77. Rico
Rico
Dr. Dingleberry—I'm sure out of respect I should use his real name, but let’s not pretend names matter when your job is to dismantle the human psyche like it’s a LEGO set—has been dissecting my brain three times a week for nearly a month now.
That’s twelve sessions. Thirty-six hours.
Two mental breakdowns and one regrettable metaphor about emotional constipation.
He says I’m making progress. Points to the chair I added in my office, the one I haven’t actively threatened anyone to sit in. Apparently that’s character development. I even acknowledged two of the “dude bros” from the merger without fantasizing about pushing them out a window. Growth.
But here’s the truth: the one thing that might actually make a difference is the one thing I haven’t said. To anyone. Not to my therapist. Not to Marco. Not even to the parents who watched me practically bleed out that night and decided the best response was to act like nothing happened.
They know the bullet points. Kidnapped. Held in a basement. Retrieved. The end.
What they don’t know is what happened between taken and rescued. The part of the story that doesn’t fit neatly in a police report or whispered over a glass of scotch.
That part? Only three people knew. And two of them are now fish food at the bottom of the Hudson.
I know I need to talk about it. Process it.
“Own my trauma,” as Dr. Dingleberry so helpfully phrases it, usually while gesturing with a pen I want to stab into my eye.
But every time I try, my throat closes up like a bank vault.
Emotions, it turns out, are not only inconvenient—they’re also suffocating.
Someone should’ve printed that on a warning label: Feelings may cause spontaneous oxygen deprivation and general loss of will to live.
I’ve avoided it for years. The retelling. The remembering. Because once you put words to horror, it becomes real. Tangible. Something people can poke and prod and pity. And I don’t want their fucking pity. I didn't want forgiveness for what I became afterward.
But now?
Now I’m sitting in the closet of a house I didn’t want but can’t bear to leave. Holding a woman I didn’t deserve but somehow ended up loving so completely it burns.
And she’s leaving.
All because I refused to give her the one thing I gave no one else: the truth.
Not the cleaned-up version. Not the bite-sized chunks. The whole bloody, unfiltered truth.
I could let her walk. But if she walks out that door, she won’t come back. And I’ll go back to being the same emotionally vacant ghost I’ve always been—only now, I’ll know what I lost.
So I do the one thing that terrifies me more than my past.
I sit down.
Right there, on the carpeted closet floor, pulling her with me until she’s straddling my lap.
My hands settle on her hips. She’s warm and soft and grounding.
And for one second, I forget the words. Forget everything except the weight of her and the echo of my heart hammering against a ribcage that’s been sealed for years.
She blinks down at me, uncertain, but she doesn't go to move away from me.
I could joke. Say something flippant about this position and the number of ways it’s distracting. But this moment? It deserves more than my usual armor of sarcasm and avoidance.
It deserves honesty.
Because for the first time in my life, I want to be known. Not by a paid stranger in a leather chair, but by her.
The little thief who stole my heart while I was too busy guarding my scars.
“When I was thirteen,” I start, my voice bone-dry, “two men pulled up while Marco and I were at the park. They asked which one of us was Marco Bennetti. I told them it was me.”
Allie’s brow furrows, and I can already feel her reaction coming before she says a word. But I continue, because once you pull the thread, you either unravel or you get it the hell over with.
“Marco, at that age, had the self-preservation skills of a housefly. He’d land on the burner and wonder why the world hated him when it lit up.
So, I took his place. Figured I had a better shot at survival.
” I laugh, but it’s not amusement—it’s bitterness—dark and cracked around the edges. “Joke’s on me, I guess.”
“They blindfolded me the second I stepped into the van. I didn’t see anything again until they strapped me to a chair in some godforsaken basement that smelled like mildew and piss.”
She seems completely unfazed by my pre-teen kidnapping.
“You knew?”
She shakes her head. “Marco said you took his place, that you were kidnapped. But he never told me what happened once they had you.”
Of course he didn’t. Marco doesn't know what happened during my temporary relocation. He saw the aftermath. He saw what they did to me—and worse, what it did in me.
I tuck a strand of her soft, dark hair behind her ear.
“I didn’t even realize it was two days until I was released. Could’ve been two weeks, could’ve been two hours. Time didn’t exist. Just the chair. The silence. And the occasional visit from pain with a side of humiliation.”
My throat tightens, but I push through. Because if I stop now, I won’t start again.
“Uncle Tony taught us early—don’t talk, don’t break, don’t give them anything. If they keep you alive, they want something. As long as you don’t give it to them, you’ve still got leverage. Hope. Whatever the hell you want to call it.”
I pause. My fists are clenched so tight my nails bite into my skin. Then I feel her—her fingers sliding through mine. Warm and steady.
“Go on,” she whispers.
“When fists didn’t work, they got creative. Cigarettes. Knives. Small things at first, like they were playing. One of them enjoyed it too much—he had this wheeze when he laughed. I still hear it sometimes when the room gets too quiet.”
I glance away. The memory burns hotter than the cigarette tips ever did.
“I didn’t scream. I didn’t talk. I just started focusing on details—mold in the corner of the room, the way it turned from green to black the longer I stared.
I named the colors in my head. Gave the shadows personalities.
Described the peeling paint like it was a fucking Monet.
It was the only way to survive. Distraction therapy, trademark pending. ”
I don't know why I toss out the sarcasm. It's my shield, and an ineffective one at that. She squeezes my hand, encouraging me to go on with the story.
“When the cuts got deeper, I stopped pretending it didn’t hurt.
But I still didn’t talk. Didn’t look at them.
I stared at a rust stain on the ceiling like it was a roadmap out of hell.
I obsessed over the ticking of the clock just outside the door.
That fucking clock. Every second a gunshot in my ears.
Tick, tick, tick—like life was counting down, and I’d already missed the deadline. ”
My heart's pounding as if it’s trying to punch its way out of my chest, and my throat—yeah, that’s a lost cause.
Dry. Tight. Every swallow sticks halfway down, useless as an umbrella in a hurricane.
But I have to finish. I have to say this.
At least once in my miserable life, I should try telling the truth.
“I think at some point, my brain just…fried itself out. Not in a fiery, sparking kind of way. No. It was quiet. Surgical. Like someone unplugged the wires behind my eyes and left me on standby mode.”
I stare past her shoulder, not because I’m avoiding her—though, let’s not pretend I’m above that—but because if I look at her while saying this, I’ll never finish.
“They were laughing. Talking. Whispering things I’m sure were meant to scare me, but I didn’t hear them.
Just saw shadows. They lost their faces.
Became outlines. Human noise pollution. The pain stopped registering, too.
Even when I felt the blood—my blood—running in warm lines down my stomach, I couldn’t feel it.
My eyes stayed on the concrete walls. The cracks in them.
The discoloration. I gave the mold names just to keep my mind from focusing on what was really happening.
Fear, pain, hope... all of it vanished when I stopped acknowledging it. ”
I flex my hands without realizing it, the memory crawling under my skin. Her fingers close around mine, anchoring me. Her hands are warm. Mine are cold. Cold and dead, like the whole of me.
“Some guy showed up, eventually. Apparently, he was a rival of my Uncle Tony’s.
Classic organized crime twist, right? He walked in, saw me, figured out I wasn’t Marco—because let’s face it, Marco would've been crying and spewing answers to questions they asked by then—and he shot the two bastards torturing me. Just like that. No warning. No words. Just two gunshots and a man adjusting his cufflinks like he was late for dinner reservations.”
I pause. Swallow. Swallow again.
“They dropped at my feet. I remember the blood more than anything else. It soaked into their clothes. Pooled across the concrete. Thick, dark red. The smell hit first. Metal and rot. I didn’t realize blood had a smell. Not until it was everywhere. Still hits me sometimes.”
“Red. That’s why you hate the color red?”
I nod once.
“For a while, I couldn’t even look at it. Couldn’t drive past a stop sign without gripping the wheel so hard my fingers went numb. But then… remember that gallery night? You wore a red dress.”
Her eyes widen, and I hold up a hand.
“You didn’t know. You couldn’t have. But here’s the thing—I saw you in it and I didn’t panic.
Didn’t break out in a sweat. My fists didn’t curl.
My mind didn’t spiral. All I could think was that I wanted to tear it off you.
Not because I hated it… but because it made me feel something.
For the first time in years, I wasn’t disgusted by the color. I was attracted to it.”