Chapter 14
Jino murmurs to himself, circling the room like a priest inventorying his chapel.
His fingertips brush the pillar as he passes, his eyes measuring distances between the bench and the mat.
I catch fragments of his planning—"daily drills" and "timing exercises" and "resistance thresholds"—as he charts Emmaleen's deconstruction with the same precision he'd use to plan a wine list.
"The feather first," he mutters. "Then the crop. Graduated correction sequences..."
I watch him with fresh eyes, seeing not my cousin but something I've refused to recognize until now. Something carved from the same material as myself, but shaped by different hands.
The tattoos covering his skin aren't the random collection of a man who collects ink without purpose.
They're a codex—a deliberate text written in bone and shadow.
On his knuckles, Latin words I never bothered to translate.
Across his forearms, the Archangel Michael rendered not in glory but in skeletal form, judgment stripped to its most essential architecture.
At the military academy I attended, the instructors taught me that the body was a temple.
Not to be desecrated with ink or metal. I see now what Jino has done—turned his flesh into a cathedral of discipline, where even the angels have been reduced to their fundamental components.
No softness and no mercy. Just bone and function.
"Compliance benchmarks by day three," Jino continues, unaware or unconcerned that I'm cataloging him like evidence. "Complete linguistic repatterning by week two."
The rosary beads inked down his fingers look like chains binding bone to bone.
How had I never seen it? The way the skeletal stigmata on his palms mirror the wounds I was made to contemplate during Lenten services at Auggies—where, along with fifteen other boys in pressed uniforms, I knelt for hours, back straight as the rod that would correct any of us who slouched.
We were close once, Jino and I. Before the fracture.
I remember him at thirteen, both of us in my father's basement, learning to throw punches. Jino's technique was always perfect—economical, nothing wasted. While I relied on my height, my reach, Jino studied angles. Found the precise point where pressure became pain.
"The collar on day four," he says, measuring the space between the kneeling mat and the mirror. "Visual reinforcement of her submission..."
I had Chateau Bavga, the country club memberships, the tailored suits even as a teenager.
Jino had a split-level ranch house, a father who worked sixty hours on the docks, and clothes from department stores.
But he wore everything like armor, pressed and precise.
Made his modest possessions into a statement of control.
Then came the divide: St. Augustine's Military Academy.
Auggies. My father's alma mater, where sons of privilege were broken down and rebuilt according to sacred geometries of power.
Where every infraction earned swift, calculated punishment.
Where silence was currency and standing at attention became more natural than relaxation.
Jino never walked those halls. He never felt the bite of the dress ruler across his knuckles for a collar buttoned incorrectly. Never stood at inspection as Father Dominic checked the shine of his shoes with a white glove. Never recited Latin conjugations at 5 a.m. while standing in the snow.
Yet looking at him now, at the "Dies Irae" etched across the back of his neck, suddenly I see something. Day of wrath and doom impending! David's word with Sibyl's blending, Heaven and earth in ashes ending!
I see Auggies written into his skin. He became the thing I was forced to become, but he did it willingly, methodically, on his own terms.
"Twenty demerits minimum the first day," Jino says, his voice like water over stone. "Subject will likely accumulate thirty..."
The word "subject" pulls at something in my memory. The clinical detachment. The categorization of human beings into obedient units.
Lorcan would understand this moment. Lorcan ó Fearghail, my brother-not-brother from Auggies. The only one who truly knows me. The only one who was there that winter night.
Not the night with Enzo. Not Jino's dying dog wrapped in a favorite blanket, laid to rest under an oak tree with solemn words.
The other night. The girl. The panic. The frozen ground that took hours to break through with stolen pickaxes. Lorcan's face illuminated by moonlight, his breath clouding in the frigid air as we dug. His voice, steady and certain: "Deeper, G. It needs to be deeper."
I force the memory away. Lock it behind the door where I keep all the things I can't afford to remember.
"Punishment routines categorized by infraction type," Jino continues, pulling a small notebook from his pocket like that’s where notebooks live. He begins marking it. Keeping records of his spiral.
Looking at him—really seeing him—I understand something fundamental. Jino created for himself what Auggies created in me. A system of perfect control. A world where every action has a predictable consequence. Where chaos can be contained through ritual and discipline.
But there's a difference. A critical one.
Jino believes in the system. He's internalized it completely, made it the skeleton beneath his skin, the foundation of his being. The discipline isn't something imposed on him—it's something he's chosen, cultivated, and perfected.
I survived Auggies. I absorbed its lessons, wielded them when necessary. But I always retained something separate—a quiet defiance, a recognition that the system was flawed. That there had to be space for breath, for fire, for the uncontainable human spirit.
"The final phase requires complete psychological surrender," Jino says, testing the weight of a wooden dowel in his hands. "The subject will believe the choices are her own."
He's right about Emmaleen. Right that she represents danger. Right that her knowledge could destroy everything—could bring Luca LaRiccia's vengeance down upon all of us. She is a liability, a crack in the foundation, a variable in an equation that requires absolute certainty.
But he's wrong about the solution. Wrong in a way only someone who worships control could be wrong.
Jino sees Emmaleen as chaos that must be contained. A wild element to be disciplined into submission. A threat to be neutralized through strategic reconstruction.
I see her differently. As necessary. As vital. As proof that the doctrine—my doctrine, Auggies' doctrine, the endless rules and structures we've built our lives around—can be broken. Remade into something that breathes.
The irony doesn't escape me. Jino, who never endured the crucible that formed me, has become its perfect product. While I, who was shaped by those merciless hands, retain the ability to imagine something beyond its walls.
He continues his inventory, oblivious to my revelation. Measuring spaces between tools. Calculating angles of observation. Planning the methodical dismantling of a woman's will.
Jino believes salvation lies in perfect submission.
I'm no longer certain it exists at all.
Finally, he turns back to me, his inventory complete. His eyes are clear, focused. The room feels smaller with him standing in it, as if his certainty consumes oxygen the rest of us need to breathe.
"How do you want her to submit to you, Giovanni?" He places weight on submit like it's a cornerstone, the foundation everything else will rest upon. "What form should her surrender take?"
The question hangs between us. I don't answer.
"I've outlined the program," Jino continues, misreading my silence as contemplation rather than resistance.
"You are the King. Untouchable. Ruling from a distance.
" He straightens, a soldier at inspection.
"I am the Master. The craftsman. I'll handle the work of breaking her, shaping her resistance into compliance.
When I'm finished, she'll be ready to serve your needs without question. "
I remain silent. Not because I'm considering his proposition, but because I'm struggling to recognize the man before me. My cousin. The boy who cried at his dog's funeral. Now a clinical architect of psychological subjugation.
Jino interprets my silence as confusion.
"Perhaps I should clarify the distinction," he says, voice shifting into something formal and practiced.
Each word precisely measured, as if reciting from a text I haven't read.
"The King never trains. The King disciplines.
The King receives only the improved product—an obedient subject who has been prepared to anticipate his desires. "
He paces the length of the training platform, hands clasped behind his back like a professor delivering a crucial lecture.
"The Master, however, handles the messy transition. The resistance. The tears. The bargaining. The Master absorbs the subject's hatred, channels it into acceptance, and eventually, transforms it into devotion."
I watch him, half-listening as he continues his dissertation on submission hierarchies and power dynamics.
“Of course,” Jino says, looking me in the eyes, “you’ll be given dominion over her consequences. Every night I will deliver her to you. Each one, a slightly more perfect version than the night before. But I’ll make sure she fails. Don’t worry, you’ll get plenty of punishment time.”
My thoughts slide into a spiral of disbelief.
What the fuck am I doing?
This wasn't the plan. Not with Emmaleen. Not with anyone. The rules, the structure, the control—those were tools. Means to ends. Ways to navigate a chaotic world where power means survival. They weren't supposed to become this grotesque puppet theater, this laboratory of broken wills.