No argument. No justification. Just honest answers.
“You broke his arm because he spoke to me wrong.”
“I broke his arm because he spoke about you like you were something to be dismissed. Because—” His voice cracks. “Because I would kill a man for touching you. And I wanted him to understand that.”
There it is.
The fear I didn’t expect. Not fear of the violence. Fear of what it reveals. Fear of what I’m seeing now.
“Mi dispiace.” The Italian slips out, rough and broken. “I’m sorry. Not for him. He earned what he got. But for making you witness it. For showing you what lives under—” He gestures at himself. The tailored suit. The careful composure. “I know what this makes me. I just?—”
This is the weakness you’ve been hunting.
The strategic part of my brain latches onto it. He’s off-balance. His need makes him predictable. With the right words and pressure, I could make him do almost anything.
That’s power. Strategy. Survival.
But I can’t bring myself to twist the knife right now.
Not while he’s this open and bleeding.
“You could have killed him.” I push anyway. Testing. “Over words. That’s not rational.”
“No. It’s not.”
“You know that.”
“I know exactly what I am, Violet.” His eyes hold mine. Dark and bottomless and completely exposed. “I don’t try to excuse it.”
The silence stretches. I should be pressing harder. Finding the angles. Building strategies.
Instead, the most human thing in me surfaces.
“He called me a bitch.” The edge in my voice isn’t just about tonight. “Looked at me like I was nothing. Like I was just—just something someone fucks when they’re bored.”
It’s about every time a man dismissed me. Every foreman who talked over my expertise. Every colleague who assumed that the pretty girl couldn’t possibly know structural engineering. Every moment my competence was treated as a joke.
Elio’s response is immediate. “You’re not nothing.” He steps closer. “You’re?—”
He stops.
Can’t finish.
I watch him struggle with words that would define me to him. Words he won’t say because saying them would be too much. Too binding. Too revealing.
The loaded silence fills with jasmine and copper and the echo of the guard’s screams.
“I don’t know what to do with any of this.” The admission tears out of me. Maybe the most truthful thing I’ve said since I woke up in his fortress.
“What do you mean?”
I gesture helplessly at the blood on his knuckles, at the smear on the stone where a man just lost the use of his arm, at the garden that’s both beautiful and a prison. Athim—monster and man, captor and protector.
“You. The violence. The—” I swallow hard. “The way I’m reacting to it. I don’t know what to do with it.”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“You don’t have to do anything with it,” he says carefully. “I’m not asking you for anything I have no right to?—”
