Because I can call him names. Asshole, psycho, kidnapper. And all of them are true. But so is wounded. Grieving. Terrified of losing people.
15
VIOLET
The courtyard door is unlocked.
I discover this by accident, pacing the halls after dinner like a ghost who forgot where she’s haunting. My fingers trail along the stone wall, a restorer’s habit, checking for damage, and they catch on the iron handle of a door I’ve passed a hundred times.
It gives.
For a moment I just stand there, heart hammering, waiting for alarms. Guards. Elio materializing from thin air to remind me that every inch of freedom here is borrowed.
Nothing happens.
I push the door open and step through.
The courtyard is small. Enclosed on all sides by ancient walls draped in jasmine, the white blooms glowing faintly in the moonlight. A fountain burbles in the center, water catching starlight as it falls. And overhead there are stars.
I haven’t seen stars without glass between us since before the café. Before everything.
My legs carry me to the fountain’s edge before I make a conscious decision to move. I sink onto the cool stone, pull my knees to my chest, and press my forehead against them.
Breathe.
But breathing doesn’t help. Nothing helps. Because every time I close my eyes, I see his face in the gallery. The raw wound of his confession. His mother murdered when he was twelve. His father… What kind of father murders his child’s mother for trying to leave?
What kind of child grows up in the shadow of that violence and becomes?—
Becomes Elio.
The tears come before I can stop them. Hot and silent, soaking into the thin fabric of my red silk dress. I cry for the boy who found his mother’s body. For the man so broken he doesn’t believe love exists. For myself, because I’m starting to understand him, and understanding is so much worse than hating.
You can call him a monster and mean it,I think, shoulders shaking.But monsters are made, not born. Someone built those walls. Someone taught him that love is just biology dressed up as poetry.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand, but the tears keep coming. I’ve cried more in the past two weeks than in the entire five years before. Captivity strips everything away. All the armor I’ve spent my life constructing, the sarcasm, the deflection, the refusal to need anyone, it’s all crumbling like water-damaged stone.
Load-bearing walls failing,my brain supplies.Structural integrity compromised.
The sound of footsteps on stone startles me. I scrub at my face, but there’s no hiding the evidence. My eyes will be red and swollen. Anyone looking at me will know I’ve been crying.
Elio doesn’t announce himself. He just sits beside me on the fountain’s edge, close enough that I can feel his heat, far enough that we’re not quite touching.
For a long moment, neither of us speaks. The silence isn’t heavy. Isn’t charged with the usual tension that crackles between us. It’s almost... peaceful. Almost companionable.
Like two people who’ve exhausted themselves fighting and called a temporary truce.
I should leave. Should stand up and walk back inside and put as much distance between us as this gilded cage allows.
I don’t move.
“Are you all right?” His voice is soft. Genuine concern underneath the formal diction. It catches me off guard, this version of him. The one who plays heartbreaking piano and stares at his mother’s painting with grief written across his face.
“I’m fine.”
“Your eyes are red.”
Of course they are. Nothing gets past you.
