I'm around the table in seconds. Arms around her, her face against my chest, her body shaking so hard I can feel it in my teeth. She survived three weeks in a trafficking compound. Fought off a guard twice her size with nothing but her teeth and her refusal to stop breathing. And now she's folding into me like she's trying to disappear, and I won't let her. My hand finds the back of her head, fingers tangling in her hair as I hold her.
We end up on the floor. My back against the kitchen cabinet, her body curled in my lap, tears soaking through my shirt, and I hold her because it's the only thing I can do and it isn't enough. Nothing would be enough.
Control.
She cries for a long time. Says Elena's name once, quiet and broken against my collarbone.
My arms tighten. My mouth presses to the top of her head. I close my eyes and think,I will never let anyone hurt you again. And then I think,but I can't protect you from this.
Fuck.
I stay with her all day, cradling her in my arms, until sobs turn into hiccups, and hiccups turn to shallow breaths. I carry her to our bed and pull the covers up. Then I stand in the doorway too long watching her curl into herself the way she did those first days after the rescue. Knees to chest, one hand under her chin.
I could stay. Part of me wants to, the part that sat on the kitchen floor for hours and held her, forgetting that I run an empire and people depend on me to be something other than a man on a tile floor with a crying woman in his lap.
But there are things I need to do before I can burn everything down and be that man for her.
Valente is at the front door when I come down. He takes one look at my face and asks. "Where to?"
"Messina," I tell him.
17
VIOLET
Idon't look at Elena's door. That's the deal I've made with myself. It's two in the morning, the hallway is dark, the marble is ice under my bare feet, and I am not going to look at Elena's door. I've looked at it a hundred times today. Every single time I've passed this hallway. On the way to the bathroom, the kitchen, the garden, back again. My head turned like it was on a string, like her room has its own gravitational pull and my stupid neck never got the memo that there's nothing to see.
The door is closed. It's been closed every time I walked past it in the last couple of days.
I look anyway.
Fuck.
It's just a door. Oak, six-panel, brass handle, identical to every other door in this wing. It doesn't know it's a grave marker. It doesn't know that the woman behind decided that surviving wasn't the same as living and she was done pretending otherwise.
Some cages you never leave. Even when the door opens.
My stomach rolls. Not the dull, manageable nausea I've been white-knuckling through for weeks. This is the middle-of-the-night kind, which is a fun new development, because apparentlymornings aren't enough and the nights are fair game now too. Three weeks of starvation working its way out of my system on a delay, like my organs got the recovery memo six weeks late and are now over-correcting with the enthusiasm of a freshman pulling an all-nighter before finals.
I press my hand flat against the wall and breathe through my nose.
In. Out. In.
The nausea passes. The hallway doesn't.
Elena was stronger than me. Fiercer. She lasted longer in that place, took more, gave less. And then she came out. She had a bed and clean water and food that wasn't stale bread and a door that locked from the inside, and none of it was enough.
If the compound could reach past all of that and still get her...
Don't.
I turn away from the door and walk back to Elio's bedroom.Ourbedroom.
There's a strip of light under the door. Warm and thin, bleeding across the dark marble like a lifeline.
He's awake. I hope I didn't wake him up when I got up. Although the man sleeps in shifts like a submarine captain, anyway. Three hours here, two hours there, always one ear open, one hand within reach of something that could kill. I used to find that threatening. Right now, standing barefoot in the dark with my stomach trying to turn itself inside out and Elena's closed door behind me like a period at the end of a sentence I can't finish, it's a rope someone threw off the edge.
I walk toward the light.
