Chapter 22
VIOLET
My fingers close around the drawer handle the same way they've closed around it every morning for almost two weeks.
The same half-hearted tug you give a door you're not sure you want open, the kind where your fingers are already loosening before the thing has a chance to give.
Every time, I'd get it an inch, maybe two, and then stop.
Close it. Walk away. Tell myself there's nothing in there worth finding because Elena's dead and her things are just things now and going through them won't bring her back and it won't change anything. It won't...
But today I don't stop.
I work the heel of my palm against the side of the drawer and pull with my other hand, steady pressure, the same technique I used to ease warped wood panels at Santa Maria della Luce.
You don't yank. You coax. You find the spot where the grain has swollen and you apply force at the angle the wood wants to go, not the angle you want it to go, and eventually.
Eventually.
The drawer slides free with a sound like a sigh.
The first thing I see is a paperback, one of those Italian titles the staff must have left, its spine uncracked. She never opened it. Next to it, a rosary still in its plastic casing, the cheap kind they sell outside every church in Sicily for two euros. Still sealed. She never opened that either.
And at the very back, pushed against the rear panel where the drawer meets the frame, a washcloth wrapped around something small and hard.
I unwrap it carefully. The cloth is folded tight, the way you fold fabric around something you're protecting. Or hiding. My fingers find the edge and peel it back. For a second I don't understand what I'm looking at.
Three white sticks, nested in the folds of the cloth like someone placed them there with care.
Pregnancy tests, the ones the medical team left with the survivors.
Every one of them showing two lines. The dye has faded.
Weeks old, at least. But the marks are unmistakable. Two lines. Two lines. Two lines.
Elena wrapped them in a washcloth.
She kept them.
I sit on the edge of her bed with them in my hand, and the first thing my brain offers up, the very first coherent thought in the rubble, is oh.
Oh, Elena.
And then I stop thinking altogether because my eyes are doing the thing I haven't let them do in so many days.
The thing I locked down in the garden while Matt's blood dried in the courtyard cracks.
The thing I sealed shut with bread and fake smiles, and sleeping in a dead woman's bed because the alternative was sleeping next to the man who—
The heat behind my eyes breaks through, and I don't stop it.
I don't try.
Twelve days. Twelve days of holding everything in a fist so tight my nails have left permanent crescents in my palms, twelve days of controlled breathing and measured sentences and the exact right facial expressions at the exact right times.
And now I'm sitting on Elena's bed, my face wet, holding three positive pregnancy tests, and I can't tell if I'm crying for her or for me or for both of us or for none of us or just because the body has a pressure valve and mine just blew.
The tears are silent. No sound. Just warm and steady down my cheeks, dropping onto the washcloth, darkening the fabric in small circles.
My stomach rolls. That same slow churn I've been waking to every morning since the compound, the one I blamed on grief, bad food, stress and the aftermath of being held captive by traffickers.
The nausea that rises when I brush my teeth.
The way eggs make me gag now when they never did before.
The tenderness in my breasts I chalked up to healing.
The crying, god, the crying, that I attributed to Elena's death and Matt's death and the general state of my entire goddamn life.
I go very still.
The tests sit in my hand. Three white sticks. All positive. All Elena's.
My eyes move from the tests to the bathroom door.
Back to the tests.
Back to the door.
The math is already mathing. My brain, my stupid, relentless, architectural-assessment brain that cannot stop taking inventory even when the building is actively collapsing around it, is counting backward without permission.
Nine weeks. Nine weeks since the last time Elio and I.
.. since the two days before the compound.
Two days of barely leaving his bed. Multiple times, no protection, because my periods had only just come back after months of stress and all those days of starvation and I wasn't thinking about consequences because I was too busy thinking about the way his hands felt and the way his voice sounded when he said my name and. ..
Nine weeks.
Fuck.
My fingers dig into the washcloth. The tests press against my palm, still warm from my grip, and I'm looking at the bathroom door and I already know.
I know the way you know something in your body before your brain signs off on it, the way a building tells you where the fractures are before you ever pull back the plaster.
The evidence has been there for weeks. I just wasn't reading it.
My stomach rolls again, and this time it means business.
The nausea crests hard and fast and I barely get Elena's tests back into the washcloth and the washcloth back into the drawer before I'm on my feet and moving, hand over my mouth, the bathroom tiles cold under my knees as I make it to the toilet just in time.
I throw up. Not much. There's not much to throw up when you've been eating like a woman performing meals instead of having them. But my body heaves, and my eyes water, and my hands grip the porcelain as I kneel there on the bathroom floor of a dead woman's room and think about two lines. Two lines.
When it passes, I sit back on my heels. Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. My reflection in the chrome flush handle is distorted and pale. I don't look at it for long, my eyes finding the bathroom cabinet instead.
It's small, white, mounted above the sink. I open it knowing what's on the middle shelf already. An unopened pregnancy test.
The tile is cold through my leggings when I sit down afterward and wait.
Three minutes. The box said three minutes. I count them out because that's what I do, that's what my brain does when I try not to spiral.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.
I try to tell myself I'm being an idiot, there's no chance in hell that after everything I went through—the drugged water, the starvation, the beatings—this pregnancy would stick, but all signs point to a different direction.
And when three minutes later I look at the stick, two blue lines tell me what I already knew.
It's positive.
The word positive, when you think about it, is a pretty fucked-up name for a result that has just rearranged every molecule of my future.
The first thing that pops into my head is how Elena must have felt when she found out she was pregnant.
Did she sit on the floor in the bathroom, trying to come to terms with what this all meant before wrapping the tests in a washcloth and putting them in the drawer?
Did she try to look for the door in her cage, or were the lines just another lock instead of a way out?
I am not Elena.
I am not alone the way she was alone. I am not without options, without a single thing left in my hands except the knowledge that the compound put something inside me I never asked for and can never undo.
Whatever else is true about my life right now, and the list of "whatever else" is so long it could wallpaper this entire estate. .. I am not that.
I can do this. I can bring this baby into the world and love it with all my heart, keep him or her safe.
This tiny, impossible, not-even-a-baby-yet thing has survived three weeks of captivity, starvation, beatings, drugged water, a near-assault, a rescue, and whatever the hell my body has been doing since.
I get up and walk back into the bedroom looking out the window as my hand travels to my stomach.
It's flat, nothing there that anyone could see.
But something is there nonetheless, something that shouldn't have survived and did, something made from a man who could play piano and break necks with the same hands, and a woman who restored cathedrals and fell in love with a monster.
Elio is the father. If you had asked me a couple of weeks ago, I'd have been shocked but equally elated at the prospect of carrying his child.
But right now? I'm having a hard time reconciling the Elio I fell for with the one who murdered an innocent man with ice in his eyes.
Then the sun moves behind a cloud.
This child will be Cicero's grandchild. Born into the Marchetti dynasty the same way Elio was born into it.
Not chosen but claimed. I think about Cicero's silver hair, his fake smile and his cold eyes.
About the way Elio flinches when he talks about his childhood.
Not with his face but with his hands, the way his fingers tighten around whatever he's holding like he's bracing for impact from a blow that landed twenty years ago and never stopped.
I think about the fortress and the guards and the cameras and the beautiful prison with its temperature-controlled rooms, about the Carrara marble floors that have been scrubbed of blood more than once.
I think about growing up inside these walls.
Learning to walk on these floors. Learning what love looks like from a man who says he doesn't believe in love.
I think about the courtyard.
I can't stop. I try and I can't. Matt on his knees on the flagstones, his shoulders curved forward in that way I know so well, the way he sat on the grass in the garden, the way he leaned into doorframes, except now his hands are behind his back and Valente is holding him by the hair as morning light paints everything gold.
Gold on stone. Gold on Matt's hair. Gold on Elio's arm as it moves in one clean arc, the blade catching the light for a fraction of a second before it doesn't matter anymore because Matt's whole body jerks forward, while Elio stands over him and doesn't look away.
Doesn't flinch. Doesn't move. Just watches, the way you watch something you expected to happen.
What if my child was playing in the garden one morning and saw something like that happen?
What if my child became like that? Cold and indifferent to taking another life.
The nausea surges, and this time it's not the pregnancy.
This time it's pure, clean terror, the kind that starts in the belly and radiates outward until my fingers tingle and my vision narrows and my heart slams so hard against my ribs that the baby, the cluster of cells, the nine-week-old accident, the thing I am already protecting with a ferocity that scares me, must be able to feel it.
And underneath all of it, underneath the fear and the math and the image of Cicero's hands on a grandchild he will treat as currency, there's something else.
What if Elio can't change?
I'm worried about him. About what he's becoming. About the distance behind his eyes that gets wider every day. About the man I fell in love with disappearing inside the machine his father built and not finding his way back out.
I hate myself for that. And it changes nothing.
I need to leave.
Not eventually. Not when conditions improve, not when the right opportunity presents itself.
Not after I've drawn up a plan with backup routes and contingencies and a strategy that the rational part of my brain is screaming for.
The decision isn't rational. It isn't strategic.
It doesn't account for the fact that I'm nine weeks pregnant and alone in Sicily, and the man I'm running from controls everything within a hundred miles and has the resources to find me anywhere on earth.
None of that matters.
I pick up the test. Wrap it in tissue from the cabinet under the sink.
I should get rid of it. Flush it, bury it in the kitchen trash under coffee grounds, throw it over the garden wall into the lemon grove.
I know I should get rid of it. The smart move, the survival move, is to destroy the evidence and keep my mouth shut and let the secret live only in my body where no one can find it.
I slide it behind the drawer instead. Into the gap where the back panel meets the frame, the narrow space between wood and wall that you'd only find if you pulled the drawer all the way out and looked.
I need to escape.