Chapter 11 Violet
VIOLET
The days blur together like watercolors left in the rain.
Eight. Maybe ten. I’ve stopped counting by sunrises and started counting by him.
He brings breakfast at eight. Coffee, warm bread, eggs with herbs, fruit sliced thin and arranged like someone gives a damn about presentation.
Every morning, the same ritual. The lock clicking, the door opening, his footsteps crossing to the chair by my window.
The chair that’s starting to look like it belongs to him, like some territorial marker he’s left in my space.
He talks while I eat. Yesterday he talked about Sicily’s history.
Its wars and saints and earthquakes. Families who ruled cities like private kingdoms. Blood feuds that burned for generations.
Bodies buried beneath foundations that tourists walk over without knowing.
Everything he says about long-dead barons sounds like a blueprint.
Like he’s teaching me something about power, about how things work now, and I’m too slow to catch the lesson.
Lunch is always with him, he hasn’t missed a single day. While dinner is served in the dining room. With me sitting on his lap. His hands feeding me bite by bite while my body learns the shape of his chest against my back.
I tell myself this is conditioning. Classic Stockholm shit, the kind they warn you about in those true crime podcasts I used to listen to while restoring water-damaged frescoes. Captives bond with captors. It’s survival instinct, not affection. Not anything real.
But my muscles stop tensing quite as violently when he touches me.
That’s its own horror.
The first time I noticed it, I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. His palm settled on my waist during dinner, and instead of going rigid, my body just... accepted it, leaned into him. Like my nervous system had decided he was safe before my brain got a vote.
I’m stronger now. Less shaking when I walk. The dizziness has faded to a background hum instead of a constant roar. There’s color back in my cheeks, steadiness in my hands.
The more I eat, the more dangerous my own reactions feel.
Because I can no longer blame everything on starvation.
Today the smell hits me before I open my eyes. Coffee and citrus, his cologne threading underneath like a bass note I can’t unhear. My stomach growls before my brain fully wakes, Pavlov’s bitch responding to her captor’s scent.
Disgusting.
He’s already in the chair. Legs crossed at the ankles, dark suit perfectly pressed, morning light catching the sharp angles of his face. The tray sits on the small table between us, steam curling from the coffee cup.
I push myself up against the headboard. Don’t thank him. Don’t acknowledge the food, even as my mouth floods with want.
“The Normans took Sicily in 1091,” he says, like we’re picking up a conversation we never started. “Before that, it was Arab. Before that, the Byzantine, Greek, Phoenician. Everyone wanted this island.” He lifts his coffee cup, takes a slow sip. “Everyone still does.”
I reach for the bread. Tear off a piece. The crust shatters exactly as he described that first night, and of course he was right about that too.
“You talk like you were there for all of this.”
His mouth curves. Not quite a smile. “My family has long memories.”
“Must make Thanksgiving awkward. ‘Hey, remember when great-great-grandpa murdered the Byzantines?’”
“We’re Catholic. Christmas is more our style.”
I snort before I can stop myself. The sound surprises us both.
He sets his cup down. Watches me with those dark eyes that seem to log everything. The way I’m sitting. The amount of bread I’ve eaten. The slight loosening of my shoulders that I didn’t give permission for.
“What do you actually do, Elio?” I make his name sound like an insult. “The foundation. The investments. The logistics.”
“It’s complicated.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer you’re getting.”
He reaches for the tray and slides the plate of eggs toward me. His fingers brush the back of my hand, causing heat to flare up my arm before I can pull away.
The mattress dips as he shifts, settling more comfortably in the chair that’s somehow migrated closer to my bed over the past week. I didn’t notice when it moved. Didn’t notice a lot of things until they were already different.
My body lists toward him automatically, as if gravity has rearranged itself around his presence.
I yank myself back. Cheeks burning.
His gaze tracks the movement. Tracks the flush. Tracks every goddamn thing.
Later that morning, I push harder.
“You said the foundation vetted me.” I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed, coffee cup cradled in both hands like a weapon I haven’t figured out how to use yet. “Who are you to it?”
He watches me for a long beat. That considering look I’ve learned means he’s deciding how much truth to give me.
“My full name is Elio Marchetti.”
I’m stunned into silence.
Marchetti. As in the Marchetti Foundation. The letterhead on my grant paperwork. The signature on the official emails. The name stamped across the cathedral’s restoration budget like a brand of ownership.
He wasn’t just some rich board member playing patron of the arts.
He is the board.
He told you from the beginning. You just didn’t hear it.
The trap snaps tighter in my mind. If he is the money, the building, the guards, the cameras… if Marchetti means this house and everything in it, then there is nowhere within these walls that isn’t him.
My gaze flicks to the window. To the men I’ve seen on the grounds, carrying weapons they don’t bother to hide.
This is not just philanthropy.
“The foundation funds cultural preservation across the Mediterranean.” His voice is smooth. Rehearsed. “We also have interests in shipping. Import-export. Real estate.”
“And the guys with the guns?”
He brushes a speck of dust off his pristine suit. “Security is a necessary expense.”
Bullshit.
But I file the information away. Every evasion tells me something. Every smooth deflection marks another crack I can probe later.
The next day, he takes me to the solarium for lunch.
Glass walls stretch toward a ceiling fogged with condensation. Greenery everywhere, palms and ferns and flowering jasmine that climbs wires in spirals of white and green. The scent is so thick it feels like something I can drink, syrup-sweet and dizzying.
Warmth soaks into my skin immediately. Real sunlight, not the filtered gray of my bedroom. The air is humid, alive, and my body responds before my brain can object.
My shoulders drop, my breath comes easier, and my chest loosens.
This is a terrarium, I think, looking at the careful arrangement of plants and the climate controls humming somewhere behind the walls. I’m just another specimen he’s keeping alive.
He watches me take it in with that patient look he’s got nailed down.
“You need sunlight,” he says. Like it’s medical advice instead of another cage disguised as kindness. “Vitamin D. Fresh air. Your skin was starting to look dull.”
“Thanks, WebMD.”
But I don’t leave. Can’t make myself leave, not when the warmth is seeping into muscles that have been tight for days, not when the green is so vivid it hurts my eyes after all that stone and dark wood.
He wants me healthy, wants my skin soft, my eyes clear, my body responding.
He’s right about what I need, and that’s the worst part.
Lunch becomes routine here. A small table near the windows, barely big enough for two. When I shift, our knees brush, and I have to clench my jaw against the contact.
Jasmine presses against the glass behind him while the light catches his face at an angle that makes the expression on his annoyingly handsome face look almost gentle.
I flay myself mentally for the thought.
After lunch, he walks me to the library.
“You’re free to use both.” He delivers this like a gift. “The door to your room won’t be locked anymore.”
But there’s a guard outside. Always. Watching my every move, following at a distance as I drift between rooms. The illusion of freedom with surveillance built in.
In the library, I search first. Building plans.
Weapons. Anything that might come useful.
What I find instead are shelves of art history, restoration manuals, tomes on philosophy, and finance.
Crime histories, too. Books about the Cosa Nostra, the ‘Ndrangheta, organizations I’ve only read about in newspapers.
There’s also a small shelf with romance novels I can’t help but flick through.
No personal photos. No casual clutter. Everything curated. Ordered.
The man has no loose threads in his own home.
I end up reading anyway because the books are familiar ground. Safe territory in a world where nothing else is. Curling into a leather armchair with a restoration manual from 1890, I lose three hours to techniques I’ll probably never use again.
When I look up, he’s in the doorway. Watching.
“How long have you been there?”
“Long enough.” He steps inside. “You bite your lip when you’re concentrating.”
Bile rises in my throat. I put the book away and get up, walking out without a word. I didn’t find anything there anyway.
The studio is worse. Nothing useful. Nothing that could draw blood. But there are other interesting things in there. Things that don’t belong to me.
Canvases half-finished, stacked against the wall. Charcoal studies of hands, sketched in confident strokes. I pull one out, study the shading, the way he’s captured the tendons and veins, the curl of fingers around something invisible.
My fingers.
I compare my own hand to the drawing. The proportions match. The knuckle scar from a chisel slip from a few years ago.
It’s infuriating that he’s good.
That the man who kidnapped me can also make something beautiful with his hands.
I frame studying his work as tactical. Understanding my captor. Learning his pressure points like I learn the stress fractures in old stone.