Chapter 26 Violet
VIOLET
“Where’s Elio?” I ask the guards as they guide me out of the room.
Nothing.
“Where are you taking me?”
“You’ll find out.”
This is routine, I tell myself as we walk down the corridors. He’s probably dealing with whatever emergency pulled him away. They’re bringing me to him. This is fine.
But the coldness in their eyes says otherwise. These aren’t the guards who nodded at me in the hallways, who pretended not to notice when I wandered the villa barefoot. These men don’t see me as Elio’s. They see me as cargo.
“One minute to change.” The lead guard steps aside, gesturing toward my bedroom. “We leave in sixty seconds.”
My hands shake as I close the door. Through it, I hear them conferring in rapid Italian. Too low and fast for me to catch more than fragments.
Focus. Think.
I strip off Elio’s shirt and pull on jeans, a thick sweater, my boots. Practical clothes. Armor. Some part of me knows what I’m doing, choosing clothes I can run in, fight in, survive in.
The mirror catches my reflection, and I freeze.
His marks are still on my skin. A bruise low on my neck, almost hidden by the sweater. Lips still swollen from his mouth.
Less than eight hours ago, I was safe in his bed, in his arms. Now I’m being escorted by strangers to god knows where, and no one will tell me anything.
He said to stay. He said he’d come back.
“Time’s up.”
I open the door.
The guards flank me as we move through the corridors. One ahead, two behind. Every staff member we pass averts their eyes.
The villa has changed. The warmth I’d started to feel in these halls, the safety I’d begun to believe in… gone. The ancient stone feels cold now. Hostile. Like the building itself knows something I don’t.
“Where are we going?”
“Just following orders.”
“Elio said to wait for him here.”
“Plans changed. He needs you with him.”
We exit through the front entrance, setting sun bathing the world in orange and crimson. A black SUV idles in the drive, engine rumbling, windows tinted so dark I can’t see inside.
This doesn’t feel right.
But what choice do I have? Fight three armed men? Run? To where?
The lead guard opens the back door. I climb in.
One guard is already sitting in the back, the other climbs in after me, caging me in.
I’m wedged between them before I can process what’s happening.
Their bulk presses against my shoulders, hot and suffocating despite the air conditioning blasting too cold.
Gun oil and cheap cologne burn my nostrils as the door slams shut.
The locks engage with a heavy thunk that vibrates through my bones.
Trapped.
The SUV pulls away, and I crane my neck to watch the villa recede through the tinted glass. The fortress that held me captive. The prison that became something else. The place where I chose him.
It shrinks and shrinks until the road curves, and it’s gone.
At first, I recognize the route. The winding coastal road toward Palermo, the same one Elio and I took when he took me shopping, then to the restaurant.
Then we turn. Away from the city. Away from anything familiar.
“Where are we going?”
Silence.
“I asked you a question.”
“Not your concern.”
The guard to my left shifts, his hand moving to rest on his thigh. Near his gun.
Is this Cicero? My mind races through possibilities, each worse than the last. Did he find out Elio broke the engagement? Is this punishment? Is Elio—
I can’t finish that thought.
The guards are tense. I feel it in the rigidity of their shoulders, see it in the way they check the mirrors every few seconds, catch the glances they exchange over my head.
The driver takes another sharp turn, smaller road now, trees pressing close on both sides, branches scraping the roof like fingers. We’re heading into the hills, away from the coast, away from everything.
Wrong direction. Wrong energy. Every instinct I’ve honed from years of learning to read dangerous situations is screaming at me.
“Something’s wrong.” I don’t mean to say it out loud.
“Be quiet.”
“Tell me what’s happening—”
The guard on my right grabs my arm, squeezing hard enough to bruise. “I said be quiet.”
The road narrows. Through the windshield, I see nothing but trees and shadows and a stretch of empty asphalt disappearing into the hills.
Then the world explodes.
The impact comes from the left, a massive force slamming into us, metal screaming against metal. My body is thrown sideways, seatbelt cutting into my ribs, my head cracking against the guard beside me.
Glass shatters.
The SUV spins twice and lurches to a stop at an angle, half in a ditch.
Before I can breathe, before I can think, gunfire erupts.
The driver’s head snaps forward. Blood sprays across the windshield in an arc of red mist.
“GET DOWN!”
Hands shove me to the floor. I curl into the space between the seats, knees to chest, hands over my head, making myself as small as possible.
The guards pile out, using the doors as cover. The sound of their return fire is deafening, sharp cracks that split the air, one after another after another.
I press my forehead to the floor and try not to scream.
Gunpowder burns my throat. Cordite, smoke, the copper tang of blood. Something warm and wet seeps across the floor toward me, touching my fingers. It’s sticky.
Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t—
The wet thud of bullets hitting flesh. A choked cry. A body falling.
Then another.
Then silence.
The ringing in my ears is so loud it drowns out everything else. My heart hammers against my ribs. My breath comes in shallow gasps that fog against the floor beneath my face.
Move. You need to move.
I can’t.
Elio. Where is Elio? Does he know? Will he come?
Footsteps outside. Multiple sets. Boots crunching on gravel. Low voices conferring in Italian.
The guards are dead. I know it with a certainty that sits like ice in my stomach. I’m alone in a destroyed SUV with unknown attackers circling outside, and no one is coming to save me.
Move. Move. MOVE.
Slowly, I lift my head.
Through the shattered window, I see shapes. Armed men—four, five, more—moving among the bodies. They’re organized. Efficient. Not random attackers. Not desperate criminals.
Professionals.
Before I can process, hands grab me, rough and brutal, dragging me out by my arm. I scream, twist, try to find purchase, but I’m hauled from the SUV and dropped onto the gravel like a sack of nothing.
My knees hit the ground. Pain shoots up my legs. My palms scrape against rock and dirt, tearing skin.
I’m shaking so hard I can barely see.
“Hello, Violet.”
The voice is familiar. Feminine. Cold.
I look up.
Gabriella stands over me in a black sheath dress and red-soled heels, a cigarette burning between manicured fingers. Not a hair out of place. Lipstick perfect. She looks like she’s waiting for a table at a restaurant, not standing among corpses with gunpowder still hanging in the air.
“You,” I breathe.
She smiles. All teeth, nothing behind her eyes.
“Me.”
She crouches down, bringing herself to my level. This close, I can smell her perfume. The same expensive scent from the villa. The same one she was wearing when she called me a whore in the garden.
“I wanted to kill you myself,” she says, almost conversational. “I spent hours thinking about how I’d do it. Something slow, I decided. Something that would let me watch you suffer for taking what was mine.”
My voice shakes. “Elio was never yours.”
Her smile sharpens. “No. He wasn’t. And that’s why this is going to hurt him so much more than your death ever could.”
“What—”
“My friends have plans for you.” She tilts her head, studying me like I’m an interesting specimen. “Better plans. More profitable plans. Plans that will destroy Elio Marchetti in ways a bullet never could.”
“He’ll come for me.” The words scrape out of my throat, desperate and pathetic. “He’ll find me, and he’ll—”
Gabriella laughs. Soft. Genuine. Terrifying.
“Oh, tesoro. That’s exactly what I’m counting on.”
Two men step forward from behind her. Tall. Expensive suits that don’t hide the violence in their posture. They look at me the way buyers look at merchandise, assessing value, calculating worth.
One of them speaks to Gabriella in rapid Italian. Numbers. He gestures at me like I’m livestock.
She’s selling me.
Panic claws up my throat. I scramble backward, but there’s nowhere to go. My back hits the wrecked SUV, and then hands are on me again, hauling me up by the arm with bruising force.
I fight.
I kick, twist, and claw at the man’s hands. My nails rake across his skin, drawing blood, and he doesn’t even flinch. His grip is iron, immovable, as he drags me toward a black sedan idling twenty feet away, engine running, back door open like a mouth waiting to swallow me whole.
“ELIO!” The scream rips from my throat. “ELIO!”
No one reacts.
“Let me go! He’ll kill you, he’ll kill all of you, he’ll—”
The man shoves me forward, and I stumble, nearly falling. He catches me by the hair this time, yanking my head back, and pain explodes across my scalp.
Gabriella steps close one last time. Her lips brush my ear, her voice a whisper meant only for me.
“He won’t come for you. Not in time. And by the time he finds what’s left... you’ll wish I’d killed you myself.”
She steps back.
The man shoves me into the sedan. I hit the seat hard, the breath knocked from my lungs, and before I can right myself, the door slams shut.
Two men flank me. The guard on my right presses a gun to my ribs, cold metal through my sweater. A warning.
Through the window, I see Gabriella. She lights a fresh cigarette, takes a long drag, and watches the car pull away. The satisfaction on her face is the last thing I see before the sedan turns and the ambush site disappears behind us.
Dead guards. Destroyed SUV. Blood soaking into gravel.
And me.
Alone in a car full of strangers, heading somewhere no one will find me.
My mind is already working. The sedan turned left from the ambush site. Deeper into the hills, away from the coast. Two men. Two guns. Doors locked. The windows aren’t bulletproof, I can tell by the glass. Not enough. But something.
The guard on my left lifts his gun. Pain explodes across the back of my skull, white-hot and blinding.
Everything goes black.