Chapter 2
VIOLET
It's cold. Not the pleasant kind, not Elio's climate-controlled hallways where even the chill felt curated, owned, set to the exact degree that suited him. This feels industrial, bone-deep, a cold that seeps up from concrete and doesn't stop until it reaches your marrow and sets up camp.
With my cheek pressed against the rough floor I open my eyes.
Move. Get up. Get your bearings.
My body doesn't agree with my brain. Everything hurts. My skull throbs where the gun connected, a deep pulse that radiates from the base down into my neck, and when I try to lift my head, my vision tilts and swims in the dark.
Because it is dark. Not dim, not poorly lit. Dark. The absolute absence of light, the kind that makes you question whether your eyes are open or closed. I blink three times to confirm. Open. Definitely open. Can't see a goddamn thing.
My hands find the floor first as I push up to sitting, the movement costing me.
Nausea rolls through in a thick wave, and I press the back of my wrist to my mouth until it passes.
My head pounds in time with my heartbeat, every pulse a fresh notification that someone cracked me with the butt of a pistol and I should be grateful I woke up at all.
Grateful. Sure. That's the word.
The floor beneath me is unfinished concrete with a film of grit and moisture that coats my palms. The air tastes stale, recycled, tinged with mildew and rust, and underneath it all the faint chemical burn of industrial cleaner failing at its one job.
I try to orient myself by sound and get nothing useful.
To my left, there's a sound of dripping water hitting metal at irregular intervals.
Above me I hear a hum of electricity, it's mechanical, like a ventilation system that's barely holding it together.
And then there is screaming.
Far away. Through walls, muffled by distance and concrete, but unmistakable. A woman's voice, high and ragged, the kind that's been going on long enough that it's more animal than language.
My body goes rigid. Every muscle locks, and my pulse kicks into my throat, hammering so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
Think. Think. Think.
What do I know?
The guards at the estate weren't Elio's, couldn't have been. They drove me into the hills and the SUV was rammed, the driver's head spraying across the windshield in a mist of red. Then gunfire. Gravel biting into my palms as I was dragged from the wreck.
And Gabriella. Standing there in her black dress and red-soled heels looking like she'd just stepped off a runway, not a scene full of dead men. The cruel satisfaction on her face, like she'd planned every detail down to the shoes.
My friends have plans for you. Better plans. More profitable plans.
I know exactly who did this. Know her face, her name, the perfume she was wearing, the cigarette brand she smoked while selling me like livestock.
That knowledge is mine. I tuck it away in the same place I keep load-bearing information, behind the walls, in the foundation, where nobody can reach it until I decide to hand it over.
Gabriella Rossi, you stupid bitch. You better hope they kill me, because if they don't, I will spend whatever's left of my life making sure Elio knows every single detail of what you did.
The screaming stops.
That's worse.
In the silence that follows, there's nothing but the water dripping and the hum of whatever machinery keeps this place breathing. I strain against the dark, pressing my ear to the wall. Then, further away, I pick up different voices. Quiet, exhausted sobs from someone who's been at it for hours.
Women. Multiple women behind these walls.
My brain, the analytical part that assessed structural damage for a living, starts building a picture. Industrial space. Multiple rooms. Women held inside them. Gabriella's words about profitable plans. The men in expensive suits assessing me like merchandise at a preview.
Jesus Christ.
Bile rises in my throat once more as my brain comes to its inevitable conclusion.
Trafficking.
I've known about it the way you know about something that happens to other people, in other cities, in other lives. Not yours. Never yours.
None of that knowledge prepared me for the concrete under my knees, or the sound of someone crying through a wall like she's run out of anything left to spend.
Okay. Okay, okay, okay.
I get my breathing under control. Four seconds in, hold, four seconds out.
The same pattern that got me through the first week in Elio's estate, when I was learning the dimensions of my gilded cage.
A different prison. Silk sheets instead of concrete.
Lemon trees instead of screaming. But a cage all the same.
Here we go again.
The thought sickens me more than the head wound.
"Hey."
I jerk, lifting my hands to guard my face, useless in the dark, but my body doesn't care about logic right now.
"Hey, easy. Easy. I'm not going to hurt you.
" A man's voice, American, coming from my right and slightly below, like he's lying on the floor.
The accent is clean, northeast, the vowels flat in a way that reminds me of home.
Not Boston. But close enough to the same coast. "You've been out for a while. I was starting to worry."
"Who the fuck are you?" My voice comes out raw and scraped, and I don't bother softening it.
"Matt." A pause. "I'd shake your hand, but I can't see it, and honestly, the last time I reached toward someone in the dark, I got kicked in the ribs, so I'm staying put."
"Smart."
"First time anyone's called me that." I hear him shift, fabric rustling against concrete.
"You've got a pretty nasty bump on the back of your head, by the way.
I checked when they threw you in here. Didn't feel like a fracture, but I'm an English teacher, not a doctor, so take that with about a pound of salt. "
"An English teacher?"
"Twelve years in a small town in Connecticut. The kids call me Mr. D." Another pause, and I can hear him choosing his words with care. "I coached JV basketball too. Went three and twenty-two in my first season, which I'm pretty sure is still a district record."
Under any other circumstances, I'd read the chattiness as nerves. But I've spent months decoding the language of dangerous men who say little and mean everything, so a man who volunteers his whole biography to a stranger in the dark registers as something to track. Not trust. Not yet.
"How long have I been out?"
"Hard to tell. They don't exactly hand out watches down here. But the guards came through twice since they dropped you off, and they come every few hours, so I'd guess maybe five, six hours. Could be more."
"The guards have a schedule?"
"Every three hours, give or take. Two of them. They bring water once a day, food if they're feeling generous." He pauses. "They were feeling generous earlier. I've got half a piece of bread if you want it."
I don't answer right away. My body wants the bread. My mouth is dry, my stomach hollow, and I can't remember the last time I ate. Crumbs in Elio's bed, feeding each other fruit and cheese, laughing about something mundane I can't recall.
A lifetime ago.
"Why would you give me your food?"
"Because you need it more than I do right now. You took a hit to the head, and if you throw up on an empty stomach, trust me, it's worse. Also, I ate the other half already, and it was terrible, so really I'm just sparing myself the rest."
I hear him slide something across the floor. It bumps against my knee. Dense, dry, the kind of bread that's been sitting out for a day. I tear off a small piece and put it in my mouth. It's stale and tastes of moldy flour. My stomach cramps around it with a viciousness that makes me double over.
"Small bites," Matt says. "I learned that the hard way."
I force myself to chew, swallow, wait. The cramp subsides. I take another bite.
"How long have you been here?"
"Few days, I think. Like I said, time's fuzzy.
I was in Palermo on vacation. It was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime, save-for-years-to-see-Italy kind of thing.
On my first night here, I met a bunch of tourists who convinced me to go to a club with them.
And because I'm an idiot who thought he could handle the nightlife, I did.
" A self-deprecating laugh. "Someone put something in my drink and… I woke up here."
The screaming starts again. Farther away this time, or maybe the same distance and I'm just getting used to the acoustics of this place. The woman's voice pitches high, then cuts off abruptly with a single sharp crack of palm on skin. The silence after is so complete I can hear Matt breathing.
"Does that happen a lot?" I ask.
"Yeah." His voice is flat. "All the time."
I finish the bread. Wipe my hands on my jeans, the ones I changed into at the estate, the ones I chose because I could run in them, fight in them. Good instinct, bad outcome. Here I am in my running clothes with nowhere to go.
"Did they target you specifically?" Matt asks. "Or was this a wrong place, wrong time thing?"
The question is reasonable. Logical, from a man who just told me he was drugged at a club. A fellow victim trying to understand the rules.
But my brain, honed on months of living with a man who weighed every word for advantage, snags on the phrasing. Target you specifically. Not how did you end up here, or what happened to you.
I give him an answer that's true enough. "Wrong place, wrong time."
"Yeah." He exhales. "Same."
I don't tell him about Gabriella. Don't tell him about the SUV, the dead guards, the woman in red-soled heels who orchestrated the whole thing, or the men in suits who bought me from her.
Don't tell him about the man whose bed I was in twelve hours ago, whose empire stretches across three continents, whose name alone might be the only currency that could buy my way out of here.
"You know what my students would say right now?" Matt's voice cuts through the dark. "Mr. D, this is literally the worst field trip ever."
I don't want to laugh. Every part of me is screaming and raw and terrified, and the last thing I should be doing is laughing. But the delivery is so deadpan, so perfectly timed, that a sound escapes me anyway, half-laugh, half-sob, ugly and real.
"That's terrible."
"I know. I have the worst jokes. My kids made a compilation once, put it on the class Instagram. Got more engagement than anything I'd actually assigned all semester."
"That tracks."
"Right? Eleven years of graduate education, and my greatest contribution to society is a lowlight reel of bad puns."
I pull my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around them. The concrete bites through my jeans. My joints and fingers feel stiff from the cold as I press my forehead against my kneecaps, taking stock.
I'm in a cell. Underground, probably, based on the temperature and the moisture and the total absence of natural light. There are guards on a schedule and other women being held. A man named Matt who teaches English and shares his bread with strangers is in my cell.
In the dark, you learn what you're really made of.
My mother used to say that. Or some version of it.
One of her Catholic kitchen-table philosophies, delivered over instant coffee while Danny and Sean fought about whose turn it was to take out the trash.
I never really took much notice. Figured I already knew better, anyway.
After all I had my weapons—sarcasm, stubbornness, a talent for reading old buildings better than I read people.
The Murphy refusal to lie down isn't something I decide, it's just what happens when I breathe, whether I want it to or not.
"Matt."
"Yeah?"
"Does anyone know we're here? Anyone on the outside?"
He's quiet for a long time. Long enough that I can hear the drip-drip-drip counting seconds against metal.
"No. None of us knows where 'here' even is." His voice has lost the joking edge. Stripped back to the bare truth, or what sounds like it. "I don't think anyone's coming for us."
The words land where I already knew they'd land. In the pit of my chest, next to the bruise and the stale bread and the fading memory of warm sheets.
Elio.
His name moves through me before I can stop it. His hands on my hips. His voice in the dark. Stay. Promise me. The way he kissed me, hard and desperate, like some part of him thought he was walking into a trap, and the best he could do was ask me to wait.
I promised.
And then men who weren't his put me in a car, and a woman who hates me sold me to strangers, and now I'm on a concrete floor with a bump on my skull and half a piece of bad bread in my stomach, and he has no idea where I am.
"Matt."
"Yeah?"
"Tell me another terrible joke."
"What do you call a fake noodle?"
I close my eyes in the dark. "What."
"An im-pasta."
"That's the worst thing I've ever heard."
"You should hear my knock-knock material. I once made a fourteen-year-old cry. Not from laughter."
My mouth curves despite everything. Despite the cold, the screaming, the throbbing pain in my skull, and the man I'm trying not to think about who's in Palermo, probably not even aware I'm gone.
Somewhere above us, a door slams. Metal on metal. Heavy footsteps, and the muffled sound of a woman pleading in a language I don't recognize.
Matt goes silent. I go silent. We listen together in the dark, two people holding their breath while someone else's nightmare plays out through the walls.
The footsteps pass. The pleading fades.
"They'll come again in about two hours," Matt says. His voice is low, careful. "When they do, keep your head down. Don't look at them. Don't talk unless they ask you a direct question."
"You've been watching them."
"Not much else to do down here."
I press my back against the wall. The concrete is rough through my sweater, grounding in a way the floor isn't. My fingers find the scar on my left palm and trace its familiar ridge. The one constant my body carries from a life before all of this.
Two hours. Then guards. Then whatever comes next.
"Hey, Matt?"
"Yeah?"
"When the guards come back, I need you to tell me everything you've noticed about this place. Layout, sounds, anything. Can you do that?"
"Yeah."