He isn't.
I wait. The way he waits when I need time to say something. I give him the silence and the space and the same patience he's given me a hundred times in cells and corridors and this garden.
He looks out through the glass doors. The garden is dark now, the bench just a shape, the lemon trees black against a sky that still holds some blue at the edges. Then he looks at me.
"I think I'll go home tomorrow," he says. "I have this feeling. Like a pressure. Like something is coming, you know?"
"Good or bad?"
He doesn't answer. Just looks at me with an expression I can't read. And I can always read Matt, always, that open face that holds nothing back, and the fact that it's holding something back now is a cold finger pressing against the base of my spine.
"Goodnight, Violet."
He pushes off the doorframe. Walks down the corridor toward the guest wing. His footsteps are even and measured, not the easy shuffle I know, and I sit with the unanswered question and the daisy in my pocket long after he's gone.
I can't sleep that night, Matt's words are playing in my head on repeat. I don't want him to leave. I'd talk to Elio about itagain, but he never came to bed. Restless and unable to pretend any longer, I get out of bed and head into the garden.
It's dawning, the grass is wet with morning dew and the grounds are empty. My feet take me to the stone bench Matt and I usually occupy, and I sit down, not noticing the cold, trying to come up with words that'll convince him to stay. That'll convince him he's safe here.
The napkin daisy is in my hands. The stem really is terrible. Crooked. Committed, but crooked. Every time I count the petals I get a different number. Nine. Eleven. Ten. Like the flower itself can't decide what it is.
I fold it back up. Put it in my pocket.
I sit on the cold bench and watch the light move across the garden wall. Gold creeping over stone, inch by inch. A lizard appears on the far wall, small and gray-green, moving in that stop-start way they do. Dash. Freeze. Dash. Freeze. Tracking something invisible.
My brain does what my brain does. Follows the lizard. Measures the light. Counts the seconds between the dashes.
The lizard disappears into a crack in the mortar, but my eyes keep moving anyway, dragged by momentum, until they land on the window at the end of the garden path.
The glass is old, slightly warped in the way of estate glass that's been here longer than anyone alive, and it distorts whatever's behind it just enough that you have to focus.I focus.
I focus.
Elio is in the courtyard.
Valente is behind Matt.
Matt is on his knees.
I know it’s him from the set of his shoulders, the slight forward curve I sat next to on concrete for three weeks, the shape I leaned against in this same garden for three more. His back is to me.
His back is to me and he is on his knees.
Valente has one hand fisted in Matt’s hair, holding his head up. The other is on his shoulder, steadying him like a butcher steadying a calf.
Elio stands in front of them. Facing the garden. Facing the window. Not looking at me. His eyes are on Matt.
His face?—
God, his face.
It isn’t cold. It isn’t controlled. It isn’t the man who held me in the maze and whispered “tesoro” against my skin. Whatever this is has ripped through every layer he owns and left something raw and open and already decided.
Rage.
Not the polished kind I know. This is older. Uglier. The kind that doesn’t ask questions anymore.
My hand finds my pocket, fingers closing around the folded napkin daisy just as Elio draws his blade across Matt’s throat.
