Chapter 21
VIOLET
You'd think it would get easier after three days.
The performing. That you'd find a rhythm, the way you find a rhythm with anything repetitive.
Factory work. Physical therapy. Lying to your mother about where you are or whether you've eaten today.
Three days should be enough to settle into the mechanics of it, to stop having to think about where to put your face and what to do with your hands and how long to hold eye contact before it tips from normal into something is wrong with me.
You'd be wrong.
Every meal is an engineering project. Fork to plate to mouth.
Chew. Swallow. Reach for water at natural intervals.
Don't reach too often. Don't sit too still.
Respond when spoken to. Not too quickly, not too slowly, not with too many words, or too few.
Smile when someone hands you something you didn't ask for.
The absence of a smile is louder than the smile ever was. Funny how that works.
So I smile.
Elio sits across from me.
He eats. He reads. He doesn't stare, doesn't linger, doesn't angle for conversation I'm not offering. He has recalibrated his entire presence in the space to require nothing from me, and it is so careful, so considered, that it's almost worse than if he pushed.
Because pushing I could work with. Pushing gives me something to push back against. A wall to brace my weight on.
But this... this patient nothing... is quicksand.
There's no resistance. Just a slow, steady pull, and the harder you fight it, the faster you sink, so you just stand very still and pretend you're on solid ground.
Night is the worst.
His side. My side. His breathing slows. Mine doesn't.
Three days of lying next to a man whose hands I've held, whose body I've climbed, whose heartbeat I counted, who ended the life of my best friend.
He slept fine that night. I checked.
I still haven't cried, haven't felt safe to. Instead I move through the hallways like a ghost, reading into every encounter, trying to figure out what else am I being lied to about.
His carefulness is a language, and I used to be fluent in it, used to read every gesture and calibrate and lean into the warmth behind it.
Now the words arrive, and I recognize them, but they mean nothing.
Like hearing Italian when you've forgotten the vocabulary.
The sounds are right but the meaning doesn't land.
That's the thing nobody tells you about withdrawal. It's not the leaving. It's the translation dying.
On the fourth day since Matt was killed, my feet take me to Elena's door.
I don't plan it. One minute I'm walking, the next the corridor ends and there's her door, with my hand already on the handle.
The metal is cool.
I push it open and step inside.
The air in here is different. Not the controlled climate of the rest of the estate.
That curated, temperature-regulated perfection that makes every room feel like it belongs in a museum.
This is just air. Still and cool and slightly stale, the way rooms get when no one opens a window, when no one breathes in them anymore.
The bed is made. Nothing is out of place. Everything is pristine, clean, any traces of the woman who occupied this room gone.
I sit on the edge of the bed. The coverlet is smooth under my palms. Cool. I press down, feel the mattress give, and the creak of the bed frame is soft and small, a sound meant for one person in a quiet room.
Nobody comes looking for me here.
The silence is different here then the one in Elio's bedroom. That silence is charged. This one is just... quiet. Empty. The kind of quiet that asks nothing of you.
Some cages you never leave. Even when the door opens.
Sitting on the bed, I finally let a tear out. One for my friend who took her own life and about a million for the one killed by the man I love.
I go back on the fifth day. And the sixth. And the seventh. And then I don't leave.
I lie on Elena's bed with my clothes on, my eyes on the plain ceiling until my eyes close.
I sleep.
Not the broken, surface-skimming thing I've been doing next to him. Actual sleep. The deep, black, dreamless kind that pulls you under like water and doesn't let you think.
When I wake up it's morning.
I lie there for a minute, blinking at the blank ceiling, and something in my chest loosens. Not by much. But enough to notice.
It would be silly of me to assume that Elio wouldn't notice that I'm gone. But he's letting me have my space, understanding that I must need it.
During the night, I hear his footsteps in the corridor. They stop outside the door, then turn before they go back the way they came.
In the morning, there's a tray outside Elena's door. Tea. Toast. A small glass dish of apricot jam, I once mentioned was delicious.
I take the tray inside and eat standing at the window.
The garden below is empty. The stone bench is empty. The morning light moves across the wall the same way it always does. Gold over stone. Inch by inch. Indifferent to the turmoil inside me.
The jam is good.
I learn Elena’s room the way you learn a wound you’re not allowed to touch.
I start with the outline first. The shape of the silence in here, the way the air feels heavier than it should, the faint cedar smell from the empty closet that somehow makes everything worse.
Then the details start crawling in whether I want them or not.
The bed frame creaks on the left side near the headboard where the joint has loosened.
I try the window latch and find it stiff, but with a bit of effort it opens.
The curtain billows every time someone walks past in the corridor outside, not from a draft but from the pressure change of a body moving through the hall.
The drawer in the bedside table sticks on the right.
I keep pulling at it anyway, even though I know there’s probably nothing in it.
I tell myself I’m not looking for anything, yet I can't stop.
On the ninth day, I bump into Elio.
For one second his face does the thing it always does when he sees me. It softens. The jaw eases, the eyes warm, and his shoulders unclench like the whole architecture of him just remembered how to breathe.
Then he remembers, and his eyes become weary, like he's not sure how to talk to me without scaring me off. Like I'm a wounded animal he's trying to approach.
"How is your search going?" I ask, unsure what else to say to break the awkward silence between us.
"The search?"
"For the American."
His expression flickers from surprise into suspicion. "It's going. We've had some really good leads and we're closing in on the people who took you from here."
My spine straightens. "Oh, really?"
"Yes, Violet. And when I find them they will pay for every single day they kept you away from me. For every scrape and bruise on your body."
I blink. "How?"
"I’ll start with their hands,” he says quietly, like he’s discussing the weather.
“Fingers first. One by one. Slow enough that they feel each joint separate. Then the wrists. Then the elbows. I want them to understand exactly how much they took from me before I move on to the parts that actually matter. When they’re begging, when they’re offering me anything I want, I’ll take their tongues so I don’t have to listen to the screaming anymore.
And only then, when there’s nothing left but pain and the knowledge that they’re never walking out of that room, will I let them die. ”
He says it all without raising his voice. Without blinking. Just flat, factual, the way a man describes the steps he’ll take to balance an equation.
I stay very still.
The image blooms in my head, Gabriella on her knees, red soles scuffed and bloody, Elio standing over her with that same calm expression while he methodically takes her apart.
I hate that I love that image. I hate that that's the sort of person I've become.
“Right,” I say, keeping my voice light. “Goodnight, Elio.”
I turn, walk back to Elena's room, and close the door behind me.
As much as I want Gabriella to die for what she put me through, she's my last piece of leverage. A weapon you hand over isn’t yours anymore.