Chapter 18 Violet
VIOLET
The dining room is candlelit when I arrive.
Dozens of flames flicker from iron candelabras, casting the stone walls in gold and shadow. Like a cathedral. Like a seduction. Like both at once.
Elio is already seated at the head of the table. Watching the doorway.
Watching me.
His attention locks onto the green silk first. Tracks down my body with an intensity that makes my skin prickle. Then up to the hickey on my neck. His mark, purple and proud. Satisfaction flashes across his face, then hunger. His hands tighten on the chair arms, knuckles going white.
Good.
I wanted a reaction. I got one.
I cross to the table, the silk whispering against my bare thighs, and I know he’s tracking every movement as I walk to the chair across from him.
His jaw tightens as I sit. Almost imperceptible. But I’m learning to read him now, and that micro-expression might as well be a billboard.
The silence stretches between us.
He reaches for the wine. Pours two glasses with hands that are perfectly steady, perfectly controlled. Slides one across the polished wood toward me.
I take it. Drink deeply. Study him over the rim.
He lets me look.
No mocking. No taunting. No “see something you like, tesoro?” Just stillness, almost an invitation. Assess me. Take your time.
So I do.
The candlelight catches the sharp angles of his face. High cheekbones. Strong jaw. That scar through his eyebrow. He’s wearing a black suit tonight, no tie, top button undone. Controlled dishevelment. Everything about him calculated to project power without appearing to try.
But I’m not looking at the surface anymore.
I’m looking for load-bearing walls.
“How are you?” His voice is soft, almost careful. Like he’s handling something fragile.
Interesting.
“How am I?” I set down the wineglass. “Well, let’s see. I got fingered against a wall last night. Spent today trying to figure out if I’m a victim or a participant. Jury’s still out.”
His whole body goes still. Not frozen. Alert. Eyes darkening as he processes what I just said. What I deliberately didn’t say.
I didn’t give him the “against my will” opening. Didn’t hand him ammunition to twist into justification or absolution. Just stated facts. Clinical. Dry.
“You’re being remarkably candid.” His voice is rougher than before.
“Figured we’re past pretense.” I take another sip of wine. “You did what you did. I’m still here. Lying about the facts seems redundant at this point.”
His fingers curl around his own glass with a white-knuckled grip.
Crack number two. My honesty unsettles him more than my resistance ever did.
A staff member appears with the first course. Some kind of carpaccio, ruby-red beef arranged like flower petals. We eat in silence that’s less hostile than our previous dinners. The edges sanded down. Both of us circling each other with wary care.
I’m halfway through the main course, lamb, perfectly pink, melting on my tongue, when he sets down his fork.
“I’d like to show you the grounds.”
I stop chewing. Swallow carefully. “The grounds?”
“You’ve been inside for weeks.” His voice is measured. “The gardens are beautiful at night. I thought you might appreciate seeing them.”
Nothing he does is without an angle.
My mind races through possibilities. What’s the play here? Controlled freedom to make me more compliant? A romantic setup designed to manipulate me into his bed? Some elaborate trap I can’t see yet?
“Why?”
“Because you need fresh air. Because the estate is worth seeing. Because—” He pauses. A complicated emotion moves behind his eyes. “Because I want to give you something that isn’t a cage or a threat.”
That catches me off guard.
I should refuse on principle. Should tell him to fuck off and walk back to my room. Should assert independence, draw a line, maintain whatever boundaries I have left.
The courtyard flashes through my mind, unwelcome. Going outside with him again already feels like stepping back into a trap whose shape I know too well.
But he’s right, I’ve been locked inside these stone walls for almost a month now, surrounded by silk and surveillance, breathing recycled air that never quite feels real.
The courtyard wasn’t outside, not truly, just another room with a ceiling removed.
And I’m starving for the sky without glass or stone framing it, for air that moves freely instead of pressing in.
I want to see the full scope of the place that’s holding me, map its edges in my mind, understand exactly how vast the cage really is.
“Fine.” I set down my fork. “But if this is some elaborate setup to fuck me against a tree—”
His mouth curves. Dark amusement flickering in those endless eyes. “If I wanted to fuck you against a tree, tesoro, I wouldn’t need elaborate setups.” He holds my gaze. “You’d let me.”
The Mediterranean night swallows me whole.
I step through the balcony doors and stop dead, overwhelmed.
The scent of jasmine hits first, heavy and intoxicating, threading through air that’s warm and soft against my bare arms, wrapping around me like it’s been waiting.
Then I look up and see stars. Thousands of them, sharp and bright, no city glow to dull their edges or steal the depth.
Just endless black pierced with light, the kind of sky I haven’t seen since before the café, before any of this.
Real air.
Not filtered. Not recycled. Not the climate-controlled atmosphere I’ve been breathing for weeks.
I stand just past the threshold, chest expanding like it’s remembering what lungs are for. My eyes sting, and I blink rapidly, refusing to cry over something as stupid as stars.
Elio hangs back, giving me space, watching me react without touching or crowding.
This quiet and careful version of him is harder to hate.
That’s the point, I remind myself. This is strategy too.
We move down stone paths that wind through the estate.
Fountains and sculptures emerge from the shadows as we pass.
Ancient olive trees twisted with age. A hedge maze rising dark against the backdrop of night sky.
And everywhere, the scent of growing things, jasmine and lemon and something earthier underneath.
The scale of it takes my breath away.
I knew he was powerful. Knew it in the abstract. But this—acres of manicured grounds, hidden security details, high fortified walls framing everything—this makes it concrete. Not a house. A fortress. A kingdom.
In the distance, Palermo’s lights glitter like scattered diamonds. Beyond them, darkness. The Mediterranean, invisible but present, a vast emptiness that could swallow me whole.
Even if I ran, where would I go?
“The maze was planted in 1642.” Elio walks beside me, not behind. Almost equal. “There’s a secret garden at its center. I found this place after my mother died. Bought it. Restored it.” His gaze drifts over the grounds. “Built something that was only mine.”
His mother.
The dead woman who loved him. Who never saw this place he built to escape whatever his father’s world was.
“What was she like?” The question slips out before I can stop it.
He’s quiet as we pass a fountain—sixteenth century, my restorer’s eye supplies, Florentine influence in the carved dolphins—and he gestures toward an orange grove to our left.
“She loved blood oranges. I added this grove because of her.” His voice is soft. “She said they were too intense for most people. That’s why she liked them.”
Blood oranges.
I love blood oranges too. Have loved them since before I can remember. The tart-sweet bite the way the juice stains your fingers dark red.
The coincidence unsettles me. Of all the things to share with his dead mother.
The cognitive dissonance is dizzying. Kidnapper walking me through a garden talking about grief. About a woman who loved what I love, purely by chance. He kidnapped me. He’s also a man grieving his murdered mother. My stomach can’t decide whether to clench or unclench, so it does both at once.
We walk in silence for a while. Through a rose garden, down terraced steps toward a lower level of the grounds. He points out things as we pass. A sculpture he commissioned when he bought the place, a wall that survived an earthquake in 1908, the fountain he had restored stone by stone.
I map everything. Exits. Sight lines. Distance to the walls.
But I also notice the way his voice softens when he talks about history, about what he’s built here. The way his hands move when he describes architecture. The care with which he touches a trailing vine, checking its attachment to the trellis.
Contradictions.
“What do you actually do?” I ask as we climb toward what looks like a terrace. “And don’t say ‘it’s complicated’ or ‘import, export.’ I’m tired of that answer.”
He’s quiet for a beat too long.
“Import and export cover most of it.”
“Drugs?” I push. “Weapons? Trafficking?”
He stops walking. The look he gives me is shocked. Hurt even, flickering across his face before he controls it.
“You think I traffic people?”
“You kidnapped me.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
He turns to face me fully. In the moonlight, his eyes are black pools. “I draw the line at women and children. I would never—” he breaks off. Jaw tight. “The fact that you could think that of me—”
He doesn’t deny drugs. Doesn’t deny weapons.
“You kidnapped me,” I repeat. “You were willing to let me starve. Those facts exist, Elio. Whatever line you think you won’t cross, you’ve already crossed plenty.”
His expression softens.
“If you hadn’t yielded, I had a doctor ready. IVs. Nutrients. Six days was the limit I set on watching you hurt yourself.”
I stare at him.
“You had a limit?”
“I’m not a monster.” Then, a ghost of dark humor, “Or not completely.”
“Six days of watching me suffer before you stepped in.”
“Six days of watching you prove you were strong enough to survive in my world.”
He frames it like a test. Like my starvation was preparation, not torture. Like the kidnapping was a rescue.