The image blooms in my head, Gabriella on her knees, red soles scuffed and bloody, Elio standing over her with that same calm expression while he methodically takes her apart.
I hate that I love that image. I hate that that's the sort of person I've become.
“Right,” I say, keeping my voice light. “Goodnight, Elio.”
I turn, walk back to Elena's room, and close the door behind me.
As much as I want Gabriella to die for what she put me through, she's my last piece of leverage. A weapon you hand over isn’t yours anymore.
22
VIOLET
My fingers close around the drawer handle the same way they've closed around it every morning for almost two weeks. The same half-hearted tug you give a door you're not sure you want open, the kind where your fingers are already loosening before the thing has a chance to give. Every time, I'd get it an inch, maybe two, and then stop. Close it. Walk away. Tell myself there's nothing in there worth finding because Elena's dead and her things are just things now and going through them won't bring her back and it won't change anything. It won't...
But today I don't stop.
I work the heel of my palm against the side of the drawer and pull with my other hand, steady pressure, the same technique I used to ease warped wood panels at Santa Maria della Luce. You don't yank. You coax. You find the spot where the grain has swollen and you apply force at the angle the wood wants to go, not the angle you want it to go, and eventually.
Eventually.
The drawer slides free with a sound like a sigh.
The first thing I see is a paperback, one of those Italian titles the staff must have left, its spine uncracked. She never opened it.Next to it, a rosary still in its plastic casing, the cheap kind they sell outside every church in Sicily for two euros. Still sealed. She never opened that either.
And at the very back, pushed against the rear panel where the drawer meets the frame, a washcloth wrapped around something small and hard.
I unwrap it carefully. The cloth is folded tight, the way you fold fabric around something you're protecting. Or hiding. My fingers find the edge and peel it back. For a second I don't understand what I'm looking at.
Three white sticks, nested in the folds of the cloth like someone placed them there with care. Pregnancy tests, the ones the medical team left with the survivors. Every one of them showing two lines. The dye has faded. Weeks old, at least. But the marks are unmistakable. Two lines. Two lines. Two lines.
Elena wrapped them in a washcloth.
She kept them.
I sit on the edge of her bed with them in my hand, and the first thing my brain offers up, the very first coherent thought in the rubble, isoh.
Oh, Elena.
And then I stop thinking altogether because my eyes are doing the thing I haven't let them do in so many days. The thing I locked down in the garden while Matt's blood dried in the courtyard cracks. The thing I sealed shut with bread and fake smiles, and sleeping in a dead woman's bed because the alternative was sleeping next to the man who?—
The heat behind my eyes breaks through, and I don't stop it.
I don't try.
Twelve days. Twelve days of holding everything in a fist so tight my nails have left permanent crescents in my palms, twelve days of controlled breathing and measured sentences and the exact right facial expressions at the exact right times. And nowI'm sitting on Elena's bed, my face wet, holding three positive pregnancy tests, and I can't tell if I'm crying for her or for me or for both of us or for none of us or just because the body has a pressure valve and mine just blew.
The tears are silent. No sound. Just warm and steady down my cheeks, dropping onto the washcloth, darkening the fabric in small circles.
My stomach rolls. That same slow churn I've been waking to every morning since the compound, the one I blamed on grief, bad food, stress and the aftermath of being held captive by traffickers. The nausea that rises when I brush my teeth. The way eggs make me gag now when they never did before. The tenderness in my breasts I chalked up to healing. The crying, god, the crying, that I attributed to Elena's death and Matt's death and the general state of my entire goddamn life.
I go very still.
The tests sit in my hand. Three white sticks. All positive. All Elena's.
My eyes move from the tests to the bathroom door.
Back to the tests.
