I look at him. He doesn't look away.
"I had eyes on the warehouse from hour three," he says, flat and steady. "Twelve men on rotation outside, two on the main doors, snipers on the eastern approach. There was no clean window until forty minutes ago. I did not leave you in there a single hour longer than I had to."
I believe him. It doesn't help. Because it means he left Violet.Ileft Violet.
She's been alone for two days.
I'm already moving. Valente is right behind me, picking up the pipe from the corner as we leave. He'll add this to our "Cicero artifacts" collection. I do love to remind myself why Ihate that son of a bitch on occasion. The twelve pipes do the job beautifully, thirteen now.
We take fourteen minutes on a twenty-two-minute road. I sit in the back and fight the body's insistence on cataloguing damage, the ribs won't let me take a full breath, the shoulder keeps aching, and the eye on the left side means my depth perception is compromised enough to misjudge a strike by centimeters, which is the kind of margin that gets you buried.
I account for it. I don't think about the guards down on the east wall or the gate standing open or the amount of time I've been gone. I think about where I told her to stay. My room. I'd asked her before I left. She wasn't going to stay in one room for two days like a very beautiful, very hostile house cat. But I pray to a god I don't believe in anyway, pray that she's there. safe in my room, waiting for me, like she promised.
The estate comes into view. The gates are open. The guardhouse is dark.
Two of my men are down by the east wall. More in the courtyard. I don't stop though, my focus on one thing only—my room.
The stairs are harder than they should be. The shoulder is useless on the left side and the ribs make each step a specific transaction, breathe in, pay for it, breathe out, pay again. With one hand on the rail, not from caution but because the gray at the edges of my vision hasn't fully retreated and I'd rather grip something than find out the hard way what my skull sounds like on marble, I keep moving.
The door is closed, which means nothing. I push it open.
The bed is in disarray, dark linens twisted into a knot on one side, half pulled off the mattress entirely. The room still smells like us. Sex and sleep and the warmth of two bodies in a space for long enough that the air takes it on. I stand in the doorwayand breathe it in, feeling something tighten in my chest that has nothing to do with the cracked ribs.
I should have ignored the summons.
I've been calculating my father's power against mine for four years. I should have let him come to me. Should have stayed in this bed, with her in it, and made Cicero drag me out himself. The worst he could have done is what he did anyway. And she would have been here. Safe. Present.
You left. You went when he called.
Like you always do.
The pillow on her side still holds the shape of her head. I look at it for exactly as long as I can afford to, two seconds, maybe three. and then I push off the doorframe and go.
Her room is in the East wing. The ribs charge me for every single step it takes me to get to it
The door is open, not ajar, open, standing wide, which means someone left in a hurry or someone else came through it. The bed is made the way she makes it, which is carelessly, the duvet pulled up but not straightened, a pillow slightly off-center. She'd been here last. Sleeping in her own room. Not mine.
Her sketchbook is on the floor by the bed. It shouldn't be here, it lives in the studio with her supplies. She must have brought it in the day she came into my room.
It's open, I look at it without picking it up.
Two hands. Hers and mine, fingers loosely entwined, rendered in that precise architectural way she draws everything, every tendon recorded, every knuckle considered. I recognize mine by the signet ring first, the Marchetti crest she'd asked about once and I'd given her half an answer. Then the crooked knuckle on the right ring finger, broken at twenty-three and never set properly. She'd drawn it true. Both hands the same size on the page,neither one holding the other down.
I don't touch it.
My gaze moves to the wardrobe. It's been left open, clothes undisturbed except for one gap, the jeans she wore most, gone. There's a white button-up shirt, crumpled on the floor. She must have been wearing it before she changed. I walk over, and pick it up. It's one of mine. Was she wearing my shirt? I press it against the side of my face and inhale her scent.
Did you run away or did they take you?
She changed. She was thinking. She wasn't panicking, or she was panicking and she was thinking through it at the same time, which is exactly her.
I set the shirt on the bed. Look at the room. The bed. The open sketchbook.
Valente is in the doorway.
"Security room," he says. "Paolo has the footage."
I take one more look at the shirt. At both hands on the page, the same size, neither one holding the other down.
