The bag with my clothes and passport is the back of the closet. The plan is fully formed. Get Elio's car keys, drive through the East service gate. The windows are tinted, the guard is usually half asleep anyway, and the gate opens automatically, calibrated to a sensor in the car. It all seems too easy. Then again, Elio would never assume that the freedom he has given me inside his fortress will end in my escape. And maybe it wouldn't have if it wasn't for the plastic stick with two blue lines and the absolute, bone-deep certainty that I cannot raise this child in a house built on blood.
So this is not strategy. This is the one thing that is not strategy.
Elio stands by the nightstand, loosening the top button of his shirt the way he does every night, and the gesture is so familiar my heart twists. How many times have I watched him do this? How many nights have those hands worked that button loosewhile I lay in his bed waiting, wanting, furious, grateful, all of it tangled together in a knot I stopped trying to untie?
This is the last time.
Don't think about that yet.
I cross the room. Not tentatively. I cross it the way I've been crossing rooms toward this man since the first night I decided to stop pretending I didn't want him. With my whole body, my whole stupid heart, every self-destructive impulse I've ever had firing all at once. My hands find his shirt before he's finished with the second button, and I pull him down to me, fisting the fabric, dragging his mouth to mine.
He makes a surprised sound against my lips. Or relieved. The same relief that was in his face at dinner when I reached for his hand, the same cracked-open thing that makes him look like a man who's been holding his breath for days and just got permission to stop.
I kiss him like I'm angry. Because I am. I kiss him like I love him. Because I do. I've learned by now that the two things don't cancel each other out; they compound, they build, they feed each other the way fire feeds on oxygen, the way a crumbling arch feeds on its own weight until the whole structure comes down.
His hands find my waist and he pulls me in, but I'm already there, already pressed against him, already undoing the rest of his buttons with fingers that know this dance by heart. Three buttons. His watch I always place on the nightstand. The way his breath changes when my nails drag down his chest.
I know all of it. I have memorized this man the way I memorize buildings. Foundation to roofline, load-bearing walls to decorative trim, every structural weakness and hidden support. And now I am going to take it all one last time and carry it with me out the door, because that is the kind of woman I've become. The kind who steals what she needs before she runs.
The shirt comes off his shoulders. My palms flatten against his chest, feeling the heat of his skin, the steady drum of his heart under my right hand. Still calm. Still controlled. Even now, even with my hands on him and my mouth on his throat, he is holding himself in check. Waiting for my lead. Giving me the pace.
Don't give me the pace. Don't be gentle. Don't be the man I can't leave.
"Violet..."
"Don't talk." My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. But the way he says my name, like it's something sacred, something he's afraid to break. I can't. Not tonight. If he talks, I'll crack, and if I crack, I'll stay, and if I stay, this child grows up in a gilded cage with a grandfather who trades women like livestock and a father who kills people and lies about it.
So I pull his belt free, the leather hissing through the loops, and he stops talking.
Good.
His hands come up to my face, cradling my jaw, thumbs tracing my cheekbones, and the tenderness of it is so brutal I could scream. But instead, I grab his wrists and push his hands down, away from my face, pressing them to my hips. Not there. Not tender. Not tonight.
He understands. His eyes go dark. That deep brown turning almost black. And his fingers dig into my hips hard enough to bruise. It's exactly what I need. The version of him that doesn't ask for permission. The version that takes.
Because I can survive leaving the man who takes. I cannot survive leaving the man who holds my face like I'm made of glass.
His mouth finds my neck, my collarbone, teeth grazing the sensitive spot below my ear making my whole body arch into him. And I'm pulling at his belt loops, shoving his pants downwhile his fingers find the hem of my dress and drag it up and over my head in one motion. My bra follows, his fingers unhooking it without looking, as if he could do this blindfolded and half-asleep. He knows my body better than I do. Knows where to press, where to bite, where to breathe and where to bruise.
But underneath every point of contact, underneath every nerve ending that fires when his mouth closes over my nipple, underneath the heat and the want and the desperate, furious need… I see Matt's face in the courtyard. On his knees. The knife. The way the light caught the blood.
It doesn't stop me. It lives in me while Elio's tongue moves against my breast as he shoves my underwear down my thighs. My fingers are in his hair, pulling hard enough to hurt, as I try to push the memory the dead man who drew me a daisy on a napkin back down. Elio's mouth works lower, down my ribs, my stomach...
My stomach. Where our child is. Where everything that happens next begins.
His lips press against the skin just below my navel and I almost push him away...
But I don't.
I pull him back up by his hair because I cannot have his mouth there, on that spot, on the secret I'm carrying out the door. He comes up with a sound that's half growl, half question. I answer by pushing him backward until his legs hit the bed, and he sits.
And there it is. Elio Marchetti looking up at me. The most dangerous man I've ever known. But the most dangerous thing about him isn't the violence, or the empire, or the blood on his hands. It's the way he looks at me right now. Like I'm the only real thing he's ever touched. Like everything else, the suits, the money, the bodies, the war, is just noise, and I'm the signal.
Stop looking at me like that. You're making it impossible.
I straddle him. His cock is hard against my inner thigh, the heat of it sending a jolt through me that has nothing to do with love and everything to do with the stupid, animal part of my brain that doesn't care about morality or murder or escape plans. The part that just wants him, the way it's wanted him since the first time he touched me, before I knew what he was, before I knew what I was.
His grip tightens on my thighs, hard enough that I'll have marks tomorrow. Good. Let there be marks. Let there be evidence that this happened, proof I can press my fingers into on a plane or a bus or whatever terrible mode of transportation carries me away from this place, so I can feel the ache and know it was real.
