Resist.
I'm not sure what I'm resisting anymore. Maybe that's the point. Maybe Elena would tell me I've already failed her mantra, and maybe she'd be right, and maybe right now I'm too tired to care about being a good student.
She deserved a better one than me.
At dusk, when Elio goes to check in with his men, I make myself get up.
My body protests. Every joint swollen and grinding, every muscle a complaint, the bruises across my ribs lighting up like a switchboard when I swing my legs over the side of the bed. The marble floor is cold under my bare feet. Cold and smooth and solid. Nothing like concrete. I tell myself this three times before my legs believe it.
The hallway is quiet. Warm light from sconces along the walls, that old-world amber glow that turns stone the color of honey. The hoodie swallows me whole, sleeves past my fingertips, hem at my thighs. I look like a child playing dress-up in someone else's life.
My mother would have a stroke. Margaret Murphy, who goes to Saint Augustine's every Sunday and parks in the same spot at Morano's and has never once set foot outside Massachusetts, would take one look at her daughter shuffling through a Sicilian crime lord's fortress in his hoodie and file it somewhere between mortal sin and grounds for an intervention.
I miss her so much my teeth ache.
I pass Elio's office. The door is open. He's inside, standing over the desk, phone to his ear, speaking rapid Italian I can't follow. He looks up. Tracks me. Doesn't stop me, doesn't call out, doesn't ask where I'm going.
I'm grateful for that, because I'm not sure how I'd explain what I'm doing. I just know I need to do it.
When I finally get to the guest wing, I try three doors, each with a different woman from the compound, one of them the girl who looked barely fifteen. The fourth door is open.
Matt'sdoor is open.
He's sitting on the edge of the bed. Hands between his knees. Staring at the floor. Someone gave him clean clothes. Dark shirt, loose pants. They hang on him wrong, too big, like he's shrunk inside himself.
He looks like a man trying to rebuild himself from parts he can't find.
That makes two of us. Except my parts are scattered across a concrete cell in Sicily and a cathedral I'll never finish and a bed that smells like a man who kills people, and honestly, if anyone finds the piece of me that used to be normal, they can keep it. I don't think it fits anymore.
I sit beside him and take his hand.
He doesn't look up. But his fingers close around mine tightly. The grip of a man going under for the third time.
"We survived." All I've got. All either of us needs.
I lean my head on his shoulder. He doesn't move, but his breathing stutters before steadying again. We sit there in the quiet, two people who shared a nightmare, holding onto the proof that it ended.
The back of my neck prickles and I lift my head just enough to look, already knowing who I'll see.
Elio stands in the doorway, his arms crossed, shoulder against the frame. His gaze moves from my face to our joined hands to Matt's bowed head. Takes it all in. He keeps watching with those bottomless brown eyes that see everything and give back nothing.
I don't let go of Matt's hand.
12
VIOLET
Twelve women were rescued from the compound. Thirteen, including me. And Matt. Elio's men pulled every single one of them from the rubble and the dark, loaded them into vehicles and brought them here, to this fortress with its maze and orange groves and armed guards and temperature-controlled hallways. Twelve women and one man who took beatings for a stranger because he couldn't not.
But no matter how I wish clean sheets, warm food, doctors who knock before entering, and brand new clothes in sizes that don't quite fit were enough. It isn't. This isn't their home, and no amount of Egyptian cotton thread count changes the fact that every single one of these rooms is unfamiliar.
I know what a gilded cage looks like. I lived in one before the real cage came along.
The women in the first three rooms are the ones who've started eating again. Then there's Maria, who's maybe twenty, maybe younger, hard to tell when someone's been aged by things that shouldn't age a person. She sits cross-legged on her bed, folding and refolding the same sweater. She nods without flinching when she notices me, which is a huge progress.
Then a Romanian girl whose name I still don't know because she hasn't spoken. She's braiding her hair. Over and over. Braids it, unbraids it, braids it again. Her fingers move like she's found exactly one thing she can control, and she's not letting go of it.
I get that.
