Chapter 11 Violet #2
My body goes rigid for exactly one second because this.
I know this. The last time he did this, we were in a dining room, days into a hunger strike I was too stubborn to end.
He'd told me to sit on his lap and fed me with his fingers, one bite at a time, and it had been a power move.
Eat because I'm telling you to eat. Eat because your body belongs to me and I decide when it's fed.
I'd hated him for it. Hated myself more for the way I responded to the warmth of his touch, the steadiness of his voice, the sheer relief of giving in to someone stronger.
This isn't that.
This is his hand on the small of my back, steady and asking nothing. This is a torn piece of bread the size of my thumbnail held to my lips. This is his voice, low and rough and stripped of every sharp edge.
"Just this. Just this one bite, Violet. That's all."
I take it. Chew. My stomach clenches, heaves, holds.
Another piece. Smaller.
"Good. One more, baby."
My eyes are burning and I don't know how to explain that this gesture, the same gesture, same lap, means the complete opposite of what it meant before.
He was claiming me then. He's keeping me alive now.
Same architecture. Entirely different building.
And my stupid, stubborn, structural-metaphor brain latches onto that because it's the only way I know how to process what's happening.
He was the cage. Now he's the scaffolding. Same materials. Different purpose.
Or maybe he was always both, and I just couldn't tell which load he was bearing.
I lean into his chest. Let my head fall against his collarbone. Close my eyes.
His hand keeps moving. Slow circles on my back. The bread appears at my lips at intervals I stop tracking. Small enough that my stomach accepts each piece before the next arrives. Olive oil on his fingertips. The faint salt of the cheese.
"The doctor said your blood work came back mostly clear," he says against my hair. "Dehydrated. Malnourished. Hormone levels elevated, but he attributed that to the trauma and physical stress."
I nod against his chest. Elevated hormones. Three weeks of daily terror will do that to a person.
"He wants to run another panel in a week."
"Fine."
"Violet."
"I said fine."
His chin rests on the top of my head. The circles on my back don't stop. I eat because his voice is low and steady and asks for nothing except that I stay alive, and right now that feels like enough. That feels like everything.
After he helps me shower, after I stand under water so hot it turns my skin pink and scrub until my arms shake and then scrub some more, after he wraps me in a towel and dresses me in joggers that are too long and a hoodie that smells like him and has to be rolled at the sleeves three times, he settles into the chair by the window.
I end up in his lap again. Not because he pulls me there. Because the chair is wide and deep, and he's in it, and the three feet between the chair and the bed might as well be an ocean.
We sit. We watch the garden through the window. Birds cut across the blue, small and fast, and the orange trees sway in the breeze.
I start speaking because I need to. Because if I don't say it now, the cell will keep it, and I'm not giving that place one more thing.
"The first day after they took me, they put me in a concrete room. It was pitch black, I couldn't see my own hands."
Against my back, his chest goes still. Not breathing. Holding.
"There was a man in there with me."
Every muscle under me turns to stone.
"His name is Matt. He teaches English in a school in Connecticut." My voice is doing that flat thing it does when it's reciting facts instead of living them. "He said he got drugged at a nightclub in Palermo. Woke up in the same place."
Elio's breathing resumes.
"He shared his food with me. Talked to me when I was on the edge of giving up.
When they moved us to the bigger space, he ended up in the cell next to mine.
" I swallow. The next part catches in my throat like glass.
"He stood up for me. Distracted guards. Got between me and them when they came for me.
He got..." The word sticks. I push through it.
"Beaten. Repeatedly. And worse. Because he was trying to protect me. "
Elio's jaw works against the top of my head. A micro-movement. If I weren't pressed against his chest I'd miss it.
"Then he has my gratitude."
I can't decode his tone, and I'm too tired to try.
Respira. Ricorda. Resisti.
Elena's voice is in my head, low and fierce and Italian, the three words she pressed into me like tools, like weapons.
I can't stop thinking about her. Is she here?
Among the women Elio pulled from that building?
Or did she use the sharp rock she'd hidden and find her own way out before anyone came?
Breathe.
I'm doing that. The air in this room tastes like orange trees and the absence of fear.
Remember.
I can't stop doing that. The cell. The dark. Matt's voice through the chain-link.
Resist.
I'm not sure what I'm resisting anymore. Maybe that's the point. Maybe Elena would tell me I've already failed her mantra, and maybe she'd be right, and maybe right now I'm too tired to care about being a good student.
She deserved a better one than me.
At dusk, when Elio goes to check in with his men, I make myself get up.
My body protests. Every joint swollen and grinding, every muscle a complaint, the bruises across my ribs lighting up like a switchboard when I swing my legs over the side of the bed.
The marble floor is cold under my bare feet.
Cold and smooth and solid. Nothing like concrete.
I tell myself this three times before my legs believe it.
The hallway is quiet. Warm light from sconces along the walls, that old-world amber glow that turns stone the color of honey. The hoodie swallows me whole, sleeves past my fingertips, hem at my thighs. I look like a child playing dress-up in someone else's life.
My mother would have a stroke. Margaret Murphy, who goes to Saint Augustine's every Sunday and parks in the same spot at Morano's and has never once set foot outside Massachusetts, would take one look at her daughter shuffling through a Sicilian crime lord's fortress in his hoodie and file it somewhere between mortal sin and grounds for an intervention.
I miss her so much my teeth ache.
I pass Elio's office. The door is open. He's inside, standing over the desk, phone to his ear, speaking rapid Italian I can't follow. He looks up. Tracks me. Doesn't stop me, doesn't call out, doesn't ask where I'm going.
I'm grateful for that, because I'm not sure how I'd explain what I'm doing. I just know I need to do it.
When I finally get to the guest wing, I try three doors, each with a different woman from the compound, one of them the girl who looked barely fifteen. The fourth door is open.
Matt's door is open.
He's sitting on the edge of the bed. Hands between his knees. Staring at the floor. Someone gave him clean clothes. Dark shirt, loose pants. They hang on him wrong, too big, like he's shrunk inside himself.
He looks like a man trying to rebuild himself from parts he can't find.
That makes two of us. Except my parts are scattered across a concrete cell in Sicily and a cathedral I'll never finish and a bed that smells like a man who kills people, and honestly, if anyone finds the piece of me that used to be normal, they can keep it. I don't think it fits anymore.
I sit beside him and take his hand.
He doesn't look up. But his fingers close around mine tightly. The grip of a man going under for the third time.
"We survived." All I've got. All either of us needs.
I lean my head on his shoulder. He doesn't move, but his breathing stutters before steadying again. We sit there in the quiet, two people who shared a nightmare, holding onto the proof that it ended.
The back of my neck prickles and I lift my head just enough to look, already knowing who I'll see.
Elio stands in the doorway, his arms crossed, shoulder against the frame. His gaze moves from my face to our joined hands to Matt's bowed head. Takes it all in. He keeps watching with those bottomless brown eyes that see everything and give back nothing.
I don't let go of Matt's hand.