Chapter 25 Violet
VIOLET
The hallway is dark as I creep through it without making a sound. I've walked this route a hundred times. I know where the runners are, where the stone swallows footfall instead of throwing it back. Apparently some part of me has been planning this longer than the rest of me wants to admit.
There should be a moment. A dramatic pause as I look back down the corridor toward the bedroom where the man I love is sleeping off the drugs I put in his drink. Some cinematic beat where the moonlight catches my face and the audience knows exactly what I'm giving up.
There isn't.
I take the stairs, then a hallway, and another set of stairs before I'm at the service doors.
The car keys hang on the hook by the service.
An Audi fob with the automatic gate fob.
I snatch it, grateful for Elio's obsessive maintenance schedule.
His control issues have their own control issues.
But I'll save the critique for my therapist. If I ever get one.
If I ever get to a place where "my mafia boyfriend killed my friend so I drugged him and stole his car while pregnant with his child" is something a licensed professional is equipped to handle.
The night air hits my face as I step outside, cool and carrying the scent of blood orange trees mixed with jasmine, and the faint salt of a sea I've been able to smell for weeks but never reach. My lungs expand. Not a gasp. Not a sob. Just a breath, full and deep, the kind you take before you dive.
The gravel under my boots is the loudest thing in the world.
Every step sounds like a gunshot in the silence, and my pulse ticks up, my body bracing for the floodlights, the shout of Elio's guards, the sound of a door slamming open behind me.
But the estate is asleep. Two guards are busy manning the main gate, and the one on the south gate has just been changed.
The Audi is parked in the third bay of the garage. Unlocked, because inside these walls nothing needs to be locked. Everything here belongs to Elio. The car. The garage. The woman getting into the driver's seat.
Not anymore.
The engine turns over with a quiet hum that vibrates through the steering wheel and up through my palms and into my chest. The headlights stay off.
I ease down the drive in the dark, following the curve I've memorized by the shape of the trees against the sky, counting the seconds between the garage and the east service gate.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
The gate sensor picks up the car at fifteen feet. The mechanism whirs. The gate swings open.
No alarm. No shout. No guards running. Just the gate, doing what it was built to do, opening for an authorized vehicle the way Elio designed it to. He told me I could leave whenever I wanted and tonight I'm taking him up on his offer.
The gate closes behind me. In the rearview mirror, the estate shrinks, the stone walls going dark against the darker sky, the windows black, every single one. No light snapping on. No figure in a doorway. Just a building, getting smaller.
I don't look back again focusing on the road unspooling ahead of me.
Narrow, winding and empty the way Sicilian roads are empty before dawn.
My hands are at ten and two, not shaking.
Not yet at least. It will probably come later.
Right now my body is running on the same wiring that got me through three weeks in a concrete cell. Find a way out. Survive.
My foot eases off the gas as I take a turn, then another driving through the dark, unseeing.
That's a lie. Elio's face flashes against the window screen.
His face against my palm, the warmth of his chest under my cheek while his heart slowed and sped and slowed again.
The words he told me just before he fell asleep.
Was it love? Or was it the most sophisticated cage ever built, one where the bars were tenderness and orgasms and the illusion of choice? Does it matter anymore?
I don't have an answer. I'm not going to get one tonight, or tomorrow, or maybe ever.
And the not knowing isn't unbearable, like I thought it would be.
Turns out you can drive a stolen car through the Sicilian countryside in the middle of the night with an unanswered question sitting in the passenger seat, and it doesn't kill you. It just rides along.
My foot finds the gas again. The car surges forward through the Sicilian countryside until I get to a small village, the kind that rolls up its sidewalks at sundown and doesn't unroll them until the bread is baking.
But there's a store on the corner with a payphone bolted to the exterior wall, the old kind with a metal cord and a receiver.
I slow down until I'm right in front it. There are coins in the well by the gearshift, and I grab them along with the number written on the piece of paper. I leave the car at the curb, engine running, and get out.
The payphone receiver is cold against my ear, as I smooth out the folded notepad page against the metal housing of the phone. Reading the number out loud I start feeding coins into the slot.
Click. The first coin drops. A small, definitive sound that cuts through the silence.
Click. Second coin.
Click. Third.
I dial. The line rings. Once. Twice, and my jaw tightens because if there's no answer, if this number is old, I'll be fucked. I hedged all my escape plans on this and it better—
"Sì." One word. Alert, not groggy. Thank god.
"Gabriella, it's Violet."
Silence. Long enough that I hear her breathing change. Then a laugh.
"The American whore. Calling me." Another laugh, shorter and uglier. "Did he finally bore you, or did you just run out of ways to spread your legs for a living?"
My hand tightens on the receiver. Every muscle in my body wants to slam it down. Three weeks in a concrete cell because of this woman. Beaten, groped, photographed, prepared for sale. Because Gabriella Rossi decided I was an obstacle on her path.
I don't do any of that. Because I need her.
"I need to leave. Him. Sicily. I need to get away."
The silence I'm met with is calculating. I can practically hear the gears turning, the ledger opening, the numbers rearranging themselves behind those cold, beautiful eyes.
"You're lying."
"I'm not."
"It's a trap. A revenge plot."
"I'm in his car, Gabriella. Alone. It's not a trap. I'm leaving whether you help me or not."
She's silent for a bit. "Why call me?" Her voice has shifted. Still hostile, still laced with venom, but underneath it now there's interest. The sound of a woman scenting an opportunity.
"Because you're the only person in Sicily who wants me gone as badly as I want to go.
And because you owe me, Gabriella. You put me in that compound.
You know it. I know it. And Elio doesn't know it yet.
So right now, you and I are going to have a very short conversation about how you're going to help me disappear, and in exchange I'm going to keep your name out of my mouth for the rest of my life. "
Nothing. Just breathing. Then, very quietly. "What do you need?"
Perfect, I've landed exactly where I aimed.
"Transport. Money. A way to get off this island that won't need my passport. He could track that."
"When?"
"Now, Gabriella. I need this all now. I've got two hours, maybe three before he wakes up and notices me gone."
"Puttana, couldn't you have called me a week ago? Given me some time to get things in order?"
"No." It's the truth. I couldn't have risked calling her from any of Elio's landlines. He'd have known and there would have been a trail. "Listen, Gabriella. You wanted me gone? Well, here is your chance. Take it or leave it."
She sighs. "The car has GPS you'll need to ditch it.
" The venom is still there but it's leashed now, working alongside the calculation instead of against it.
"Drive to the old harbor road that runs past a flooded quarry, South of Villabate.
I'll meet you on the coastal road, half a kilometer south.
I'll have clothes, money, documents. Nothing traceable. "
"How will I leave the island?"
"There's a fishing vessel that leaves before dawn, they often take things for my family. It'll take you to the mainland." Her voice hardens again. "After that you're not my problem. You were never my problem. You were just a cockroach who crawled into a kitchen where she didn't belong."
My teeth clench so hard my jaw aches. But my voice comes out level. "Noted."
"And Violet?" She says my name like she's spitting out something rotten. "If you ever contact me again, if you ever come back to Sicily, if you ever breathe Elio Marchetti's name in a sentence that includes mine, I will finish what the compound started. Capisce?"
"Loud and clear."
The line goes dead.
I hang up the receiver, my hand finally shaking. Not from fear. From the effort of not screaming into the empty street that I just negotiated my escape with the woman who tried to have me sold, and the price was swallowing every word I wanted to say.
Welcome to the Marchetti world, Violet. This is how the women survive.
I turn back to the car.
The quarry is twenty minutes from the village, down a road that narrows until the asphalt gives way to packed dirt and gravel.
The Audi's suspension absorbs every rut and pothole as the headlights carve a tunnel through the dark.
At the end, through a gap in a rusted chain-link fence, I see water.
Black and still. A flooded quarry pit that swallowed whatever industry used to live here and turned it into a hole.
I park on the edge. Kill the engine and wait for the silence to swallow me as I rest my hands on the steering wheel. The leather is warm from my grip, faintly smelling like him, the way his things always carry his scent, woven into every surface he touches.
Get out of the car, Violet.
I get out.