His phone is on the nightstand. I take his hand, warm, heavy, completely slack, and press his thumb to the screen. It unlocks. Contacts. I scroll with one hand, the other still holding his, and find what I'm looking for. I tear a page from the notepad beside the lamp, scribble the number down in handwriting that isremarkably steady for a woman whose whole life is detonating, fold the paper twice, and slip it into my palm. The phone goes back. Same position. Same angle. Same distance from the lamp.
He doesn't stir.
I dress in the dark. Jeans. Boots. Sweater. The bag comes out from the back of the closet. It's light. Passport. A change of clothes. The folded notepad page. The napkin daisy, pressed flat between passport pages, the petals smudging into the ink of my own photographed face.
No cash. No jewelry. Nothing of his.
At the foot of the bed, I stop. My bag is on my shoulder. The room is quiet except for his breathing. Deep, even, chemical. The lamp throws gold across the sheets, across the shape of him under the blanket, across the face I have memorized down to the microscopic level, the face I rebuilt from memory in a concrete cell and swore I'd see again.
My hand lifts. Reaches.
If you touch his face, you will not leave.
My fingers curl inward. My arm drops.
I turn away.
The bedroom door closes behind me with a click so quiet it barely registers.
25
VIOLET
The hallway is dark as I creep through it without making a sound. I've walked this route a hundred times. I know where the runners are, where the stone swallows footfall instead of throwing it back. Apparently some part of me has been planning this longer than the rest of me wants to admit.
There should be a moment. A dramatic pause as I look back down the corridor toward the bedroom where the man I love is sleeping off the drugs I put in his drink. Some cinematic beat where the moonlight catches my face and the audience knows exactly what I'm giving up.
There isn't.
I take the stairs, then a hallway, and another set of stairs before I'm at the service doors. The car keys hang on the hook by the service. An Audi fob with the automatic gate fob. I snatch it, grateful for Elio's obsessive maintenance schedule. His control issues have their own control issues. But I'll save the critique for my therapist. If I ever get one. If I ever get to a place where "my mafia boyfriend killed my friend so I drugged him and stole his car while pregnant with his child" is something a licensed professional is equipped to handle.
The night air hits my face as I step outside, cool and carrying the scent of blood orange trees mixed with jasmine, and the faint salt of a sea I've been able to smell for weeks but never reach. My lungs expand. Not a gasp. Not a sob. Just a breath, full and deep, the kind you take before you dive.
The gravel under my boots is the loudest thing in the world. Every step sounds like a gunshot in the silence, and my pulse ticks up, my body bracing for the floodlights, the shout of Elio's guards, the sound of a door slamming open behind me. But the estate is asleep. Two guards are busy manning the main gate, and the one on the south gate has just been changed.
The Audi is parked in the third bay of the garage. Unlocked, because inside these walls nothing needs to be locked. Everything here belongs to Elio. The car. The garage. The woman getting into the driver's seat.
Not anymore.
The engine turns over with a quiet hum that vibrates through the steering wheel and up through my palms and into my chest. The headlights stay off. I ease down the drive in the dark, following the curve I've memorized by the shape of the trees against the sky, counting the seconds between the garage and the east service gate.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
The gate sensor picks up the car at fifteen feet. The mechanism whirs. The gate swings open.
No alarm. No shout. No guards running. Just the gate, doing what it was built to do, opening for an authorized vehicle the way Elio designed it to. He told me I could leave whenever I wanted and tonight I'm taking him up on his offer.
The gate closes behind me. In the rearview mirror, the estate shrinks, the stone walls going dark against the darker sky, the windows black, every single one. No light snapping on. No figure in a doorway. Just a building, getting smaller.
I don't look back again focusing on the road unspooling ahead of me. Narrow, winding and empty the way Sicilian roads are empty before dawn. My hands are at ten and two, not shaking. Not yet at least. It will probably come later. Right now my body is running on the same wiring that got me through three weeks in a concrete cell. Find a way out. Survive.
My foot eases off the gas as I take a turn, then another driving through the dark, unseeing. That's a lie. Elio's face flashes against the window screen. His face against my palm, the warmth of his chest under my cheek while his heart slowed and sped and slowed again. The words he told me just before he fell asleep.
Was it love? Or was it the most sophisticated cage ever built, one where the bars were tenderness and orgasms and the illusion of choice? Does it matter anymore?
I don't have an answer. I'm not going to get one tonight, or tomorrow, or maybe ever. And the not knowing isn't unbearable, like I thought it would be. Turns out you can drive a stolen car through the Sicilian countryside in the middle of the night with an unanswered question sitting in the passenger seat, and it doesn't kill you. It just rides along.
My foot finds the gas again. The car surges forward through the Sicilian countryside until I get to a small village, the kind that rolls up its sidewalks at sundown and doesn't unroll them until the bread is baking. But there's a store on the corner with a payphone bolted to the exterior wall, the old kind with a metal cord and a receiver.
