So I do. Not everything. Not the crime family, not the empire, not the art worth more than most people will earn in three lifetimes. But the real parts. The parts that live in my heart, warming me from the inside out, when I feel lost and hopeless at four in the morning.
"He plays piano," I say. "Usually when he thinks no one's listening. Einaudi, mostly, and he plays it angry, like the keys owe him something." Matt's mouth curves slightly. "He reads constantly, history, philosophy, poetry, and he dog-ears the pages, which should be a crime. He once spent forty minutes explaining the structural reinforcement of a fifteenth-century bell tower without realizing I was the wrong person to lecture about architecture until I started correcting him on the buttressing."
"Smart guy."
"Too smart. That's part of the problem." I pick at a thread on my shirt. "He's possessive in a way that should terrify me. Does terrify me. He makes decisions for people like he's the only one qualified to make them. He's done terrible things, Matt. Things I can't pretend away. And when he looks at me it's like I'm the only painting in the gallery and he's never going to let anyone else through the door."
Matt listens without speaking, not waiting for his turn to talk.
"You love him," he says. Not a question.
"I don't know what I feel. I know I chose to stay when I could have left. I know that when I close my eyes in here, he's wheremy brain goes. I know that probably says more about me than it does about him."
"It says you're human."
"It says I'm an idiot."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive." He adjusts the cloth against his nose. "Is he the kind of man who'd look for you?"
"He'd burn this place to the ground."
"Even the difficult parts of him? The possessive, makes-decisions-for-people parts?"
"Especially those parts."
Matt nods, slow, like he's fitting something together, and there's a sharpness in his focus that passes before I can name it.
"He sounds like the kind of man who doesn't let go easily."
"He doesn't let go at all." I pause. "That's the problem… and the hope."
Matt reaches through a low gap in the fence. His fingers, swollen and bloodied, rest against my hand on the concrete. Not gripping. Just present.
"We're getting out of this, Vi. Both of us."
"You don't know that."
"No. But I'm choosing to believe it. And I'm choosing you as the person I believe it with."
My throat aches. My hand stays where it is under his fingers.
"When we get out," I say, "I'm buying you a steak."
"Can't. I'm vegetarian."
"Since when?"
"Since my nose decided to redecorate itself. Meat suddenly lost its appeal."
I breathe out. Somewhere in the compound a van engine turns over, new arrivals or a shipment going out, and through the gap in the wall panels headlights sweep across the loading dock.
Matt's hand stays against mine as the headlights fade and the engine dies and the compound settles back into its rhythm. I keep my eyes open. Elena might be gone tomorrow. The one-shoed girl is still upstairs. The van will come back.
7
ELIO
Mauro Bianchi is on the other side of this door, zip-tied to a chair that Valente bolted into the foundation two hours ago, and I'm standing in the hallway with my back against the wall and blood under my fingernails that isn't mine. Violet's been gone for twenty-eight days.
