His expression fractures as his loaded into a vehicle. He watches me through the window as they close the door.
I watch him back until Elio turns and someone opens the car door and Elio slides inside with me still in his arms, still notputting me down. I keep mine around his neck as the engine turns over, and we move.
Behind us the compound smokes. Women stumble out into the dawn, blinking, holding each other, testing the ground like they can't trust it.
I get it.
The ground hasn't been trustworthy in a long time.
I stay exactly where I am.
10
ELIO
It's been two hours since Violet collapsed against my chest in the back seat of my car, her body giving out mid-breath like someone had cut her strings. Two hours since her fingers went slack in the fabric of my shirt, her head lolling sideways as I pressed two fingers to her throat because for one sick, bottomless second I thought she was dead.
She wasn't dead. Sheisn'tdead. She's breathing. Right here, in my bed, in my room, behind my walls, where she should have been this entire fucking time.
The doctor left twenty-three minutes ago. I know because the clock on my nightstand is the only thing in this room I'll let myself look at besides her. His voice is still rattling around in my skull, that flat clinical recitation delivered like he was reading a grocery list. Cracked ribs, malnourishment, dehydration, contusions across her arms and jaw, ligature marks on both wrists consistent with prolonged restraint, defensive wounds on the neck and shoulders, abrasions, torn skin…
She fought.
He said it like a footnote. An addendum to the chart. A clinical observation that explained the pattern of injury.
Every day. Every single fucking day I didn't find her fast enough, someone put their hands on her, and she fought them, and it wasn't enough because she was alone.
My jaw locks so hard my back teeth grind. I flex my hands on my thighs and look down at them. Blood in the creases of my knuckles. Under my nails, black in the low light. The guard's blood, or Mauro Bianchi's, or one of the six others between the breach point and her cell. Does it matter whose? It's all the same debt.
Not enough. Not nearly enough.
Violet is lying on her side, the sheet pulled to her chin. I've put her in one of my shirts now, black, long enough to reach her knees, couldn't let her slip in what was left of her shirt and that filthy skirt. God, she had no underwear. No fucking underwear. The bruise along her jaw is yellow, days old, at least. Which means someone hit her in the face, and she walked around with it for days, and no one came.
Ididn't come.
My hands curl into fists on my thighs. The knuckles crack. I don't move from the edge of this bed. I can't.
Through the walls, the estate is becoming something I never built it to be. There are people here who shouldn't be. Twelve women and a man pulled from concrete cells and fluorescent corridors, and dumped into a sixteenth-century estate full of priceless art and Carrara marble. The dissonance would be funny if anything were funny right now. Someone is crying in the guest wing, a low, broken sound that carries through stone like stone was designed to amplify grief. Maybe it was.
The sounds of all these people are overwhelming. All I want to hear is Violet's steady breathing, but all I can hear are boots on the stairs, voices in the corridor, my men moving like they're afraid of waking something. There's radio static from the security office down the hall. A woman's voice drifts up from theopen window, asking a question no one can answer because we don't have a translator yet.
I left this room once. For five minutes I stood in the corridor with the door cracked behind me so I could still see the shape of her under the sheet, and told Valente to handle it.
"All of it. Whatever they need. Doctors, clothes, food. Translators. Therapists. I don't care what it costs."
Valente looked at me in a way a man looks at a crumbling wall and tries to calculate how long before it comes down.
"You need to sleep, boss."
"What I need is for you to do what I just told you to do."
He went.
There is still blood under my fingernails. Hers is in my bed. And between those two facts lives a man I don't have time to examine right now, so I'm going to do something useful instead of sitting here thinking about everything I failed to prevent.
There's a basin in the bathroom, white porcelain, deep enough to hold a few liters. I fill it at the tap, test the temperature on the inside of my wrist. Warm. Not hot. The same wrist that was locked around a man's windpipe a few hours ago, pressing until the cartilage gave.
Soap. I go through three bottles before I find the right one. Unscented. The same one she had in her bathroom in Palermo. No fragrance, no perfume, no floral bullshit. Just Violet.
