Chapter 23
VIOLET
You'd think a woman who's spent the last few days building an escape plan in her head would have the discipline to stay away.
You'd think the fury and the grief and the image of Matt's throat being sliced in the morning light would be enough to keep her feet pointed in any direction that isn't toward him.
You'd think all of that, and you'd be right.
But it doesn't matter, because here I am.
Walking toward Elio.
I lost the war. That's what this is. The war I've been fighting in Elena's room with my hand on my stomach and my face pressed into a pillow that doesn't smell like anything except absence.
The war where one side says he killed Matt and the other side says I miss him so much I can barely think straight.
I have been lying in that empty room for days, letting them tear me apart, and I am so goddamn tired of it.
Especially knowing now what I have to do.
So I go back to him. Not because I've forgiven him. Not because the fury has burned down to something manageable. Not because the image of Matt on his knees has faded. It hasn't, it won't, it lives behind my eyelids every time I blink, and it will live there forever.
I go back because the other thing is also true.
I miss him. I miss him the way you miss breathing when you've been holding your breath for too long; that desperate, involuntary gasp when your body overrides your brain and says enough, you're done, we're doing this now whether you like it or not.
I don't like it. In fact I hate it. I hate that I can carry this much rage in my chest and still want his arms around me.
I hate that my body doesn't care about justice or betrayal.
Elio's in the study, his door wide open.
He's standing by the window, not sitting, his back to me, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a glass of something amber.
The afternoon light catches the side of his jaw and the line of his throat, making the butterflies take off in my stomach just at the sight of him.
Love and fury and grief warring inside me all at the same time.
When he turns I nearly gasp. Because at the sight of me his face opens.
The mask he usually wears, the one made of marble, money, and the kind of control you learn when your father teaches you that feelings are liabilities, just drops.
For one second, maybe two, he is looking at me the way a man looks at something he thought was gone forever.
Then he catches himself. Puts it back on. But not fast enough.
I cross the room without thinking. My feet are in charge today and the rest of me is just along for the ride, apparently, because I walk straight to him and put my arms around his waist and press my face into his chest as I say the truest, most devastating thing I could possibly say.
"I missed you." I mean it. God help me, I mean it with every cell in my body.
His body goes still as he takes one breath.
Two. Then his arms come around me and his whole frame exhales.
Not a sigh. Something deeper, different.
I feel the tension leave his body, the tension I put there.
I want to tell him I'm sorry, tell him that everything is okay now, but that would be a lie.
The tension that just left him? It just made space for something worse.
I know this and I'm standing in his arms anyway because I can't...
I can't be anywhere else right now.
His hand moves up my spine. Palm flat, fingers spread.
The same hand that held the knife. The same hand that plays haunting piano music when he thinks no one is listening.
The same hand that cradled my head in the compound when he carried me out.
All the same hand. All the same man. I have been trying to make him two different people for days and I cannot do it.
Every version of him is touching me at once as I stand here with my face against his shirt, his cologne in my lungs, and his heartbeat under my cheek.
"Violet." Just my name. Just one word. But his voice cracks on it, right down the center.
I don't say anything else. Neither does he. We just stand there. In his study. In the late afternoon light. His hand on my back. My arms around his waist. His chin on top of my head.
It is the best and worst I've felt in weeks. Simultaneously.
When we finally break apart I don't leave his side, needing his proximity despite wanting the distance.
Through the afternoon, into the early evening, my eyes follow him the way they used to in the first weeks after the rescue. Memorizing everything I can about him. Except then I was rebuilding him from the memory I'd worn thin in captivity. Now I'm storing him for a different kind of absence.
The way his gaze finds me before it finds anything else when he enters a room.
Every single time. Like the room doesn't exist until he's located me in it.
The way he angles his body toward mine even when he's talking to Valente, even when he's reading something on his phone.
The way he doesn't push. Doesn't ask why I've been avoiding him or where I've been.
Doesn't demand explanations or apologies or any of the things a man like him, a man who controls everything, who needs to control everything, would feel entitled to demand.
He just stays close. Lets me set the distance. Gives me room without giving me up.
And I hate him for it. Because it makes it so much harder.
It would be easier if he were cold. If he watched me with that flat, assessing gaze he turns on everyone else.
If he treated me like another asset in his portfolio, something to manage and maintain.
If he did any of those things, I could pack my bag tonight and walk out the front gate and feel nothing but righteous fury.
But he tilts toward me in a room full of his men, and my throat closes.
I am watching the man who killed Matt. The way his jaw tightens when he reads something on his phone.
The careful way he rolls his sleeves, exposing forearms that have held me and hurt people—both of those things happened with identical muscles, identical tendons, identical skin.
I am watching the man I love. They won't separate.
I tried in the study, and I'm trying now.
They won't. He is fused. I love him. I haven't forgiven him.
I'm leaving him. All three of those things are going to be true forever.
I slip out of the kitchen when he's busy giving orders in low Italian. They've been discussing logistics I don't understand for the better part of the last twenty minutes so I take the opportunity to do what I have planned. No better time than the present.
My footsteps are silent on the marble as I cross the long corridor to his study. The heavy oak door is ajar, and I push it open just enough to slip inside and close it behind me with a soft click.
The painting dominates the far wall. La Morte di Paolo e Francesca.
Even in the dim light filtering through the half-drawn curtains, the canvas pulls me in.
Two bodies tangled in a final, desperate embrace against a cold stone wall.
A sword still buried deep in Paolo’s back, the blade connecting them even in death.
Francesca’s head is thrown back, lips parted in a silent cry, one pale hand clutching at her chest as if she could somehow hold her heart inside her body.
It’s devastatingly beautiful. And cruelly, perfectly ironic.
I stare at it for a second too long, throat tight. The man who claims that love doesn't exist keeps his darkest secrets behind an image of lovers murdered for their passion. He killed Matt with the same cold finality Giovanni used on these two. Then he lied to my face about it.
My palm meets the smooth, cool surface of the heavy gilt frame. I push gently. The painting swings outward on silent, well-oiled hinges, revealing the recessed steel door of the safe.
He gave me the combination the day he offered to let me go when he first rescued me from the compound. “Six-two-eight-four. Everything in there is yours if you need it.”
Back then I shook my head at his offer. I was right where I wanted to be. With him.
Now?
Six. Two. Eight. Four.
The lock clicks open.
I scan past the shelves filled with documents, past cash in thick banded stacks, euros and dollars. Past a small velvet box. And finally, at the bottom, in a worn leather sleeve, I find my passport.
My fingers are shaking when I pick it up. Not trembling. Shaking. Full, visible, both-hands shaking, the kind of shaking that would give me away in an instant if anyone were watching.
I don’t understand it until I open the cover and my own face looks back at me.
A face from a lifetime ago.
Before the compound. Before the courtyard.
Before Elio. Before any of it. A woman with auburn hair pulled back and a neutral expression and no idea, not one single goddamn clue, what was coming for her.
She looks young. She looks like someone who thinks that the worst thing that can happen on a Sicilian restoration project is a funding cut, or a rain delay, or a crumbling transept that won't hold plaster.
She looks like someone else.
Elio's voice keeps going down the hall. Steady. Certain. The same voice that said you're safe, tesoro, in a slaughtered corridor. The same voice that said Matt left for Connecticut, looking me dead in the eyes.
My lungs won't expand. The study feels smaller than it is, the walls pressing inward as I hold my own face in my hands unable to breathe.
He's across the corridor, twenty feet away, unaware. He doesn't know I'm standing in his study looking at the woman I used to be. Grieving her because she's gone, and she's not coming back. The woman who replaced her is someone who loves a killer, carries his child, and is about to run.
I could scream.
I don't scream.
The shaking stops on its own. Passport back. Safe closed. Dial spun. Walk out. I don't take the cash. I don't take anything that isn't mine already.
Elio's eyes find me the minute I slip back into the kitchen, the corner of his lips lifting slightly.
I smile back as the leather of my passport sleeve presses against the bare skin of my ribs beneath my bra, pretending everything is fine.
Pretending the napkin with the daisy isn't neatly folded between the pages of my passport.
Maybe if Elio hadn't lied, things would have been different.
If he just told me the truth, his reasons.
Maybe there was something about Matt that I didn't know.
That I couldn't have known. Maybe the man I love is not simply a jealous monster who murdered the only friend I had because he couldn't stand watching us sit in a garden together.
But he lied. And I hold the rage, and the grief, and the tiny poisonous seed that tells me I'm better off without Elio. That our child is better off.
I leave the kitchen and go to Elio's bedroom, the passport and the napkin go into a bag I find in the back of the closet along with a change of clothes. I pack as little as I can, knowing the less I take with me, the better.
At dinner it's only Elio and I, everyone else from the compound has left by now. Or maybe Elio got rid of them the way he did Matt. I push those thoughts away and watch him pour wine into our glasses with steady hands.
"How are you?" he asks, the way you ask someone you're afraid of spooking.
"Better." The word tastes like a lie. I wash it down with water, not touching the wine.
He nods. Doesn't push. Twists pasta around his fork, then puts it to his lips.
I want to ask him. Did you know what he meant to me? Did you think I didn't deserve the truth?
Did you do it because you loved me, or because you owned me, and can you tell the difference?
The questions pile up behind my teeth, but I swallow every single one.
Because I love him. Because I hate him. Because asking means answers, and there is no answer on this earth that will make Matt alive again. So instead, I reach across the distance. Across the linen and the bread and the glasses, and the wine I can't drink. My hand finds his.
His fingers close around mine immediately, relief moving through his face, as his jaw unclenches, and his shoulders drop a fraction of an inch.
His eyes soften into something that isn't the bottomless brown I know but something closer to the surface, something with light in it, and for one unguarded second he is not the head of anything.
He is not Marchetti. He is just a man whose woman reached for him after days of silence and the relief of it has unmade him.
Is this love? Is this what love looks like on a man who was raised to believe love is a weakness?
A man whose father taught him that affection is leverage and vulnerability is death?
Is the relief real? Would it look different if it were something else?
Possession, control, the satisfaction of something returned to its proper place in his collection?
I don't know.
I have shared his bed, his body, his silences, and his rare, cracked-open moments of something close to honesty. And I still don't know. A man who loves me would look like this. A man who owns me would look like this. The relief would be identical.
I thought I could find the difference. I believed that if I looked hard enough, if I studied him the way I study load-bearing walls and fractured foundations, I would find the structural truth underneath.
Still haven't found it.
His thumb traces a line across my knuckles, back and forth, slow. The simplest gesture in the world. My throat burns.
Under the table, my free hand goes to my stomach.
This. This is the reason I have to leave quietly.
Elio's hand squeezes mine across the table. Gentle. Like he's afraid I'll disappear if he holds too tight.
I squeeze back.
The worst goodbye is the one the other person doesn't know is a goodbye. It just feels like dinner.
I can't stay. Can't raise our child in a house with armed guards and marble floors and a grandfather who treats bloodlines like currency.
Can't watch him kill the next Matt, and the one after that, and learn to eat breakfast in the room adjacent, the way wives of powerful men have been doing since the beginning of powerful men.
No.
Elio looks at me the way he looked at me in the study, open, unguarded, grateful, and it takes everything I have.
Every single thing. Every wall I've built, and every breath I've measured, and every carefully neutral expression I've practiced in bathroom mirrors.
All of it, everything, the full sum of Violet Quinn Murphy's capacity to endure, just to stand up and guide him to his bedroom.