Chapter 14 Emmaleen #2
Giovanni doesn’t push. He just drives, one hand resting casually on the wheel like we’re out for a Sunday cruise instead of heading to a mob family dinner. The silence stretches between us, dangerously thin.
I should say no. I should change the subject. I should ask about the weather or gas mileage or literally anything else.
Instead, I find myself calculating risk factors like some demented actuary of bad decisions.
If he tells me and then has to kill me, at least I’ll die knowing.
If he tells me and doesn’t kill me, I’ll have information.
If he doesn’t tell me, I’ll still be in this car with a murderer, just an extra-mysterious one.
None of these options is “get out of car, run screaming into the hills,” which would be the correct choice according to every horror movie ever made.
But I’ve been making bad choices since I signed that contract this morning, so why stop now?
“Yes,” I say finally, my voice steadier than I feel. “I want to know.”
Giovanni’s mouth curves into something almost like a smile, but sharper. More predatory.
“When I was a teenager,” he begins, his tone shifting into something softer, almost nostalgic, “my cousin Jino had a protection dog—a German Shepherd named Enzo.”
A dog? This is about a dog? My brain stutters, recalibrating from expected mafia hit to... pet story?
“Enzo had been with the family for twelve years. My cousin’s constant companion through some... difficult times.”
The way he says “difficult times” carries weight, like there’s a whole other story buried in those two words.
“But Enzo was old,” Giovanni continues, his fingers tapping once, twice against the leather steering wheel. “He had cancer. Painful. Terminal.”
I watch his profile as he speaks, trying to reconcile this oddly gentle storyteller with the man who casually mentioned shooting someone at age eight.
“Jino couldn’t bear to take him to a veterinarian’s office to be put down. Said it was too clinical for family.”
Family. The word echoes strangely when applied to a dog. But I get it. My parents’ cat was more sibling than pet to me growing up.
“One winter night, my Uncle Manzu made the difficult decision to end the dog’s suffering at home.”
The car suddenly feels colder. I wrap my arms around myself, already knowing where this is going.
“I was staying with them that weekend. They asked me to help dig a grave in the woods behind their property.” Giovanni’s voice remains steady, but something in his tone shifts, becoming more precise, more detailed.
“The ground was frozen. We needed pickaxes. My hands were raw by the time we finished.”
I can picture it vividly—three dark figures in the woods, breath clouding in the winter air, the sound of metal striking frozen earth.
“After it was done, I helped wrap Enzo in his favorite blanket. The three of us carried him to the grave under an oak tree where he used to rest in the summer. We marked it with stones. Jino said a few words.”
Giovanni falls silent, his story apparently complete. The only sound is the purr of the engine and the rush of air outside.
I should feel relieved. It was just a dog. A mercy killing for a beloved pet. Not a mob hit or a business rival or whatever horror story I’d been bracing for.
And yet.
There’s something in the careful way he told it.
The precision of certain details—the frozen ground, the blanket, the oak tree—alongside the complete absence of others.
Like how exactly Uncle Manzu “ended the suffering.” Like whether this was the only body Giovanni had helped bury, or just the one he’s willing to tell me about.
It’s like being handed a beautifully wrapped gift box that might contain either chocolates or a severed finger. The packaging doesn’t quite match what you sense is inside.
I realize I’m staring at him, trying to read truth in the angles of his face. His expression gives away nothing—no grief, no emotion at all. Just that perfect control that he claims makes him bad at poker.
“That’s the body you buried?” I finally ask, my voice sounding small in the confines of the car.
“That’s the body I buried,” he confirms, eyes still on the road. “Your turn.”
Your turn. Great. Because what follows “I buried a body” in normal conversation is definitely “Now you share something fun about yourself!”
I need to reassess. Fast. This isn’t a date. It’s not even a job interview anymore. It’s a weird psychological experiment where I’m both lab rat and co-researcher.
“Okay,” I say, straightening in my seat. The white pencil skirt creases at the hip. “Two lies and a truth.”
Giovanni’s eyes remain on the road, but I can feel his attention shift fully to me, like a spotlight swinging in my direction. It’s unnerving how he can do that without even looking at me.
“I wrote a paper in college called ‘How to Banter like a Gilmore Girl.’” I deliver this with perfect deadpan.
His eyebrow twitches. Interesting.
“I did a trapeze act for my senior-year talent show.” Second statement, equally flat.
“I trained puppies for the blind.” Third statement, same tone.
The corner of Giovanni’s mouth quirks up slightly. “The Gilmore Girls paper is true.”
Of course he gets it right. Because God forbid Giovanni Bavga ever be wrong about anything.
“How did you know?” I ask, genuinely curious despite myself.
“The way you talk.” He glances at me briefly.
“Fast. Reference-heavy. You don’t just like the show—you studied it.
Analyzed its rapid-fire dialogue patterns until you could replicate them perfectly.
” His eyes return to the road, but I feel the weight of his assessment lingering.
“Your speech has that same cadence when you’re comfortable—words tumbling out in carefully constructed volleys, packed with cultural touchpoints most people miss.
It’s deliberate, that rhythm. Not something you’d claim unless you’d actually dissected it academically. ”
Well, damn. That’s... uncomfortably accurate.
“Also,” he adds, “you look like you’d rather die than do a public trapeze performance, and training service dogs requires patience you clearly don’t have.”
I laugh. Too loud. A startled, genuine sound that echoes in the car’s interior before I can catch it. I should be offended, but he’s not wrong. My patience reservoir has exactly two settings: endless for books and words, nonexistent for literally everything else.
I could spend hours dissecting a single paragraph of prose, teasing apart its structure and meaning, but ask me to wait five minutes in a slow-moving coffee line and I’m mentally composing strongly worded letters to management.
The dichotomy isn’t lost on me—this selective patience that extends infinitely in one direction while completely evaporating in another.
“You really like words, don’t you?” he asks, and the question feels different from his others—less like an interrogation, more like actual curiosity.
Something in my chest loosens slightly. This, at least, is territory I know how to navigate. “Yes,” I admit. “I love them. Always have.”
The highway stretches ahead of us, Pittsburgh’s skyline visible in the distance. I watch it grow larger as I consider how to explain something that feels as natural to me as breathing.
“Words are...” I pause, searching for the right way to put it. “They’re tools, and weapons, and shelter all at once. You can do anything with them.”
Giovanni says nothing, waiting for me to continue. The silence feels less threatening now, more like space being offered.
“My dad was an English professor,” I say, surprised to hear myself volunteering personal information. “He used to say that language was humanity’s greatest magic trick—turning abstract thoughts into sounds that create pictures in someone else’s mind.”
I remember sitting in Dad’s study, surrounded by books, listening to him read aloud. The way his voice would change for different characters. How words on a page could make me laugh or cry or feel less alone.
“When I was little, I thought books were alive,” I continue, staring out the windshield. “Not in a childish, Disney way. I just thought they had... I don’t know, energy. That they absorbed something from everyone who read them.”
Giovanni’s hands adjust on the steering wheel. “And now?”
“Now I think maybe I was right.” I shrug, feeling suddenly self-conscious. “Words are the closest thing we have to time travel. You can read something written by someone who died centuries ago and feel exactly what they felt. That’s... that’s pretty close to magic.”
The Lamborghini roars as we slow to take an exit, moving from highway to city streets.
“In college, I started cataloging the different ways people use language. The Gilmore Girls paper was about rapid-fire banter as both connection and deflection—how Lorelai uses humor to simultaneously pull people closer and keep them at a safe distance.” I stop abruptly, realizing I’m rambling. “Sorry. You didn’t ask for a thesis.”
“No,” Giovanni says, his voice thoughtful. “I didn’t. But it was interesting nonetheless.”
We’re deeper into Pittsburgh now, navigating through increasingly upscale neighborhoods. I wonder if this is where he grew up—where his poet mother taught literature while his father... did whatever mob fathers do.
“What about you?” I ask, immediately regretting the question. The fragile moment of connection shatters as his expression closes off again.
“What about me?” His tone is back to that dangerous neutrality.
“Do you like words?” I press on anyway, because apparently, I have a death wish. “Your mother was a poet. Did any of that rub off?”
For a long moment, I think he won’t answer.
Then, so quietly I almost miss it, he says, “Words are unreliable. People say things they don’t mean.
Promise things they won’t deliver.” His knuckles whiten slightly on the wheel.
“I prefer actions. They don’t lie. My turn.
I can recite the entire script of The Godfather from memory.
I once swam with great white sharks in the Caribbean without a cage. ”
He pauses.
Four seconds as if his life depends on this next statement.
“I was kidnapped when I was eight.”
He looks me in the eye, and I know instantly it’s number three. And in this same instant, I see the game for real. I see the way he played.
I shot someone when I was eight.
I’ve had to bury a body before.
I was kidnapped when I was eight.
Two truths… and a lie.
Except the lie wasn’t the statement about burying a body, it was the story that came after about the dog. Even if that was true, that wasn’t the point.
The point of all this was for me to see him.
The real him.
A shooter.
A grave digger.
A pawn in a game he’s been playing from birth.
But the conversation is over now. Clearly and literally. Because the Aventador slows as Giovanni pulls up to the gates of what I can only assume is the Bavga Family Estate.
We’re here.