Between the blows, I go somewhere else.
Her hands in my hair. Those callused fingers, rougher than they should be, tracing patterns against my scalp. Her mouth on mine. The way she says my name.Elio.Like she hasn't decided if it's a prayer or a curse, and she's comfortable in the ambiguity.
Mine.
Another blow. I grit my teeth. The dislocated shoulder screams its own separate frequency.
Where is she right now?She better be safe in my estate, or there will be a price to pay.
I hold on to that thought. The vicious, almost-smile that forms on my face. Because they can torture me, beat me, starve me… but if they dare touch what's mine, they'll never see it coming.
This game Cicero and I are playing is getting tiring now. The beatings are predictable, a chore. I can't kill his men, he'll just send more. I can't kill him, the Syndicate would descend. So like the pawn he thinks I am, I never fight back, keeping him complacent, while in the background I'm planning to ruin him. Just a few more months before I can unleash what I've been building beneath his floor.
Patience.
Even here. Even bleeding. Even with my shoulder grinding and my ribs knitting wrong and blood pooling in the floor drain that never quite drains.
I wake justas the door comes off its hinges.
It does not open, it detonates inward, the top hinge shearing clean off. Valente comes through with his Beretta up, shooting the stunned guards before they have a chance to react.
Two men flank him. My men, loyal to me.
He takes in the room. Me hanging, blood on the floor, the pipe in the corner. His expression doesn't change. This is the fourth time he's cut me down from this beam. He knows the choreography.
"How many?"
"Three outside. Two in here. The third one ran." He pulls bolt cutters from inside his jacket. Always prepared. "He won't get far."
The chains give. I drop, my knees hit concrete. My hands, swollen and slow, catch me before my face does.
Valente doesn't help me up. He knows better. He stands close, blocking me from the two men's view, giving me the thirty seconds I need to force my body vertical through sheer stubbornness. The shoulder objects loudly. I tell it to shut the fuck up.
When I stand, everything registers at once—ribs, kidneys, the eye swollen to nothing, the shoulder with its own persistent opinion about whether I should be upright. I stand anyway. Take one step toward the door and have to put my hand on the wall, just for a second, just until the gray at the edges of my vision decides to clear.
It clears.
"Phone."
He hands me the encrypted device. Twenty-six character passcode by muscle memory. I miss a digit. Start over. My fingers are thick and stupid and I don't have time for that so I breathe through it and try again. Get it on the third attempt.
All accounts look fine. Cicero is still in the dark. Which means this time he's beaten me bloody over a woman. He chained his only son to a beam and had him worked over for god knows how long because I'm refusing to marry Gabriella Rossi.
I lock the phone and hand it back. I think about that for exactly as long as it takes me to register what Valente's expression is doing.
"Is Violet okay?" I ask.
His jaw tightens just a fraction.
"What."
"The gates were open when Ric arrived thirty minutes ago."
The gates don't open. Not without a code, a retinal scan, verbal authorization from me or Valente. The gates are always closed.
"How long was I here?"
A beat. "Forty-seven hours."
