Chapter 17 #3
"The monster?" I say, like it's fucking obvious.
"And he's the fucking saint! Hello? Reality to Jino's slow brain!
Did you even see them last night? The way she giggled when he talked about Declan Cross books?
Declan Cross? Who the fuck reads trash like conspiracy theory fiction?
For fuck's sake." Now it's my turn to run my fingers through my hair.
"They were having post-coital book club, Jino! "
He stares at me for a moment, then he laughs. "You're jealous."
"I'm not fucking jealous. I'm… practical. It's just…"
"How do you compete with him?"
There's really no point in denying this.
It is the problem running laps in my brain right now.
"I'm not discounting what you're saying here, Jino.
It's… maybe, not a bad idea. Lorcan and I have shared women in the past, It's... doable that part.
Maybe even… ideal, if we could get the dynamic back.
But again, she's not coming back here. Even if Lorcan can pull off killing deepfake Rico, and even if Luca LaRiccia buys it, he's never gonna let this go.
It's all very suspicious, not to mention convenient.
He's never gonna stop seeing me as the man who probably killed his son.
Emmaleen's not safe here. Don't you get it? She's not coming back."
"So she stays with Lorcan? I mean, I was kinda thinking it would play out that way since he's the one with the chapel."
My head is about to explode. He's so fucking dumb. "It's a nine-hour drive, Jino. Maybe two by plane. What am I supposed to do? Procure a private jet every time I want to punish my own woman?"
Finally—fucking finally—Jino understands my pessimism. "It's… logistics, G."
"It's not," I insist. "It's a long-distance relationship, Jino. And everyone knows how those turn out."
He opens his mouth to protest—probably to suggest we secure a property closer to Boston, something I've already war-gamed in my head a dozen times while lying awake at four in the morning.
But then he stops. Actually stops, mid-breath, and I watch the realization crawl across his face in real time.
Because even Jino—optimistic, solution-oriented, let's-just-make-it-work Jino—finally sees what I've been staring at all night.
A house halfway between here and there doesn't solve a goddamn thing.
Even if we found the perfect location, some compromise coordinates on a map where drive times balance out mathematically, it doesn't address the fundamental impossibility of what we're talking about.
The entire arrangement becomes complicated—that special kind of complicated that corrodes everything it touches. Nothing stays contained. Nothing runs smoothly. It all requires constant orchestration, endless negotiation, perpetual management.
I can already picture it with painful clarity: splitting days of the week like divorced parents with a custody agreement, arguments erupting over whose turn it is and how much time each person gets, resentment building every time someone feels shortchanged.
Schedules becoming weapons. Proximity becoming currency.
The whole delicate dynamic we'd need to maintain—the precise balance of power and submission, dominance and care—reduced to a logistical nightmare of calendars and compromises.
It's a recipe designed specifically for failure.
No amount of careful planning or good intentions will overcome the basic mathematics of distance and human nature.
And that sucks.
Because I'm falling for Emmaleen Rourke.
No. I fell for this woman that first day. When she babbled about PowerPoints and Starbucks.
When she stood in those red shoes—too big on her feet, absurd and beautiful—alphabetizing invoices like her life depended on perfect order.
When she forced herself behind the wheel of my Lamborghini, hands shaking, determined not to let fear win.
Every single time I pushed, she pushed back harder. She never just survived my tests—she escalated them.
That's when she stopped being a project and became something I couldn't afford to lose.
And she writes me poetry—actual fucking poetry.
Maybe I wasn't down on one knee planning a wedding or picking out china patterns. But somewhere along the way, without consciously deciding it, I started seeing her as a permanent fixture.
Not just in my bed or at my table, but woven into the fabric of whatever life I was building here in Riverview. Long-term. Years kind of long-term. The kind where you stop imagining scenarios that don't include someone.
And now—now I'm standing here watching that entire imagined future crumble into ash and dust.
Because suddenly, impossibly, I'm obsolete.
Replaced before I even realized I was competing.
Rendered irrelevant by someone who apparently understands exactly what she needs in ways I never even tried to comprehend.
And the worst part—the absolute worst, most fucked-up part of this entire catastrophic situation?
Rico fucking LaRiccia is the one who did this to me.
Even dead, buried in an unmarked grave in Bucks County, Rico LaRiccia is still ruining my fucking life.
He's the reason Emmaleen can't come home.
He's the reason Lorcan was here in the first place.
He's all nine circles of my own personal Hell.
I walk away.
"Giovanni—where the hell are you going?"
Jino's voice cuts across the space, sharp with confusion.
I don't answer. Can't answer. My brain is a goddamn catastrophe—a writhing mass of imagery I can't shut off.
Octopi squeezing through impossible cracks, three hearts beating in impossible rhythms.
Emmaleen's grin from between my thighs.
Lorcan's crimson robe like some fucked-up Catholic fever dream.
Her voice reciting prayers to Saint Lorcan with the same reverence she used when she called me King.
Her throat beneath Lorcan's hand, her eyes rolled back in ecstasy I've never once given her.
The sound she made when she came—guttural, broken, free.
And underneath it all, the sick realization that I trained her for him. Made her perfect for someone else.
I shove through the door and hit the driveway.
Everything's slipping. Every carefully maintained element of control I built over years—the routines, the discipline, the absolute certainty that I could shape outcomes through sheer force of will—all of it disintegrating.
I can't even jerk off anymore. Can't summon basic fucking arousal unless I'm watching footage of him with her.
The Aventador's door opens, and I slide behind the wheel.
The engine roars to life and take off down the driveway, punching the gate remote and accelerating before it's fully opened, scraping through with inches to spare.
No destination in the GPS.
No music.
Just me and the road and this relentless spiral of thoughts I can't escape.
Emmaleen can't come back. That's the fundamental truth everything else crashes against. Luca LaRiccia is prowling around the edges of our world, sniffing for blood, looking for any excuse to justify what his instincts are already telling him—that I killed his son.
And if he finds her, if he discovers she witnessed it, he'll make her death last for days.
I accelerate. The countryside blurs past.
I could call my father. Ask Salvatore to intervene, to use his influence to smooth things over with Luca, to create some kind of protection for Emmaleen that would let her come home.
Except I won't.
Because Salvatore wouldn't help me anyway. He'd laugh—that cold, dismissive sound he makes when I've disappointed him.
Why would he protect what I love when he's spent my entire life teaching me that love is weakness?
I matter to no one in this world.
Marco and Angelo have wives and kids. They're established—legitimate branches of the Bavga tree with roots sunk deep.
I'm the rotten fruit Salvatore pruned off and shipped to Riverview.
The miles eat away beneath my tires.
My thoughts loop and loop and loop—
Emmaleen's face. Lorcan's hands. The collar I put on her throat that someone else gets to hold. Rico's ghost laughing from his unmarked grave. Salvatore's indifference.
A green highway sign cuts through the spiral like a prophecy.
The spiral stops. Absolute clarity crashes through the chaos like lightning.
Twenty-three years ago, Salvatore Bavga traded his youngest son as tribute for a debt that wasn't even his.
An eight-year-old boy. Bound and bleeding in a warehouse. Payment for a sister's betrayal.
That boy dislocated his thumb. Shot a guard in the hip. Ran.
Then got beaten bloody by his father for 'ruining things'.
Luca never collected.
And I've been paying for it ever since—in Rico's cruelties, in Salvatore's contempt, in the unspoken debt that's hung over my head for two decades.
But debts work both ways.
I pull onto the shoulder and put the car in park.
My phone feels heavy in my hand as I begin putting the pieces together. begin to formulate a plan. My thumb scrolls through contacts.
Then I press send.
It's time to pay the debt.