Something behind my sternum cracks. Just a little. Just enough.
"Violet."
His voice comes from the bathroom doorway. Low. Careful. The way you'd speak to something wild that might bolt if you breathed wrong.
I turn my head on the pillow.
He looks like hell.
And I've never been so glad to see anyone in my entire life.
The circles under his eyes go past exhaustion into something medical. Bruise-purple, carved deep, the kind you get fromweeks of not sleeping, not just a bad night or two. His jaw is covered in stubble thick enough to be almost a beard, dark against skin that's lost some of its Mediterranean warmth. He's leaning against the doorframe in gray sweatpants and nothing else, and my restorer's eye does what it always does, assesses the damage.
And there's a lot of damage.
Bruises across his ribs. Not fresh. These are the yellow-green of something two, maybe three weeks old, layered over darker purple underneath. A healing cut along his left side, stitched clean but angry. Another across his collarbone that looks like it came from something blunt and deliberate. His knuckles are scabbed, split and re-split, swollen enough that closing his fists must hurt.
"Are you okay?" The words come out rough and stupid and insufficient, my voice scraping against a throat that still feels scoured with sandpaper. But my gaze is on those bruises, tracing the pattern, and the pattern tells a story. These aren't combat injuries. These are systematic. Targeted. Someone did this to him with intention. "What happened to you?"
He doesn't come closer. Stays exactly where he is, shoulder against the frame.
"I'm fine. Just Cicero acting like a toddler when he can't get what he wants."
His father.
His father did this to him.
I shouldn't be shocked. Everything I've learned about Cicero Marchetti suggests a man who treats his son like a dog he's training, alternating between praise and the boot. But knowing something in the abstract and seeing the evidence written across six feet five inches of a man who snapped a neck with his bare hands are two very different things.
He stands in that doorway and watches me with an intensity that should be terrifying. That bottomless brown, locked onto me like I'm the only thing in the room, in the house, in the world. Like he hasn't looked at anything else in weeks and doesn't plan to start.
It should terrify me.
It doesn't.
And I'm not sure what that says about me anymore.
"How do you feel?" He doesn't cross the threshold. Six feet of marble floor between the bathroom door and the bed, and he doesn't take a single step. This man, who killed his way through a compound to reach me, who ripped a metal door off its hinges, who snapped a man's spine like kindling while I watched. This man is standing six feet away because he won't be one more person who takes my choices.
I want to say, "Come here. Hold me. Don't stand in that doorway like I'm something you're afraid to break."
What comes out is, "Like I've been hit by several trucks and then rescued by a blood-soaked maniac."
A ghost of a smile flickers across his features as the corner of his mouth lifts for half a second before it falls again.
"Fair description."
"You look terrible," I add, looking him up and down.
"You should see the other men."
"I did. You left them in a hallway."
That flicker again. Gone before it's there. "I wasn't keeping a tidy workspace."
And oh, god, I missed this. The dry, cutting back-and-forth, the way he matches me beat for beat without blinking. Three weeks of surviving on Matt's terrible Shakespeare and stale bread jokes, and here's this man giving me exactly the thing I didn't know I was starving for. An equal. Someone who doesn't flinch at the sharp edges.
But he still hasn't moved.
