Chapter 11 Violet #2
But I catch myself tracing one of his pencil lines with my gaze the way I used to trace craquelure in frescoes. Following the path of his hand. Wondering what he was thinking when he made this mark, and this one, and this one.
Stop it.
I shove the canvas back against the wall and leave.
He’s in the hallway when I exit, leaning against the doorframe like he’s been waiting.
“Did you see anything you liked?”
“You’re good.” I hate admitting it. “Doesn’t make you less of a monster.”
“No,” he agrees easily. “But it makes me human, and that’s what scares you.”
The next day, I’m crossing from the library to my room when movement in the courtyard catches my eye.
A truck, pulling through the main gate. Black, military-looking.
Men stepping out with weapons I recognize from action movies and nightmares.
Machine guns, matte black, carried with the casual efficiency of people who use them regularly.
One of them laughs at something another says.
Relaxed. Unbothered. Like this is a normal Tuesday.
They move in practiced formation, disappearing under an overhang before I can count them.
My stomach knots with confirmation.
This can’t be security for some nervous billionaire. This is an operation. A machine with moving parts, and I’m trapped somewhere inside it.
Later, at lunch in the solarium, I try to needle him about it.
“Most art foundations don’t need paramilitary cosplay.”
His expression cools, and the temperature drops ten degrees in the space between us.
“Sicily is unpredictable.”
“That’s your answer for everything.”
“Because it’s true.” He lifts his water glass, takes a slow sip. “The foundations here are never as solid as they look.”
Double meaning. Always double meanings with him.
The more he avoids, the more I know. Whatever he is, it isn’t clean.
That night I walk into the dining room. See him seated. See the single setting, the candles, the crystal.
And I just... sit down.
No question. No defiance. No “where do I sit?” thrown at him like a tiny grenade.
I lower myself onto his lap as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, and I don’t realize what I’ve done until I’m already there. Until his arm is around me and his chest is warm against my back and my body has arranged itself against him like water finding its level.
Horror floods through me.
His hand stills on my waist. I feel the shift in his breathing. The subtle tension that runs through him before he deliberately relaxes.
When I risk a glance at his face, he’s smiling. Not smug. Not gloating. Something softer, almost tender. Like I’ve given him a gift I didn’t know I was offering.
“There you are,” he murmurs. So quiet I almost don’t hear it.
My body is a traitor.
I let him feed me in silence. Let his hand rest on my stomach. Let myself lean back against his chest when my spine gives out from sitting straight for too long.
It’s tactical, I tell myself. I’m just pretending to soften, just waiting for him to slip.
That’s what I tell myself.
After dinner, he walks me to my wing like he always does, hand hovering at my elbow. Not touching, just present.
He says goodnight and leaves me at my door. I should go in. Shower. Sleep. Plot his murder like a normal captive. Instead, I wait until his footsteps fade down the corridor. Count to sixty. Then slip back out.
The house is quieter at night. My guard is thankfully elsewhere, probably having a well-deserved break.
I follow the low light down a side corridor I haven’t explored yet. The walls here are older, the stone less restored. Paintings line the hallway, smaller than the ones in the main rooms. More personal.
A door stands slightly ajar. Warm light spills through the gap.
I push it open.
The gallery is… intimate. Soft lamps casting pools of gold across polished wood floors. Gilt frames holding old masters, icons, devotional paintings. The air smells like wood polish and a faint incense, like it’s a chapel.
I’m about to step back when I see him.
Elio stands in front of a Renaissance Madonna. Mother and child, gold halo, blue robes that remind me of the angel wing in my cathedral. The painting is beautiful. Fifteenth century, Florentine school maybe, the kind of piece museums would kill for.
He doesn’t notice me.
His shoulders are relaxed in a way I’ve never seen. The rigid control he wears like armor is gone, stripped away. His face is open. Raw.
The expression I catch on him is not hunger. Not calculation. Not the patient predator I’ve been studying for days.
It’s grief.
His eyes shine in the low light. Dark and wet at the edges. His hand hovers at his chest, pressing against his sternum like something inside aches.
The Madonna gazes past him. Serene and unreachable. Her painted eyes hold the same tenderness they’ve held for five hundred years.
He stares at her like she’s the only person who was ever kind to him.
My hate stutters.
I wanted him to be simple. A sociopath in a beautiful suit.
Monsters are easier to catalogue when they’re cleanly inhuman, when you can map their damage without getting lost in the complexity underneath.
But this is a man in pain. A man standing alone in a private chapel, grieving something I don’t understand, looking at a painted mother like she holds answers he’ll never get.
Who did you lose?
The question rises before I can stop it. I bite it back. Swallow it down. Asking makes it real. Asking means caring, and I don’t. I can’t.
He senses me finally and turns.
The shutters slam down with frightening speed. In the space of a breath, he goes from raw to controlled, from open to locked. The predator returns. The mask slides back into place.
But I saw what was underneath.
“You should be in your room, Violet.” His voice is composed, but there’s a roughness at the edges that wasn’t there at dinner.
I cover my shock with sarcasm, the only armor I have left.
“Didn’t peg you for the religious type.”
His jaw flexes. “I have... history with her.”
Her. Not the painting. The Madonna herself. Or someone the Madonna reminds him of.
I should leave, retreat to my room to analyze it. Instead, I hear myself pushing.
“Is this part of the tour? Dining room, solarium, armed guards, private gallery?”
He steps closer. Too close. Always too close. But he doesn’t touch me.
“Do you believe in anything, Violet?”
The question catches me off guard. Not rhetorical. Genuine. “I believe in what I can touch,” I say. “Stone. Pigment. Plaster.”
“And people?”
“People lie.”
Something flickers across his face. Agreement, maybe, or recognition.
“Go to bed, tesoro.” Softer. Dangerous in a different way. “This room isn’t for you.”
I walk away on unsteady legs. My heart pounds for reasons that have nothing to do with fear of violence. Everything to do with the crack I just saw.
Back in my room, I stare at the ceiling. The angels look different at night. Shadows pooling in the hollows of their painted faces, turning serenity into something more ambiguous.
I replay the image of him in front of the Madonna.
The set of his shoulders. The grief in his face. The way he shut it down the second he knew I was watching, like slamming a vault door on something precious.
My hand slides under the pillow, reaching for the caliper.
Gone.
My fingers find nothing but silk. Empty space where cold metal should be.
I tear the pillow off. Check the mattress, the floor, the gap between the bed frame and the wall. Nothing. Nothing.
The scream that rips out of me is muffled by the pillow I shove against my face. I bite down on silk and rage, hating him with every cell in my body for taking this too, this last small weapon, this final shred of control.
Bastard. Fucking bastard.
He saw me reach for it that night at dinner. He knew exactly where I hid it. And he waited, waited until I was comfortable, until I stopped checking every night, to take it away.
Everything I have, he takes. Everything I build, he dismantles. Every wall I construct, he walks right through.
I lie back on the bed. Stare at the angels. My pulse is still racing, but not just from anger anymore.
His face in the gallery. The grief. The shine in his eyes.
The monster has cracks.