I blink and the gallery is gone, and we are in his bed and the light is the same gold but everything else is different, his weight over me and his mouth at my throat and the way he said my name in the dark like it was the only word he knew, like he'd been waiting to say it, and nothing had ever felt like that before, nothing, not once in my entire life had anything felt like being wanted that completely. And I knew it was wrong, I knew what he was, and I stayed anyway. I wanted him. I chose?—
I wake up crying.
Big fat tears rolling down my face, as my whole body yearns for Elio's touch. I press my face into the mattress and wait for it to stop. It takes its time.
The thing I hate most isn't that I dreamed about him. It's that I didn't want to wake up. That I was there, in his bed, in his arms, and some part of me was trying to stay inside it even as the concrete and the amber light and the ache in my ribs pulled me back. That I miss him the way you miss a place you know you can never go back to, and the missing doesn't care at all that he's the one who took you there against your will.
At least his cage was gilded. At least the monster was mine.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah. Just missing… home."
"We all do. Hope keeps us alive. Even when it's complicated."
I turn my head toward the fence. His face is right there, pressed against the chain-link, his eyes in the amber light steady and warm.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand. The salt stings the cut on my cheek.
Just tomorrow. Not escape. Not freedom. Not even a plan. Just tomorrow, the smallest possible unit of survival, and right now it's the only goal I can hold.
I roll onto my good side, facing the fence. Matt mirrors me on the other side. His breathing evens out before mine does and Iwatch the rise and fall of his chest through the diamond-shaped gaps and try to match it.
I press my fingertips to the metal between us and let my eyes close.
6
VIOLET
Three days pass before I can sit up without my vision going black at the edges. The bruises move through every shade of ugly on their way to healing. Purple-black along my ribs, green-yellow spreading across my stomach, a deep plum stain wrapping my left thigh where the knee connected hardest. My cheekbone is swollen enough that my left eye only opens halfway, the skin tight and hot when I press my fingers to it, which I keep doing even though I know I shouldn't. My ribs aren't broken. I know what broken feels like and this isn't it, just cracked maybe, bruised deep in a way that makes every inhale an event. But not broken.
By the third morning I manage to stand and walk the length of my cell. Eight steps. Turn. Eight back.
"Look at you," Matt says from his side of the fence. "Regular Olympic athlete."
"Shut up."
"I'm serious. You should see the other guy."
"There is no other guy."
"Exactly. You won."
I flip him off through the fence. He grins, and the grin is so open and real that it makes my chest hurt in a way thathas nothing to do with my ribs. Nobody grins like that in here. Nobody has anything left to grin about. But Matt does it like breathing, like his face just defaults to warmth when it doesn't know what else to do. Elena's voice runs underneath it the way it always does now.Be careful who you trust.
I know. I know. But the grin doesn't care what I know.
The compound has its own fucked-up clock I can’t stop counting. Mornings they line us up, prod us like cattle, shove bread and water through the fence. Afternoons the metal door at the top of the stairs groans open and slams shut over and over. Women walk through it and come back hollow-eyed or limping, or they don’t come back to this block at all. Elena says they cycle them—two weeks, three, however long it takes to grind down whatever fight they had—then through that door to a different section or straight to whoever paid for them. I’ve counted eleven gone since I arrived. Through the crack where two wall panels don’t quite meet I’ve seen a van pull up to the loading dock twice. New women stumble out, drugged, blinking against the lights, herded inside by men who don’t even bother with masks. Why would they? Who the hell are these women going to tell?
This afternoon, three girls come in. The youngest can't be more than sixteen. She has dark hair matted to her face and she's still wearing one shoe, the other foot bare and bleeding on the concrete. A guard shoves her toward the processing area near the metal staircase, where another guard waits with a digital camera and a clipboard. I watch through the gap as they line the three girls against a bare wall. Flash. Front. Flash. Side. Flash. The guard with the clipboard writes while the one with the camera checks the screen, zooms, adjusts, shoots again.
My hands ball into fists at my sides.
They finish processing and herd the new girls toward the cells at the far end. The one-shoed girl disappears behind a partition.
Elena finds me during the fifteen-minute window between shift changes when nobody's patrolling. She slips along the fence line to my cell and crouches there, her fingers curling through the links near the floor. She looks worse than yesterday. The bones of her wrists jut sharp under thin skin and her eyes have a fever-bright quality that worries me.
"Ascolta," she says, low and fast. "Listen. I don't have much time left here."
