Chapter 4 #2
This is your plan. This is the plan you developed in a gasoline-scented trunk while high on carbon monoxide and post-orgasmic brain fog.
You're going to OUT-SLAVE your way back to slavery.
You're going to prove you don't need saving by demonstrating that you've been so thoroughly saved-from-yourself that saving is now impossible.
You've officially lost the plot. The plot has not just been misplaced, it's walked through some kind of portal-magic.
Someone should file a missing persons report for your plot because it was last seen fleeing the scene approximately two months ago when you signed a contract with a mob boss who keeps a "consequence cabinet" in his basement.
I take a slow breath. The logic is twisted, but it's more like a long and winding switchback road that leads to the top of a mountain than a short-cut through the woods that drops you at your Grannie's house where she's been eaten by a wolf.
The plan stands.
Heroic Kidnapper starts pacing the room like he's auditioning for a production of Hamlet where the lead role is "Man Experiencing a Crisis of Conscience in Real Time."
He mutters under his breath—fragments I can barely catch. Something about Father Patrick. Something about choices, and chains, and circles of Hell. His Irish accent gets thicker with each pass across the worn rug, consonants sharpening into edges.
The pacing accelerates. Slows. Stops.
His boots are inches from my closed knees.
I keep my eyes lowered, fixed on a point approximately six inches beyond my folded hands, exactly as Jino taught me. Peripheral vision shows me the scuffed leather of his boots, the frayed hem of his jeans, the tension in his stance.
"Stand up."
I rise. Slowly. The movement starts from my core—spine lengthening first, shoulders settling into alignment, weight transferring smoothly from knees to feet. No wobble. No hesitation. Pure mechanical precision.
Jino would award me zero demerits for this execution.
The thought arrives before I can stop it, and I hate how pleased that makes me feel.
"Sit down." Heroic Kidnapper jabs his finger toward the couch—a sharp, impatient gesture that carries the weight of command, the kind that belongs to men who've never had to ask twice.
"Like a normal person, yeah? Not like you're waitin' for Mass to start or some bloody priest to hand out communion wafers. "
I settle onto the couch. Spine straight but not rigid. Hands folded in my lap, left over right. Knees together. Eyes lowered until given explicit permission otherwise.
This is meant to demonstrate that submission is natural for me, that Giovanni didn't break something that wasn't already cracked. Proves I chose this.
Except.
My body obeyed before my brain finished processing the command. The instruction traveled from his mouth to my muscles without bothering to check in with my conscious mind first, bypassing every cognitive checkpoint like it owned the route.
That margin of time—that crucial, paper-thin gap between hearing an order and consciously deciding whether to comply—has vanished somewhere along the way.
Evaporated. Been systematically extracted through Jino's endless circuits of kneel-stand-bow-repeat until nothing remains of it.
There's just stimulus and response now, stripped down to pure behavioral mechanics.
Command and obedience.
Action and reaction.
No buffer zone where choice happens, no moment of hesitation where my brain gets to weigh options and select a course of action like a rational human being.
I've successfully Pavlov'd myself into furniture that arranges itself on command.
I lift my eyes in time to find Heroic Kidnapper staring at me, his expression cycling through horror and fascination. Like he's watching a car accident in extremely slow motion and can't decide whether to look away or grab popcorn.
"You may speak. What's your name?"
"Emmaleen Rourke, Sir."
The "Sir" slips out automatically. I didn't plan it. Didn't think about it. My mouth just… supplied the appropriate honorific because that's what mouths do when addressing authority figures.
His jaw tightens. "How long have ya been with Giovanni?"
I calculate quickly. The hotel gala feels like it happened in a different lifetime, but the actual timeline is disturbingly compressed. "Approximately six weeks, Sir."
"Six—" He cuts himself off. Starts again. "Six weeks. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Six weeks and you're already—"
He doesn't finish the sentence.
Doesn't need to.
"Including the hospital time. Which was six days, so if you subtract those from the total timeline, the actual duration is more accurately five weeks of active...
involvement." I pause, realizing how clinical that sounds, how I'm parsing time like it's data in a spreadsheet rather than the slow erosion of my personhood. "Sir."
The honorific arrives a bit late, but quick enough to qualify as automatic. Like breathing.
Good girl, some terrible part of my brain whispers. You remembered the rules even while doing math.
"Hospital time?" he manages. His voice carries something between shock and resignation—like a man watching his worst-case scenario unfold with even worse details than anticipated.
Is that defeat I'm hearing? Or is it something closer to horror—the slow-dawning realization that whatever he thought he was rescuing me from runs deeper and darker than a simple locked door?
"Would ya mind explainin' what exactly ya mean by 'hospital time'?" The question comes out careful, deliberate—like he's bracing himself for an answer he already suspects will destroy whatever remaining illusions he's clinging to about the nature of my situation.
I pull in a slow breath and release it. The sigh carries six days of hospital visits, Rico's calculated fists, and the weight of everything I can't say without making this worse.
Because explaining the hospital time means admitting Rico put me there. Means connecting those dots for my hot, shirtless Heroic Kidnapper here. That Rico LaRiccia wanted to rape me and brained me with a statue instead.
Just before Giovanni blew his head in half.
Which carries a death sentence of mob war or… whatever.
Lying is explicitly forbidden. It's written in the Bavga Doctrine—Absolute honesty. No concealment, even of small things. Lack of honesty is betrayal.
But I'm also reasonably certain—maybe 101% certain, if I'm being precise about my confidence levels—that Giovanni would make an exception to that particular rule right now.
So I do what I've learned to do best over these five weeks of active involvement.
I choose my words very, very carefully. "There was… an accident. It involved this." I place my fingertips on my temple where the evidence of surgery lingers as a patch of hair that is growing out, but clearly doesn't match the length of all the hair around it.
It's the kind of asymmetry you only get from emergency medical intervention, from surgical clippers wielded by trauma nurses who don't give a damn about aesthetics when they're trying to save your life.
The breath he lets out is pure sadness, carrying the weight of something breaking inside him. "He did that to ya? Giovanni?"
"No. It wasn't him. It was someone else. And he saved me from that someone else." I pause, meeting those storm-grey eyes directly, letting him see the finality there. "Beyond that, I can't tell you anymore. I'm sorry."
My voice doesn't waver even as my heart hammers against my ribs. "I'm going to disobey. You can punish me any way you feel is appropriate, but I cannot—I will not—tell you the rest."
I watch him process this information, watch something shift behind those storm-grey eyes. He's trying to reconcile the naked woman on his couch—the one who says "Sir" like it's punctuation—with whatever he expected to find in Giovanni's basement.
"What is goin' on here, lass? Are ya tellin' me that Giovanni killed someone to save you?"
I say nothing, because what could I possibly say that wouldn't betray either Giovanni's secrets or my own increasingly complicated understanding of what happened that night?
His expression changes before my eyes—not all at once, but in increments, like watching someone solve a particularly disturbing equation.
Like he's putting a puzzle together and just found that missing interior piece.
Not the satisfying corner piece or the obvious edge.
Not even the frustrating bit of kitten's eyeball from those deceptively wholesome jigsaw puzzles that promise simple domestic scenes but deliver hours of eye-straining torture.
No, this is the other kind of piece. The blob of pure black with no identifying features, no helpful gradient of shadow, no texture to guide you.
That one missing piece that seems to carry almost no information attached to it whatsoever, yet somehow—maddeningly, impossibly—provides perfect illumination the moment it slots into place.
The moment everything suddenly, horrifyingly makes sense.
He drops down into the couch across from me with the kind of controlled collapse that suggests every muscle in his body is fighting the urge to do something more dramatic—pace, perhaps, or punch something expensive.
His hand flies up to his forehead, long fingers pressing hard against his temples like he's trying to physically massage away the migraine of understanding I've apparently just gifted him.
The pressure he's applying looks almost painful, knuckles white, jaw clenched tight enough I can see the muscle jumping beneath that perfectly maintained stubble.
Silent.
Completely, utterly, devastatingly silent.
Well. That didn't take long at all.
He knows.
Well, he doesn't know know—doesn't have the full story, the complete picture, every sordid detail of how Giovanni Bavga became my jailer-slash-savior-slash-something-I-don't-have-vocabulary-for-yet.