Chapter 14 Violet
VIOLET
I'm cutting through the east corridor toward the kitchen when the door opens. Not a bedroom door. Not one of the guest rooms, or the library, or any of the spaces that feel communal, where the rescued women drift and the staff move quietly and efficiently. This is the ground floor near Elio's wing.
Matt steps out.
His face does a thing. Not panic. Not guilt, exactly. More like the expression of a person caught mid-sentence who needs a beat to find the right word. It's there and gone so fast that if I'd blinked, I'd have missed it entirely.
"Got turned around." He laughs, rubbing the back of his neck with that embarrassed grin that makes him look about twelve. "This place is a maze, Vi. I was trying to find the library."
And I laugh too, because of course he got lost. The estate is enormous and confusing, and the corridors all look the same.
"Library's back that way." I point toward the guest wing. "Hang a left at the big, ugly painting of the guy who looks constipated."
"The one with the horse?"
"That's the one."
He grins and wanders off in the right direction with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders easy.
I don't think about it again. Not today, not when through the window I spotted something propped against the fountain I usually sit on.
I rush outside. Someone on Elio's staff—I don't know who, but whoever it was understood the assignment—left a sketchpad and a set of Conté crayons on the table by the fountain.
Not the expensive kind. The good kind. The kind that smells like cedar shavings and goes down smooth and fights you just enough to make the line interesting.
The charcoal feels good between my fingers. Gritty and real, leaving evidence on everything it touches, which is more than I can say for the last month of my life.
I sit on the low stone wall by the fountain and draw the arched windows of the east wing because my hands remember what my brain hasn't caught up to yet.
I'm a restorer. I build things back. It's what I do.
It's what I've always done, even before I had a word for it, even when I was eight years old gluing Danny's broken model airplane back together on the kitchen floor while Ma yelled at Sean about something I've blocked out.
My hands know how to make broken things whole.
They're just waiting for the rest of me to catch up.
The charcoal drags across the paper in long, sure strokes.
Arches first. Always arches first, they carry the load, distribute the weight, tell you how the whole structure thinks about gravity.
Then the mullions, the tracery, the shadow patterns where the afternoon light cuts through limestone at exactly the angle that would've made a Renaissance architect weep.
A smudge on my wrist. Another on my thumb. Black dust under my nails that'll take a few washes to get out.
Good. Evidence of living. Evidence of making.
Matt finds me. Sits beside me on the wall, close enough that our shoulders brush, and looks at the sketch. His whole face opens up. Genuine delight, bright and warm and so uncomplicated it almost hurts to look at.
"You're really talented." He tilts his head, studying the drawing with the kind of earnest attention he probably gives his students' essays. "My kids would flip. They think art is just TikTok filters and whatever AI spits out."
"To be fair, some of those filters are doing god's work."
He snorts. "Don't tell my AP students that. They already think effort is optional."
There's a specific warmth in being seen by someone who knew you at your worst and is now watching you rebuild. Like having a witness to your own resurrection.
Except less dramatic. And with more charcoal smudges.
"Do you feel safe here?" Matt asks after a while. His voice is easy, conversational. The voice of a man who needs to know where the walls are, even when the walls are made of lemon trees and bougainvillea instead of concrete. "Like, do people know about this place? How far is the nearest town?"
And the thing is, these are exactly the questions I would have asked if I was stuck somewhere after everything we went through.
So I answer him. Tell him the estate is about forty minutes outside Palermo.
That the security is layers deep—cameras, armed guards, a perimeter wall that would make a medieval fortress blush.
That the nearest village is a cluster of stone houses down the hill, close enough to see from the west terrace but far enough to feel like another planet.
He nods as I reassure him. Asking more questions and exhaling a relieved sigh when I give him the answers.
"He's good to you?" The change of topic doesn't startle me. Maybe it's because I want to talk about Elio, and all the things I got wrong about him. I want to tell the world about him, but instead I tell my audience of one.
Matt is the only person I can tell, because he already knows what Elio is, what he does, what he's done, and what he means to me, I tell him that Elio is more than what people see.
That under the empire and the violence and the name that makes grown men flinch, there's a man who slept in a chair beside my bed for ten nights because he was afraid of crowding me.
That he fed me with his hands when mine shook too hard to hold food.
That he offered to send me home, no conditions, no strings, just a plane ticket and an open door, and meant it.
"He doesn't let go," I say, watching a hawk circle above the tree line. "At all. Ever. And I used to think that was the problem. That being held that tight meant being held down. But now I think it might be the point."
Matt listens. Really listens. The way he listened in the cell, turned toward me, eyes steady, body still. Not waiting for his turn to speak. Just... receiving. Taking it in.
"You love him," he says quietly.
I don't deny it.
What would be the point? Matt saw it written across my face, plain and clear.
Or maybe he drew it out of me, the way good listeners do, asking the right questions in the right order until you've handed them the whole blueprint without realizing you opened the drawer.
And Matt is the best listener I've ever met.
I should probably find that more unsettling than I do.
Above us, the hawk is still hunting.
I'm on my way to find Elio, when I pass Valente near the east staircase. He's on his phone, half-turned toward the window, speaking low, rapid Italian that I only catch fragments of.
One fragment is enough.
Rossi.
My feet keep moving. My brain stops.
Rossi. Gabriella Rossi. Elio's ex-fiancée. The woman who arranged my kidnapping like she was ordering a hit, because that's essentially what it was, except instead of killing me she sold me to men who traffic women by the pound and let them do whatever they wanted with the leftovers.
I haven't thought much of her once since I got back, which is shocking really. I should tell Elio but I haven't yet.
I keep not telling him. At first because I could barely form sentences that weren't please and water and Matt.
Then, because I was healing, and healing takes everything you have leaving nothing for hard conversations.
Then, because there was never a right time, and when is the right time to tell the man you love that the woman his family wants him to marry is the reason you spent three weeks on concrete learning what your own blood tastes like?
And now the not-telling has calcified into its own problem. Its own secret. Hardening into the wrong shape, the way mortar does when you leave it too long—you can't reshape it, can't smooth it out, can only chip it away and start over or build around the mistake and hope the structure holds.
Tell him. Today. Right now. Just say the words.
But today is a good day. And good days are new. And I'm not ready to break one yet.
Valente ends his call, turning around and catching me standing there like an idiot.
A slight inclination of his head. "Signora."
I've been noticing him. Not the way I notice Elio—not even in the same galaxy—but the way you notice a supporting wall in a building you're assessing. You don't admire it. You just need to know it's there.
His hands rest at his sides, loose and ready. There are old scars on his knuckles, splits that healed white and smooth the way skin does when it's been broken too many times.
Valente doesn't smile. He doesn't need to. His presence is its own communication, simple and structural. I am here. He is safe. You are safe because I am here.
I want to ask about Gabriella, I want to ask about Rossi's and if the marriage contract is back on.
I don't. I nod and turn toward the kitchen where I can hear Elio.
He's leaning against the counter with a cup of espresso in one hand, and a phone he isn't looking at in the other. The second I walk in his eyes find me with that locked-on focus that used to make my skin crawl and now makes my heart flip.
"Tell me about Valente," I say, pulling myself up onto the counter and pressing my thigh against his side, needing the contact. "How long have you known him?"
his eyebrow lifts in question, but he indulges me anyway.
"Since we were boys. He's the one who pulled me out of—" He stops. His jaw works as the unfinished sentence hangs between us.
"Out of what?"
"It doesn't matter."
It does. I know it does. His hands have gone still on the countertop, perfectly flat, like a man pressing down on something that wants to rise. His eyes find a fixed point somewhere past my shoulder and hold there, bracing against a wall he built himself.
But I don't push. Because deep down I know whatever he was about to say has something to do with Cicero, and I know how Cicero stories end already.
I take his hand and walk him to his study, settling myself in the chair that used to be by his bed for ten nights.
It's our routine now. Elio running his empire from behind his desk, and me in the leather chair with my legs tucked under me, watching him.
It's almost domestic.
"What happens to Matt?"
His pen moves across the page. Doesn't look up. "He can stay as long as he needs."
I wait for the but. It doesn't come. Not in words. But his pen pauses for half a second too long before it moves again.
"You don't trust him."
"I don't trust anyone."
"Do you trust me?"
He looks up then. Dark eyes on mine. That bottomless brown that used to terrify me and now feels like the only solid ground in a world that keeps tilting.
"With everything I've got, Violet."
I let that sit. Don't push about Matt.
Maybe I should.
Later, in the dark, I stare at the ceiling and think about Matt's recovery.
How fast it's been. His bruises cleared before mine. His face is almost back to normal, while I'm still discovering new colors on my body every morning like a mood ring I didn't ask for. Yesterday my left hip was chartreuse. Today it's somewhere between plum and regret.
Biology, probably. He's bigger. Stronger.
Men heal faster, isn't that a thing? Or some people are just built to bounce back, and I'm not one of them.
That's fine. I've never been the bounce-back type.
I'm more the drag-yourself-forward-on-your-elbows type, which is less inspirational-poster material but gets the job done.
Elio breathes beside me. Steady and deep.
I turn toward him. Press my mouth to his.
Not because I have to. Because I want to.
Because this man let people I care about stay without conditions, and I have never, not once in twenty-eight years, had a person in my life who gave without keeping score.
Danny loves me, but there's always an angle.
Sean loves me, but there's always a lecture.
Ma loves me, but there's always a cost, calculated in guilt and rosary beads and why can't you just be normal, Violet.
And Elio—Elio gave without being asked, without conditions, without tallying it up for later, and that deserves more than words.
So I kiss him. And I mean it with my whole body.
My mouth opens against his, tongue finding his bottom lip, hands sliding up into his hair.
My fingers twist into it, pulling him closer until there's no space between us, until I can feel the hard planes of his chest against mine and the heat of his skin through the thin cotton of his shirt.
He makes a sound low in his throat, hungry and raw, as his hand goes to the back of my neck, fingers spanning the column of my throat as if they were made to fit there.
His mouth takes over. Warm. Sure. Devastating in that way that makes me forget I'm a person with bones, because every single one of them has turned to liquid.
His other hand finds my waist, pulling me into him, and the kiss deepens into something that tastes like espresso and smoke and recklessness that comes from choosing a dangerous man and meaning it. My teeth catch his lower lip. He exhales hard through his nose. Pulls me tighter.
I could live in this. Build a whole new architecture out of the way Elio Marchetti kisses me when he stops thinking.
But when I pull back, his eyes aren't on me.
They're on the open door. The corridor beyond it. The one that leads to the guest wing. The one Matt walked down earlier today.
His jaw is set. Not angry. Not jealous. Focused.
I don't ask what he's thinking. I settle against his chest instead and listen to his heartbeat.