Just my name. Like it's the only word he has left.
My skin erupts in goosebumps as the chill of the room finally catches up to me. Still inside me Elio reaches to the side and pulls his shirt over me. Not the one I stole, the one he was wearing earlier.
I'm still shaking, but it's not from the cold. It's from everything. From the enormity of still being alive and still being capable of this and still wanting him so much my teeth ache with it. Three weeks of that compound. Ten days of careful distance. And then this. This floor. This man. Every nerve apparently deciding to feel everything at once, no moderation, no dimmer switch, just all the lights on full.
Tomorrow I'll have rug burn on my knees. I'll wear it like a goddamn badge of honor.
Elio pulls me tighter into his chest, arm around my waist, as my ear finds his heartbeat.
Steady. Even. Unhurried.
Mine is a five-alarm disaster.
He doesn't say anything for a long time. Neither do I.
"I've got you,tesoro." Not a promise. A fact.
I press closer, tuck my face into his neck. Breathe him in. Citrus, wood and leather under the salt and sweat, the smell I tried to reconstruct from nothing in a concrete cell.
His arm tightens around me. Not possessive. Present.
There's a difference. I couldn't have articulated it a month ago. Couldn't have told you what separates the grip that saysminefrom the grip that saysI'm here.Now it's the clearest thing in the world.
I don't know if this is love. I don't know if I trust the word yet, or if it fits the shape of what lives between us. This jagged, violent, tender, impossible thing that survived a kidnapping and a compound and a man sleeping in a chair for ten nights because he couldn't bring himself to leave and couldn't bring himself to come closer.
But I know I'm not leaving this floor.
And I know that when he offered me the door, I didn't even look at it.
That has to count for something.
His cock gets harder inside me as my body hums with sensation I can't even begin to explain. Everything is amplified, too much, not enough. I start moving again, already feeling like I'm close to the edge.
14
VIOLET
I'm cutting through the east corridor toward the kitchen when the door opens. Not a bedroom door. Not one of the guest rooms, or the library, or any of the spaces that feel communal, where the rescued women drift and the staff move quietly and efficiently. This is the ground floor near Elio's wing.
Matt steps out.
His face does a thing. Not panic. Not guilt, exactly. More like the expression of a person caught mid-sentence who needs a beat to find the right word. It's there and gone so fast that if I'd blinked, I'd have missed it entirely.
"Got turned around." He laughs, rubbing the back of his neck with that embarrassed grin that makes him look about twelve. "This place is a maze, Vi. I was trying to find the library."
And I laugh too, becauseof coursehe got lost. The estate is enormous and confusing, and the corridors all look the same.
"Library's back that way." I point toward the guest wing. "Hang a left at the big, ugly painting of the guy who looks constipated."
"The one with the horse?"
"That's the one."
He grins and wanders off in the right direction with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders easy.
I don't think about it again. Not today, not when through the window I spotted something propped against the fountain I usually sit on.
I rush outside. Someone on Elio's staff—I don't know who, but whoever it was understood the assignment—left a sketchpad and a set of Conté crayons on the table by the fountain. Not the expensive kind. The good kind. The kind that smells like cedar shavings and goes down smooth and fights you just enough to make the line interesting.
