"Elio."
I don't stop.
"The Rossi marriage will happen. With or without the girl."
I walk out. Down the stairs. Past the twenty men who answer to him. Through the front door into Sicilian sunlight that has no business being this bright when everything in me has gone this dark.
Valente has the engine running. He reads my face through the windshield and doesn't ask, just puts the car in gear the moment my door closes.
I unfold the knife and wipe my father's blood on my trousers. Black fabric. Won't show.
"Tommaso Lombardi in Messina. Bar near the port."
Valente's eyes go to the rearview, to the blood on my hands.
"When?"
"Now."
5
VIOLET
At dawn Elena comes back into her cell and sits on her mattress without looking at anyone. She's been gone all night this time.
Her clothes are torn at the shoulder. Her eyes are distant, relocated somewhere her body isn't. There's blood between her legs today. She doesn't look at it. She folds her hands in her lap and mouths her three words at the ceiling.
Respira. Ricorda. Resisti.
I mouth them with her through the fence. Neither of us speaks. There's nothing to say that wouldn't be smaller than what just happened to her, so I say nothing, and she doesn't ask me to.
I no longer count days in this place, focusing on the guards instead. I've seen twelve distinct faces so far, working in pairs, rotating on a schedule Matt mapped out in the first few days. Three shifts. The tall one with the scar takes mornings. The short one who shot that woman handles afternoons with a thick-necked guy who never speaks. Nights are looser, less predictable. Different faces. Different energy.
The night guards look at me more, which is a problem in itself. Somehow I've managed to coast through until now. Somehow I've managed to avoidthe room.
When the day guards look, it's a bored assessment, more like inventory check, the way you'd glance at cargo to make sure it's still where you put it. But the night guards look with appetite. One of them, a wiry guy with a shaved head and a neck tattoo that creeps up behind his ear, stops in front of my section of fence every time he passes. Doesn't say anything. Just stands there, his eyes tracing the length of me while I lie on the mattress pretending to be asleep.
Matt notices. He starts sleeping sitting up against the chain-link on his side when the night shift comes on, his back to the fence between us, positioned so anyone looking at me has to see him first. He doesn't mention it. I don't mention it. We just adjust, the way you adjust to a building that's settling.
I'm tired. Not normal tired, not beaten-down-by-captivity tired, though there's plenty of that. A different kind. Bone-deep, like my body is running something in the background that's eating all the processing power. I sleep ten, twelve hours and wake up feeling like I haven't slept at all. My chest aches in a dull, diffuse way I can't pin to any specific injury, the area around my breasts tender in a way that's been bothering me for days. The water here is bad. Whatever they're giving us is doing something to my system. Nausea hits without warning, worst in the mornings, and I've gotten good at breathing through it before it gets away from me.
But I'm surviving, trying my hardest to come up with an escape plan, and failing.
I don't know how long I've been here. Time blurs without sunlight, just an endless fluorescent hum and the distant cries that echo through the walls every night. A week. Two. Maybe longer. It feels like forever. I tell myself I'm lucky. The otherwomen aren't. Their screams splinter the dark, raw and endless, bodies used and discarded as if they're nothing. Beaten. Raped. Daily. But not me. Not yet.
"Your turn, American girl."
The voice rips me from shallow sleep. Two guards I haven't seen before stand outside the chain-link. One drags the barrel of his loaded gun along the links, metal scraping metal in slow, deliberate rhythm. The other unlocks my door with a heavy clank.
My body locks tight. I keep my eyes shut, breathing even, willing them to think I'm still out. Maybe they'll leave.
No chance.
A steel-toed boot slams into my shin. Pain lances up my leg, bright and vicious, and I groan before I can stop it.
"Hey!" Matt's voice cracks from the next cage. "Leave her alone!"
They don't even glance at him. Rough hands yank me up by my sleeve, the fabric tearing at the seam. I scramble, feet slipping on concrete, but the one with the gun drives a fist into my kidney. White-hot fire explodes through my side as my vision swims.
