Chapter 18 Violet #2
I don’t buy into the framing. But I file away the information. The limits he set for himself. What that says about him.
When we get to a large stone terrace, it takes my breath away.
From here, the entire estate spreads below us like a map. The fortress rises behind us, ancient stone and modern security blended seamlessly. Gardens fall away in terraced levels—the rose beds, the orange grove, the dark mass of the maze. And beyond the walls, the distant gleam of sea.
It’s breathtaking.
It’s also completely inescapable.
The beauty is part of the containment. A gilded cage is still a cage.
We stand at the stone railing. His cologne threads through the jasmine and night air. Citrus and wood, maddeningly familiar now. His hand rests near mine on the sun-warmed stone.
Not touching. But close enough that I could close the distance. Choose the contact.
For a moment, I want to. The pull is physical, gravitational.
I stop myself.
Not ready to know why I wanted to.
Voices drift up from below.
Two guards move along a patrol path, their footsteps crunching on gravel. Elio straightens, attention shifting.
“Un momento.”
He moves to the edge of the terrace and calls down in rapid Italian. The guards approach, responding in equally rapid dialect. Elio descends three steps to speak with them more privately, leaving me momentarily alone.
I drift down onto the path below the terrace. Not far. Just far enough to feel something like autonomy.
Could I run?
I have more space now than I’ve had since he took me. Theoretically, I could sprint into the darkness, find a wall, climb it—
And then what?
Miles of darkness. Armed guards. No phone, no money, no passport. Nothing I can name beyond this place except my family, half a world away. Running isn’t escape.
Running is suicide.
A guard comes from around the corner. One I haven’t seen before. Younger, with a cruel set to his mouth. He circles toward me, and his gaze crawls over the green silk dress in a way that makes my skin prickle.
He says something in Italian. Fast. Dismissive.
My comprehension is spotty, but I catch enough. Americana. Puttana. Something about the boss being stregato. Bewitched.
Every instinct sharpens.
I know this type. Have dealt with a million men who think they can say anything, look at anything, because who’s going to stop them? My body tenses, getting ready for a fight.
I don’t get a chance to respond though.
Elio moves.
One moment he’s on the terrace. The next, he’s vaulted the railing in a single fluid motion and landed on the path beside us. The guard doesn’t have time to flinch before Elio’s hand closes around his throat and slams him into the stone wall.
Time stretches thin.
Frozen, I watch, unable to react fast enough to do anything but witness.
“Ripeti quello che hai detto.” Elio’s voice is ice. Completely calm. More terrifying than any shout. “Repeat what you said.”
The guard chokes. His feet scrabble for purchase against the gravel.
“Signore—I didn’t—”
“You looked at her.” Each word is a separate sentence. A separate crime. “You spoke to her. You insulted what’s mine.”
The other guard takes a step forward. “Capo, he didn’t mean—”
Elio’s gaze cuts his way. The guard shuts up immediately and steps back. Everyone understands. This is between the boss and the man who crossed an unspoken line.
He releases the guard’s throat, making him gasp for air, and stumble forward. Elio waits, lets him catch his balance, lets him think for one stupid second that it’s over, before he strikes.
A blow to the stomach that bends the guard double. A knee to the face that snaps his head back, blood spraying in a dark arc. The guard collapses, hands lifting in instinctive, useless defense.
Elio drops with him.
One knee on the man’s chest. He catches the guard’s arm and twists. The crack of breaking bone rings through the garden. The scream that follows is inhuman. Raw. The guard’s arm bends at an angle arms don’t bend, as he writhes, sobbing, while Elio’s expression remains completely blank.
No rage. No satisfaction.
Correction. Not punishment. A lesson.
“She is mine.” Elio’s voice carries clearly in the sudden silence. “Her face. Her body. The air she breathes. Not for you to look at. Not for you to consider. Erase her from your mind. Capisce?”
The guard can only sob.
The other two guards who were watching drag him away, muttering “idiota” under their breath. Blood smears the stone where he fell.
All that’s left is silence.
Elio stands slowly. His chest rises and falls too fast, the only sign that anything out of the ordinary just happened. There’s blood on his knuckles, on the cuffs of his pristine shirt. He straightens his collar, runs a bloody hand through his hair in a small, unconscious attempt at composure.
Then he turns.
Looking for me.
I’m still on the path. Haven’t moved. There are tiny droplets of blood on my silk dress, on my bare skin where the spray caught me.
Our eyes meet across the short distance.
I should be terrified.
A man’s arm was just broken for an insult. For a look. The violence was disproportionate, brutal, a clear glimpse of the monster I always thought him to be.
But what I feel isn’t fear.
It’s the sharp, almost physical realization that for the length of that encounter, I was absolutely safe. The guard looked at me like I was nothing, called me a whore, and Elio made sure he would never do it again.
My mind splits down the middle.
No one has ever responded to someone disrespecting me with that level of ferocity. Not my brothers, who taught me to fight my own battles. Not anyone.
And yet. Sean and Danny would be horrified to see this moment. Would lose their minds if they knew I’m standing here with blood on my dress, watching my kidnapper flex his broken knuckles, and the first thing I felt wasn’t revulsion.
I’m a Murphy. Raised in a loving Catholic family with clear lines of right and wrong. My father, if he were still alive, would have a lot to say about what just happened. About my response to it.
But at the same time… some primal part of me responds to the raw, absolute nature of the protection. I’ve been protected before. Loved before. But never like this. Never with bones broken and blood spilled to send a message.
Warmth spreading low in my belly. An unwelcome pulse of arousal layered over shock.
You’re sick. You know that, right? You’re fucking sick.
But knowing it doesn’t change what my body is doing. Doesn’t change my nipples hardening or the heat building between my thighs while I stare at his split knuckles and think about what those hands did to me last night.
Elio steps toward me. Stops just short as his eyes search my face. Braced for fear. Disgust. Rejection.
He doesn’t get any of those. Not in the clean ways he expected.
“That wasn’t about respect.” My voice comes out quieter than I intend. But steady. “Or discipline.”
“No.”
“It was about me.”
“Yes.”
No argument. No justification. Just honest answers.
“You broke his arm because he spoke to me wrong.”
“I broke his arm because he spoke about you like you were something to be dismissed. Because—” His voice cracks. “Because I would kill a man for touching you. And I wanted him to understand that.”
There it is.
The fear I didn’t expect. Not fear of the violence. Fear of what it reveals. Fear of what I’m seeing now.
“Mi dispiace.” The Italian slips out, rough and broken. “I’m sorry. Not for him. He earned what he got. But for making you witness it. For showing you what lives under—” He gestures at himself. The tailored suit. The careful composure. “I know what this makes me. I just—”
This is the weakness you’ve been hunting.
The strategic part of my brain latches onto it. He’s off-balance. His need makes him predictable. With the right words and pressure, I could make him do almost anything.
That’s power. Strategy. Survival.
But I can’t bring myself to twist the knife right now.
Not while he’s this open and bleeding.
“You could have killed him.” I push anyway. Testing. “Over words. That’s not rational.”
“No. It’s not.”
“You know that.”
“I know exactly what I am, Violet.” His eyes hold mine. Dark and bottomless and completely exposed. “I don’t try to excuse it.”
The silence stretches. I should be pressing harder. Finding the angles. Building strategies.
Instead, the most human thing in me surfaces.
“He called me a bitch.” The edge in my voice isn’t just about tonight. “Looked at me like I was nothing. Like I was just—just something someone fucks when they’re bored.”
It’s about every time a man dismissed me. Every foreman who talked over my expertise. Every colleague who assumed that the pretty girl couldn’t possibly know structural engineering. Every moment my competence was treated as a joke.
Elio’s response is immediate. “You’re not nothing.” He steps closer. “You’re—”
He stops.
Can’t finish.
I watch him struggle with words that would define me to him. Words he won’t say because saying them would be too much. Too binding. Too revealing.
The loaded silence fills with jasmine and copper and the echo of the guard’s screams.
“I don’t know what to do with any of this.” The admission tears out of me. Maybe the most truthful thing I’ve said since I woke up in his fortress.
“What do you mean?”
I gesture helplessly at the blood on his knuckles, at the smear on the stone where a man just lost the use of his arm, at the garden that’s both beautiful and a prison. At him—monster and man, captor and protector.
“You. The violence. The—” I swallow hard. “The way I’m reacting to it. I don’t know what to do with it.”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“You don’t have to do anything with it,” he says carefully. “I’m not asking you for anything I have no right to—”
He can’t finish that sentence either. Because we both know the answer.
Everything. He’s asking for everything.
Our gaze locks.
I see both sides of him laid bare. The obsession that makes him dangerous and the vulnerability that makes him human. The monster who breaks bones without hesitation and the man who apologizes for losing control. The captor who took my freedom and the protector who would kill for me.
Both truths. Side by side.
Both terrifying.
Not because I can’t bear them. But because I don’t know which one my own responses are drawn to anymore. I should be calculating. Building strategies. Planning.
“I want to go inside.” My voice shakes. Just enough to betray how deep this has affected me.
He nods.
Doesn’t offer his hand. Seems to know I can’t take it right now. Not without it meaning too much.
That restraint is another small kindness. Another crack in my defenses.
We walk back to the fortress side by side. Not captor ahead, hostage behind. Level. Equal.
Both bleeding in different ways. Him from split knuckles and cracked control. Me from realizing I want to be the reason he loses it again.
I’m so, so fucked.