Elio. In the estate, behind locked doors, armed guards, and garden walls that might as well have been prison bars. I clung to him. Slept in his bed, arched into his hands, told myself the wanting was mine. Not manufactured. Not a survival mechanism dressed up in silk sheets.
And now. Concrete instead of marble. Matt instead of Elio. A different cage, a different man who makes the walls feel less close.
I don't finish the thought. Press my thumb hard into the scar on my palm instead and count the drips from the leaking pipe in the corner until my brain goes somewhere quieter.
"Hey, Vi?" Matt's voice, groggy, from his mattress. Not asleep after all.
"Yeah."
"Can I ask you something?"
"Depends."
A pause. Long enough that the dripping water marks three beats.
"Is there anyone who might be looking for you?"
My fingers go still on the scar across my palm.
A simple question. Reasonable. A fellow captive hoping someone on the outside knows, someone with resources, someone who might come.
"Why do you ask?"
"Because if someone is, if there's even a chance, that changes things. That changes what we do next."
He's right. The honest answer is yes. God, yes. There's a man in Palermo who will hopefully tear this country apart to findme, whose name alone would make the guards in this place shit themselves, who kissed me like I was his everything.
But I don't say any of that.
"I don't know," I say. "Maybe."
Matt is quiet for a long time. "Okay. Maybe is better than no."
I turn onto my side, facing away from him. Another wave of nausea rolls through and I breathe through it, slow and deliberate. Bad water. Bad food. Stress.
Behind me, Matt shifts on his mattress. When he speaks again his voice is careful.
"Vi? One more thing. The person who might be looking, are they the kind of person who has the means to actually find you? Like, resources?"
My hand presses hard against the scar on my palm.
"Go to sleep, Matt."
4
ELIO
It's been seventy-two hours of dead ends, bought silence, and men who know nothing, because they were paid to know nothing. Every lead dissolves on contact. The security footage shows three vehicles, a rehearsed extraction, faces obscured, plates that trace back to a rental company in Catania that burned to the ground the same night. Too clean for anyone to have managed alone.
Logic keeps circling back to the same door.
I button my suit jacket in the car, my ribs punishing me for it. The wrapping beneath my shirt keeps everything where it belongs but not enough to let me forget. My split lip has scabbed over in a way that cracks every time I speak, which means every conversation for the past three days has tasted like copper. The eye has gone from swollen shut to a deep purple-green. No amount of composure disguises it.
Good. Let him see his handiwork.
Cicero's estate sits on the hill above Palermo like a crown on a rotting head. Seventeenth-century villa, restored twice, once after the war, once after my mother died and he gutted the interior to remove all evidence of her existence. New marble. New fixtures. Every trace of her gone in six weeks.
The guards at the gate nod me through without searching me. A mistake born of habit. They see the suit, the car, the face that looks like Cicero's but thirty years younger and currently rearranged by his fists. They see the son who lived in this prison and never stood up to his father. They don't see the four-inch folding knife in my inside breast pocket, the one I took off a Corsican in Marseille six years ago. Titanium frame, carbon steel blade. Thin enough to disappear inside a lapel.
