Chapter 10 Elio
ELIO
It's been two hours since Violet collapsed against my chest in the back seat of my car, her body giving out mid-breath like someone had cut her strings.
Two hours since her fingers went slack in the fabric of my shirt, her head lolling sideways as I pressed two fingers to her throat because for one sick, bottomless second I thought she was dead.
She wasn't dead. She isn't dead. She's breathing. Right here, in my bed, in my room, behind my walls, where she should have been this entire fucking time.
The doctor left twenty-three minutes ago.
I know because the clock on my nightstand is the only thing in this room I'll let myself look at besides her.
His voice is still rattling around in my skull, that flat clinical recitation delivered like he was reading a grocery list. Cracked ribs, malnourishment, dehydration, contusions across her arms and jaw, ligature marks on both wrists consistent with prolonged restraint, defensive wounds on the neck and shoulders, abrasions, torn skin…
She fought.
He said it like a footnote. An addendum to the chart. A clinical observation that explained the pattern of injury.
Every day. Every single fucking day I didn't find her fast enough, someone put their hands on her, and she fought them, and it wasn't enough because she was alone.
My jaw locks so hard my back teeth grind.
I flex my hands on my thighs and look down at them.
Blood in the creases of my knuckles. Under my nails, black in the low light.
The guard's blood, or Mauro Bianchi's, or one of the six others between the breach point and her cell.
Does it matter whose? It's all the same debt.
Not enough. Not nearly enough.
Violet is lying on her side, the sheet pulled to her chin.
I've put her in one of my shirts now, black, long enough to reach her knees, couldn't let her slip in what was left of her shirt and that filthy skirt.
God, she had no underwear. No fucking underwear.
The bruise along her jaw is yellow, days old, at least. Which means someone hit her in the face, and she walked around with it for days, and no one came.
I didn't come.
My hands curl into fists on my thighs. The knuckles crack. I don't move from the edge of this bed. I can't.
Through the walls, the estate is becoming something I never built it to be.
There are people here who shouldn't be. Twelve women and a man pulled from concrete cells and fluorescent corridors, and dumped into a sixteenth-century estate full of priceless art and Carrara marble.
The dissonance would be funny if anything were funny right now.
Someone is crying in the guest wing, a low, broken sound that carries through stone like stone was designed to amplify grief. Maybe it was.
The sounds of all these people are overwhelming.
All I want to hear is Violet's steady breathing, but all I can hear are boots on the stairs, voices in the corridor, my men moving like they're afraid of waking something.
There's radio static from the security office down the hall.
A woman's voice drifts up from the open window, asking a question no one can answer because we don't have a translator yet.
I left this room once. For five minutes I stood in the corridor with the door cracked behind me so I could still see the shape of her under the sheet, and told Valente to handle it.
"All of it. Whatever they need. Doctors, clothes, food. Translators. Therapists. I don't care what it costs."
Valente looked at me in a way a man looks at a crumbling wall and tries to calculate how long before it comes down.
"You need to sleep, boss."
"What I need is for you to do what I just told you to do."
He went.
There is still blood under my fingernails. Hers is in my bed. And between those two facts lives a man I don't have time to examine right now, so I'm going to do something useful instead of sitting here thinking about everything I failed to prevent.
There's a basin in the bathroom, white porcelain, deep enough to hold a few liters. I fill it at the tap, test the temperature on the inside of my wrist. Warm. Not hot. The same wrist that was locked around a man's windpipe a few hours ago, pressing until the cartilage gave.
Soap. I go through three bottles before I find the right one. Unscented. The same one she had in her bathroom in Palermo. No fragrance, no perfume, no floral bullshit. Just Violet.
The basin goes on the nightstand. Towel over my shoulder.
I sit on the edge of the bed, close to her head, and slide my hand under her neck.
Careful. So fucking careful my fingers are trembling with it, and my fingers never tremble.
Not when I pull a trigger, not when I hold a blade, not when I wrap a zip tie around a man's throat and watch the light go out.
They're trembling now.
Her head lifts into my palm. Weighs nothing. She weighs nothing, the whole of her, this woman who detonated everything I thought I knew about control and possession and the difference between wanting something and needing it.
Her hair is matted. Three weeks of concrete floors and no water and whatever filth they kept her in, tangled into the auburn until the color is almost gone.
I dip my hand in the basin and work the warm water through, starting at the ends, working up.
Slow. Patient. Taking each tangle between my fingers and easing it apart instead of pulling, because if I pull, if I hurt her, even this small unconscious hurt, I will lose whatever is left of me.
The water turns gray almost immediately.
I keep going.
Gray becomes brown. I change the basin. Refill it. Test the temperature again. Come back. Sit. Lift her head into my hand. Continue.
My hands are moving like they belong to someone else.
Someone who builds things instead of breaking them.
Someone who knows how to be gentle without it being a performance, without it being the lull before the violence.
But these are my hands, the same ones that caved in a man's skull against a keyboard once, that shattered Mauro Bianchi's orbital bone this morning, that have done things I stopped counting years ago.
These hands, with blood still ground into the creases that won't wash out no matter how many times I dip them in this basin.
Her hair is getting clean.
My hands aren't.
The water runs almost clear on the third basin. I smooth the wet strands back from her face, and her hair is auburn again, dark and damp against the white pillowcase. Like dried blood in certain light. Like something rescued from ruin.
She doesn't wake.
But she turns into my palm. A small tilt of her head, unconscious, automatic, pressing her cheek into the cup of my hand.
Like a cat pushing into warmth. Like even in sleep, in the deepest black of whatever place her mind has gone to escape what was done to her, her body knows the difference between every other hand that touched her in that place and mine.
Cazzo.
I almost come apart.
Right here, sitting on the edge of my own bed with a wet towel over my shoulder and a basin of dirty water on the nightstand.
The thing inside my chest that I've kept locked for thirty-four years, the thing I didn't believe existed until an American woman with calloused hands that applied for a grant to restore a cathedral, that thing cracks open and the sound that comes out of me is not a sound I've ever made before.
Not now. She needs me whole. Not shattered on the bedroom floor with wet hands and nothing to offer her but the wreckage.
I set the basin down. Press the heels of my palms into my eyes until I see white. Breathe. She needs me whole. So whole is what she gets.
I make myself leave.
It takes more effort than anything I've done in those three weeks of hunting, and that includes killing several men.
One more minute looking at the bruise on her jaw and I will put my fist through the stone wall of my own bedroom, and the noise will wake her, and she will see my face, and whatever she sees on it will frighten her more than what she just survived.
So I stand. Put the basin down. Look at her sleeping face, the damp hair spread across my pillow, the small frown between her brows that even unconsciousness can't smooth out, and walk away from it.
The rest of the estate is a different country.
Cold stone and efficiency and men who straighten when they see me coming.
A doctor carrying supplies to the guest wing nearly walks into me, steps aside like I'm a wall he miscalculated.
One of the rescued women is sitting against the far wall with a blanket around her shoulders, staring at a point in the middle distance that doesn't exist. She doesn't look up when I pass.
Doesn't flinch. Doesn't register another human being at all.
Valente meets me at the top of the stairs with a tablet and a list that would give a hotel concierge a stroke.
Beds allocated, eight in the guest wing, three in the staff quarters.
Medical assessments ongoing, three need hospital transfer, two are refusing to leave the estate.
Food is being prepared. No translators yet, but he's working on it.
One woman hasn't spoken since extraction.
One woman has a broken collarbone and three cracked ribs.
The one man's injuries aren't extensive, but he hasn't made eye contact with anyone since arrival.
"Send a car for the women who need the hospital. Make sure they have an armed escort. No one talks to them, no one touches them. Female staff only. The ones refusing to leave, let them stay. Don't push them."
Valente nods, marking something on his tablet.
"You said there's a woman who isn't speaking?"
"She hasn't said a word. Not to the doctor, not to anyone. Just sits."