Chapter 2 Elio
ELIO
The light goes on.
Her apartment is on the third floor, second window from the left.
The one with the ceramic tiles on the sill and the bowl of blood oranges she replenishes every three days from the market stall on Via Roma.
The vendor’s name is Giuseppe. He overcharges her by thirty percent because she’s American and doesn’t haggle, and she tips him anyway because she’s the kind of person who leaves money under plates for waitresses who refuse it.
Twenty-three days of watching her, and I know Violet Quinn Murphy the way I know the provenance of a painting.
Every brushstroke, every restoration, every crack in the varnish.
She carries South Boston in her vowels and her stubborn jaw, carries her dead father in the way she flinches at raised voices, carries two older brothers’ protectiveness in the way she checks over her shoulder when she walks home after dark.
Danny and Sean. Both with records, both reformed, both under the impression their baby sister is safe on the other side of an ocean.
If they only knew what kind of man watches her now.
I shift in the leather seat, the Maserati’s interior dark enough to swallow me whole. The cigarette between my fingers has burned down to nothing. I don’t remember lighting it.
Control.
That’s what this is. Reconnaissance. Due diligence on a Foundation employee. She’s on my grant, after all. The Marchetti Foundation’s money pays for her apartment, her supplies, her access to that crumbling cathedral she disappears into at dawn.
Not nine in the morning like a normal person.
Not even at eight like someone who values sleep, but six fifty in the morning.
She stops at Café Prima for a double espresso—no sugar, room temperature water on the side—and spends exactly twenty-seven minutes sketching in a notebook with a green leather cover before walking across the piazza to work.
She tucks her hair behind her left ear when she’s concentrating.
Only the left. The right side falls forward, brushing her cheek, and she ignores it until it gets in her way, at which point she blows it aside with a sharp exhale that makes her lips purse in a way I’ve studied from seventeen different angles.
Cazzo. I’m losing my mind.
The light in her window flickers. She moves through the apartment, and my hand tightens on the steering wheel.
Through the gauze of her cheap curtains, I can make out her shape.
Narrow shoulders, the curve of her waist, still in the clothes she wore to work today.
Dark jeans, gray sweater, sensible boots.
The same uniform she’s worn every day this week with minor variations.
She doesn’t dress to be seen. Doesn’t style her hair or paint her face or do any of the thousand things women do to signal availability.
She dresses like she’s already given up on being noticed.
Too late, tesoro. I noticed.
A vibration rattles the center console. I don’t look at the screen already knowing who it is.
The same person who’s called five times today, each time with increasing irritation.
Cicero Marchetti doesn’t like being ignored.
It’s one of his defining characteristics, right up there with complete lack of conscience and the charming habit of viewing his child as a chess piece rather than a person.
The phone stops. Rings again.
I let it ring.
Whatever he wants—the Rossi situation, the Ferrante negotiations, another lecture on family duty—can wait.
Gabriella Rossi and her alliance marriage can burn for all I care.
I’ve been dodging that particular trap for eighteen months, and I’ll dodge it for eighteen more if necessary.
Gabriella is beautiful, but she always makes me think of a knife.
Sharp. Cold. Designed for a single purpose.
I have no interest in being cut.
The phone goes silent and a text follows. Then another.
I don’t read them.
Instead, I watch the window where Violet has appeared.
She’s silhouetted against the warm light of her apartment, standing at the sill where she keeps her trinkets.
From this angle, I can see the profile of her face, the way she tilts her head as she looks out at the darkening street.
Her fingers reach for something, the blood oranges, and she picks one up, weighing it in her palm.
My jaw tightens.
She doesn’t know I’m here. That’s the thing. She moves without performance, without awareness of eyes on her body, and every unguarded gesture is a scrap of her not meant for anyones eyes.
A spray of citrus oil catches the light as she digs her thumb into the peel.
I can imagine the scent from here. Sweet and sharp and faintly bitter, like Sicily itself. Like her, perhaps. American sweetness over something more complicated. She carries sadness in her shoulders, in the way she walks through crowds without meeting anyone’s eyes.
But there’s steel under the sadness. I’ve watched her climb scaffolding like she was born on it.
Watched her argue with suppliers in broken Italian, refusing to accept inferior materials for her precious frescoes.
Watched her stand alone in a four-hundred-year-old cathedral as the light failed around her, sketching with the kind of focused intensity that borders on religious fervor.
She cares about things. Dead things. Broken things. Things that need saving.
What would she make of me, I wonder? A living thing beyond repair.
The orange peel drops to the sill in a long spiral. She separates a segment, and I watch. Watch, like a fucking teenager through a bedroom window, like this is anything other than what it is, as she brings it to her lips.
Her mouth opens.
The segment disappears.
My fingers tap the steering wheel. Once. Twice. A rhythm I don’t consciously choose, matching the pulse that’s picked up in my throat. She’s just eating an orange. A mundane act performed by millions of people every day. And yet.
And yet.
Her lips close around another segment, her jaw moving slightly as she chews.
For one irrational second I am certain she can see me as she looks out the window, at the street below, at the evening settling over Palermo like a blanket.
Certain she’s looking directly into the dark interior of this car and asking herself who sits inside it.
But her gaze moves on, unseeing as she stares into the distance.
She doesn’t know I’m here. Doesn’t suspect.
That’s the thing about Violet Murphy. I’ve watched her scan streets with the wariness of someone who learned young that danger wears friendly faces, and yet she’s remarkably blind to the threat sitting sixty meters from her door.
Because I am a threat. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
I built a billion-dollar empire out of art and blood.
The legitimate half buys me seats at charity galas and invitations to museum openings.
The other half, the one that really matters, buys fear.
Respect. The kind of power that doesn’t need to announce itself because everyone already knows.
Men have died by my order. By my hand. I don’t lose sleep over it.
They knew the rules when they entered the game.
But she didn’t.
Violet Murphy is an innocent. A civilian. A woman who thinks she came to Sicily to restore crumbling frescoes and found something to believe in, when the truth is she’s been here on my sufferance since her application crossed my desk.
The Marchetti Foundation receives three hundred grant applications a year.
We fund maybe twelve. I don’t review them personally, that’s what staff is for, but something about her file caught my attention.
The photograph, perhaps. Dark auburn hair, the challange in her eyes, a mouth that looked like it had forgotten how to smile.
Or maybe it was the portfolio. Image after image of her work. Damaged things made whole, broken things restored, beautiful things saved from obscurity and decay. She has a gift. An eye for seeing what something was meant to be, beneath all the damage.
What would she see if she looked at me?
Nothing worth saving.
The phone buzzes again. This time I glance at it.
Cicero
Rossi won’t resolve itself. Call me.
Gabriella is losing patience. So am I.
Tomorrow. My office. 9am.
I read the messages, feel nothing, and set the phone face-down.
Gabriella Rossi can lose patience until she chokes on it.
I didn’t spend a decade building my own power base within the Syndicate just to hand it over to a woman my father chose to keep the Rossis compliant.
Marriage alliances are his game. The old way.
Bloodlines and breeding and women passed like currency between powerful men.
She is not my woman.
And I have plans of my own for the Marchetti empire.
In the window, Violet has finished her orange. She wipes her hands on her jeans as she always does, the woman has a dozen sweaters but apparently no napkins, and moves away from the sill.
The light stays on.
I check my watch. It’s nine fifty-two, which means she will shower now.
After that she’ll change into the oversized T-shirt she sleeps in, the one with some American university logo on the front, then read for approximately thirty minutes until, finally, she’ll turn off the light between ten thirty and eleven.
I know her schedule better than she does. I know the contents of her apartment better than she does.
Twenty-three days of watching. Of waiting.
Of cataloguing details like she’s a painting I’m planning to acquire.
Provenance: South Boston, working class, Catholic guilt and stubborn pride.
Condition: excellent, despite some emotional scarring.
Medium: flesh and blood and a spine made of steel wrapped in soft packaging.
Estimated value: incalculable.
She walked past my car tonight. Close enough to touch if I’d rolled down the window. Close enough to hear the rhythm of her breath. She didn’t notice of course. She never notices.
But she will.
Tomorrow.
I’ve been patient. Learned everything I could about her.
Mapped her routines, her vulnerabilities, her defenses.
I know where she’s strong and where she’s weak.
I know she’s lonely, it bleeds through every phone call with her mother, every solitary dinner, every night she falls asleep with a book on her chest because there’s no one there to take it from her hands.
She wants to be known. She’s just convinced herself she doesn’t.
I know her. Better than anyone alive.
The light in her window dims slightly as she’s moves to the bathroom for her daily scheduled shower.
I light another cigarette, inhale deeply, and acknowledge what I’ve been avoiding for weeks.
This isn’t reconnaissance. This isn’t due diligence. This is obsession, pure and simple, and I’ve never been the kind of man who lies to himself about his nature.
I want her.
Not just her body, though Cristo, yes, her body too, the curve of her hips, the pale skin I’ve glimpsed when her sweater rides up, the mouth I’ve imagined wrapped around things far more interesting than blood orange segments.
All of her. The whole complicated package. The sad American girl who talks to statues and tips street vendors and carries her loneliness like a armor.
I want to peel her open like she peeled that orange. Segment by segment. Layer by layer. Until there’s nothing left hidden.
Mine.
The word settles into my chest like it belongs there.
I finish my cigarette and check my watch.
Tomorrow, I’ll introduce myself. Some accidental encounter at the cathedral, perhaps, or the café where she spends her mornings. A benefactor taking interest in a Foundation project. Perfectly innocent. Perfectly reasonable.
She won’t suspect. Why would she? To her, I’ll just be another face in a foreign city.
And by the time she realizes what I am, what I want, it will be far, far too late.
I start the engine, the Maserati purring to life, and pull away from the curb. In the rearview mirror, her window glows amber against the Palermo night.