Chapter 4 #3
But he knows enough. He's connected enough dots to see the shape of the thing, even if he can't quite make out all the fine details yet.
He knows that whatever's happening in Giovanni's house, whatever arrangement has me kneeling naked in basements and calling a crime boss "Sir," it's not what he thought it was.
And judging by the way those storm-grey eyes have gone dark and flat, by the way his whole body has gone rigid with barely-contained something—shock, horror, disgust, I can't tell which—he knows it's so much worse than whatever scenario his heroic kidnapper brain had initially constructed.
Does he know who Rico LaRiccia is—heir to the most powerful crime family in New York, the man whose disappearance would send shockwaves through every organized crime operation from Pittsburgh to Manhattan?
Does he know Rico's missing, that somewhere on Giovanni's sprawling estate or buried in the Pennsylvania woods there might be a body that could bring down empires?
Does he know that Giovanni was one of the last people to see Rico alive, that whatever happened left blood on expensive Italian shoes and a cousin-shaped hole in the LaRiccia family tree?
Does he know that I'm a witness—not just to violence, but to murder—and that the only safe place for a witness who isn't conveniently dead is, apparently, a sex dungeon?
A meticulously designed training facility where I kneel on leather mats and count my failures in crop strikes, where exhaustion becomes discipline and discipline becomes something disturbingly close to peace?
Where I'm handed demerits specifically calibrated to both punish me and make me come apart at the seams in the same devastating moment?
Not sure.
But… likely.
Very likely.
Without warning, Heroic Kidnapper launches into what can only be described as a death spiral of frustrated intellectualism.
"You're like—Christ, you're like Persephone, aren't ya?
Ate the pomegranate seeds knowin' full well they'd trap you in the Underworld.
Or maybe you're Bluebeard's wife, curiosity killin' more than the cat.
No—you're Sartre's bad faith personified, pretendin' you've no choice when choice is all you've got left—"
His accent thickens with each literary reference. The 'g's drop off his words entirely.
"—or is it Stockholm syndrome wrapped up in Foucauldian power dynamics, the prisoner internalizin' the warden's voice until she can't tell submission from desire—"
I should probably be offended that he's comparing me to cautionary tales from Western canon. Instead, I'm cataloging his references, mentally checking them against my own reading list.
Persephone—Greek mythology, Homeric Hymn to Demeter, later versions by Ovid.
Bluebeard—fairy tale, Perrault, feminist retellings by Carter and Atwood.
Sartre—existentialism, Being and Nothingness, the whole "existence precedes essence" thing.
Stockholm syndrome—technically not named after a literary source, but he's using it metaphorically.
Foucault—power/knowledge, Discipline and Punish, panopticon theory.
It's like being lectured by a very attractive, very angry philosophy professor who moonlights as a kidnapper.
It's oddly… hot.
Then I notice something that doesn't quite fit the rescue narrative.
His gaze drops. Not to my eyes, but to my throat.
To the collar, I assume at first.
Except his eyes linger. Tracking the line of my collarbone. The hollow at the base of my throat where his hand pressed earlier when he pinned me against Giovanni's wall.
His pupils dilate.
Just slightly. But enough.
His throat works on a swallow he doesn't quite suppress. He shifts his weight, adjusts his position on the couch in a way that suggests physical discomfort of the specifically anatomical variety.
Oh.
When he speaks again, his voice has dropped half an octave. Landed somewhere in the register I recognize intimately from Giovanni's "you're going to do exactly what I say" tone and Jino's "position-three-now" instructions.
Command voice.
Not rescue voice. Not concerned-citizen voice.
Command.
"Where'd ya come from? Before Giovanni."
"Cleveland, originally. But I was staying at New Beginnings Women's Shelter in Riverview when Mr. Bavga offered me employment."
But I'm watching him now. Really watching.
The way his gaze tracks over my bare shoulders. Then down again, to my breasts. Which are showing off in a most spectacular way at the moment.
Tight, peaked nipples.
Firm, round shape.
The tension in his jaw that reads less like righteous anger and more like restraint. The way he's sitting—weight shifting again, hands flexing and unflexing at his sides like he's physically stopping himself from reaching out.
Is he—
Is Heroic Kidnapper actually turned on right now? By this? By me sitting here in Giovanni's collar, speaking in my carefully trained submission voice, displaying all the visible evidence of my conditioning?
The hypocrisy would be funny if it weren't so perfectly on brand for my life.
Man rescues woman from sexual servitude, gets visibly aroused by her conditioned obedience, probably tells himself it's different when he does it.
Sure, buddy. Your boner is the ethical boner. The rescue boner. The boner that knows the difference between exploitation and… whatever you're telling yourself this is.
I should feel something about this. Anger, maybe. Or vindication—proof that he's no different from Giovanni, that the only thing separating "saint" from "sadist" in the family tree of fucked-upness is which side of the trunk you're on.
Instead, I feel that familiar low heat starting to pool between my thighs.
Because my body recognizes authority when it sees it.
And Heroic Kidnapper—with his command voice and his dilated pupils and the visible bulge forming against his jeans—is absolutely, unquestionably authority.
In this moment of dual silent introspection, this moment of absolute tragedy masked as modern existentialism, a song begins to play.
Rihanna's voice cuts through the cabin—Eminem's track about monsters. The kind that live under beds. The kind you befriend instead of fight because they understand the voices in your head better than anyone else ever could.
People try to save you. Think you're crazy. Never stop holding their breath, waiting for you to get better.
But you don't get better.
You just get more honest about what you are.
Heroic Kidnapper doesn't move. Doesn't reach for the phone. Just sits frozen while the chorus plays and all the color drains from his face.
He knows who's calling.
And suddenly, so do I.