Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 31 - Chapitre 40

DoveFifteen days.I counted them every morning now, the way a prisoner scratches marks on a wall. One-sixth of my three months, gone. Fifteen days since I'd woken cuffed to a bedpost, and almost a week since the piano, since the kiss, since the vault. And in all that time, nothing. No summons. No study. No Elio. Just the sounds that came from the study at night, haunting me in my sleep.Different girls came and went through the house like the weather. I'd stopped trying to learn their names; there was no point, half of them didn't last past a night. The numbers stayed but the faces changed, and the house filled and emptied and filled again with beautiful strangers, and through all of it the man at the center of it never once sent for me.I told myself I was relieved. And I was, mostly. But there was a smaller, stupider feeling underneath the relief that I couldn't quite reason away, and it was this: he'd forgotten me. He'd kissed me like the world was ending and then he'd simply move

ElioI went back to my study after I left her room, and I poured a whiskey I didn't drink, and I made myself go back over the whole night with the cold eye I use on everything. Because I needed to understand exactly how badly it had gone wrong, and exactly whose fault it was.The girls had been waiting when I got home.They'd come to me almost the moment I walked in. Carmen, at the front of them, flushed with her own importance, holding something up in her fingers like a cat presenting a dead bird at the door. "Master!" she'd said, glowing. "We need to tell you something.”She was holding my ring. The black diamond, my name inside the band, the thing that does not leave my hand except that it had, once, as collateral.“We found your ring. This must be very important. We don’t know how she stole it from you, but we got it back." She'd said it like she expected a reward. "I thought you should know what kind of girl you're keeping up there. She’s a thief and a liar." I took the ring an

DoveI stayed in my room and listened to the house fill with strangers.Their voices carried up through the floors. The low, cultured murmur of men who owned things.“Wow, big brother. You’ve outdone yourself.” I caught Gio's voice the clearest, bright and enthusiastic, praising the house as they moved through it. “This is some work. And you've done all this in three months?” Elio's answers lowly, short and cold, giving nothing away. I pictured he was giving them a tour of the house. And I sat on my bed with my knees pulled up and my heart in my throat, listening to them get closer.The footsteps sounded louder in the hall. My hall.I held my breath."What's this room?" Gio's voice, right outside my door, and then the handle rattled — turned, caught against the little lock I'd thrown from the inside, rattled again.I went absolutely still, one hand pressed over my own mouth."It's nothing important," Elio said. Flat. Bored. Dismissive in exactly the way that made a thing invisible

DoveHe shut the door, and the sound of it was very final.I turned to face him in the dim light of my room, my back still aching where Gio had shoved me, my cheek still wet where he'd caught it. Elio stood just inside the door, and the fury was coming off him in waves. I could feel it filling the room, cold and enormous, and I braced for it to land on me.“Where did he touch you?” His eyes scanned me. “Are you okay?”I wiped my face, avoiding his eyes, I just nodded."What were you doing out of this room," he said. Lowly. "I told you. I told you it’s better if you stay inside. And on night one. Night one. I find you in the hall with my brother's hands on you.""I wasn’t trying to be seen, I thought you guys were out. I only went to the piano, I didn't think anyone was—""You didn't think." His voice cracked out, sharp, and I flinched. "Do you have any idea what could have happened? What he — do you understand what he could’ve done to you? If I'd been five minutes later—" He stopped h

DoveI woke feeling… warm.The strange, unfamiliar, bodily fact of being warm. Not the thin chilly warmth of blankets, but the deep kind, the kind that comes from having been held all night by another person, and for a few floating seconds before I opened my eyes, I lay in it and felt safer than I had in weeks. Maybe than I had in years.Then I reached out, and the bed beside me was empty.I opened my eyes.I was alone in his room. Black satin sheets, dark wood, gray morning light coming through the tall windows — and no Elio. The whole enormous bed stretched out beside me with no one in it, and without him the room was cold. It felt like a different place entirely. It had been full last night; now it was just an expensive empty room that smelled faintly of cedar and belonged to a man who wasn't here.I put my hand out and touched the sheets where he'd lain.There was still an impression there. The shape of him pressed into the pillow, the sheets pulled back where he'd slipped out an