back against his thigh, because I literally cannot hold it up anymore.
His hands slide into my hair.
Fingers firm and sure, working shampoo into my scalp with steady, circular motions. The pressure is perfect. Not too hard, not too soft. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
And then his smell hits me.
Expensive soap. Clean cotton. Warm citrus and wood and leather, subtle and complex. He’s close enough now that every inhale fills my lungs with him.
Heat coils low in my stomach. Not hunger. Something else. Something sharp and wrong that has no business existing in this moment. My thighs clench involuntarily.
I freeze in horror.
No. Absolutely not. This is not—
I order my body to stop. Command every nerve ending to shut down, to remember who he is, what he’s done. The betrayal of my own flesh is worse than the nudity.
His fingers pause just for a fraction of a second, the air shifting as he inhales, sharper than before.
He feels it. The tiny shiver that has nothing to do with cold.
I wait for the taunt. The smirk. The smug acknowledgment that my body has turned traitor in the worst possible way.
It doesn’t come.
He just resumes washing. Slower now. More focused. His fingers working through the tangles carefully, and the silence is so much worse than mockery would be.
If he taunted me, I could hate him cleanly.