Chapter 8 #2
Real books. A whole library of them. Not staged, not inherited from the previous owner like Giovanni's collection he's never touched. These are Lorcan's books. Read. Loved. Kept.
"You alright?"
I shove the book back onto the shelf before I can do something humiliating like cry over James Joyce. "Yeah. Fine. Just—tired. You said that already. I'm repeating myself. That's how tired I am. Tired enough to develop echolalia apparently, which is—"
"Emmaleen," he says, pulling me out of my rambling.
"You're safe here." His voice is quiet now.
Gentler. Like he's talking to a stray dog, trying to get it off a busy street before it gets slaughtered by a trucker.
"I know that probably doesn't mean much comin' from the man who shoved you in a trunk, but—you are. Nothin's gonna hurt you in this house."
I turn to face him, this tall, broad, tattooed Irishman who kidnapped me to save me, who lectures about Sartre and plays sea shanties, who has a whole library of poetry and drives a car from the 1980s like he's cosplaying a romantic hero.
"Why?" I ask.
"Why what?"
"Why do you care? You don't know me. You don't owe me anything. You could've just… reported what you found to whoever hired you. The LaRiccia family. Let them handle it. Instead you—" I gesture helplessly at the space between us. "This. All of this. Why?"
His jaw tightens. For a long moment, he doesn't answer. But he's not quiet—not inside, at least. His mind is going a million miles an hour, churning through whatever internal monologue he's having with himself.
I can practically feel the spiral happening, the way thoughts are looping, and connecting, and branching off into tangents he can't quite shut down.
I recognize it because I do the same thing.
The realization hits me with unexpected clarity. He is… familiar.
Not his face, though I suppose there's something almost classical about his features. Not anything physical. But his mind—the way it works, the way it won't let him rest, the way he processes everything through layers of meaning and connection.
A kindred spirit, maybe.
I'm not entirely sure what that means, if anything. Could just be pattern-seeking on my part, my brain trying to find safe harbor in the middle of this surreal nightmare by latching onto someone who seems just as trapped in his own head as I am in mine.
Or, more likely, it's something ripe for extensive psychoanalysis I'll never be able to afford.
Finally, Lorcan speaks.
"Giovanni got the Gothic revival mansion." His voice is rough, almost reluctant. "The dark wood. The ancestral weight. The brooding lord of the manor aesthetic." He gestures vaguely at the industrial elegance surrounding us. "I got… this."
"And this is…?"
"The opposite." A bitter half-smile. "Or it was supposed to be. Steel and glass. Clean lines. No history embedded in the walls. No ghosts in the foundations."
I wait, sensing there's more.
"See, here's the irony." He runs a hand through his hair, that spiral energy building again.
"Giovanni's the practical one. Cold. Calculating.
Views everything as transaction and leverage.
And he ends up in a house that looks like it should belong to a Bronte hero—all that Gothic romance he'd never admit to wantin'.
Meanwhile, I'm the one who reads poetry and believes in…
fuck, I don't know. Meaning. Connection.
The possibility that people aren't just chess pieces. "
His laugh is hollow.
"And I built myself a fortress. Concrete and cameras. Security protocols. The most unromantic space imaginable."
He stares out the window at the harbor lights.
"If my teenage self could see this place, he'd know exactly what I was doin'. Runnin' from everything St. Augustine’s Military Academy tried to make me. From frozen ground, and pickaxes, and… consequences that don't ever thaw."
Something snaps in my brain as I try to make the connections… "What? Frozen ground and…?"
"Nothin'," he sighs. "Definitely not a story for tonight. Or… you, for that matter."
"A story?" And for some reason, just as these words leave my mouth, the connection hits. It doesn't make much sense, but it's there. In my head, nonetheless.
A winter night.
Lie, Lie, Truth.
The dog story.
Jino and Enzo.
I killed someone when I was eight.
I've had to bury a body before.
I was kidnapped when I was eight.
Giovanni's three truths spoken in our first car ride together to Pittsburgh, that strange game played in the intimate confines of his Lamborghini.
Funny how memory works. At the time, I was concentrating very hard on the first and the last statements. The bookends. The shocking admissions that seemed designed to overwhelm me.
I shot someone when I was eight.
I was kidnapped when I was eight.
Those were the truths meant to horrify, to reveal, to establish the boundaries of his world and mine.
But here, in this moment—standing in Lorcan's warehouse with the South Boston waterfront stretching dark beyond the windows—I realize… it's the middle one I should've noticed.
I've had to bury a body before.
Not I helped bury a body. Not I watched someone bury a body. Just that simple, declarative statement that I let slide past without proper examination because he sold me on the dog story and I was too busy processing red shoes and color-coordinated garment bags.
Giovanni buried a body.
With Jino.
And his Uncle Manzu.
In the frozen woods behind their property.
"Yer thinkin' hard again," Lorcan says, his Irish accent wrapping around the observation with something that might be amusement, or concern, or both.
His voice pulls me back from the spiral, from the connections I'm making, from the realization that Giovanni's confession wasn't about some random victim—it was about Enzo. The German Shepherd. The beloved family dog who was suffering and needed mercy.
Except… I meet Lorcan's gaze. "How do you know Giovanni again?"
He actually laughs. "Why do you ask?"
"You… just… never told me."
"Hasn't been time to hash out backgrounds, has there?"
I don't know if enough time has now passed that I'm coming to grips with my situation, or the submissive programming is starting to wear off now that I'm no longer in a sex dungeon, or I'm just not a critical thinker in dangerous situations…
but I'm just starting to notice that… it's starting to feel weird that…
Giovanni is missing from this entire adventure.
Seeing as how he's pretty much the main character.
I get it. I was kidnapped. My save-me-expectations could, perhaps, be a little high considering the fact that I'm in the middle of a mob drama.
But shouldn't Giovanni be making more of an effort?
Not because I'm special. But because I'm an actual witness to Rico's murder.
A murder Giovanni executed.
A murder that will ignite a mob war across state lines?
"Emmaleen?"
"Hm?" I look at Lorcan and find him confused.
"Ya OK, there, darlin'?"
I could lie. Or deflect. But I don't. "I'd like to hear that story now."
"Which one?"
"Why you care so much about my safety. Why you haven't handed me over to the LaRiccia's.
Why you think Giovanni is a monster, why my collar triggered you into seeing white, and why you're not answering his calls.
I mean, I get that last one, at least on the surface.
You broke into his house. And—" I sigh, panning my hand to indicate the apartment as a whole.
"—all this makes sense now. The security stuff, I mean.
I don't know much—anything, really—about Giovanni's security.
But I'll tell you what I do know." I narrow my eyes at my handsome, heroic kidnapper.
"He's way more paranoid than you. In fact, you're just the kind of person he might hire to install his security. "
Lorcan laughs. It's not even sarcastic. It's real. "Ah, yeah. Ya got me."
Did he just breathe a sigh of relief?
"I did his security. I've got all the passwords.
I just turned it all off. I didn't plan on findin' you, Emmaleen.
I didn't plan on findin' anythin'. I was goin' through the motions.
My uncle sent me down there to check shit out.
He was ordered to do this by the LaRiccia family.
I was ordered to get it done. It didn't matter what I found in Giovanni's mansion.
It never mattered. I was gonna report back and say I found nothin'. "
"Why?" My voice sounds very small right now.
He waits for nearly thirty seconds, before answering me. But when he does, he's different. Not cold. Lorcan really isn't a cold man. Just… resolved. "Like I said earlier," he finally says. "There are things you're never gonna know about him. Me. Us. And that's it. The end."
There is a big, black period at the end of that sentence.
The End.
"Can I call him?"
Again, Lorcan laughs. "You want to call him right now?"
I nod. "I bet he's worried."
"Oh, I bet he is," Lorcan agrees. And though these words are low, they are not soft. "I bet he is."
"Is that a no?"
"It's a no. For now. And not because I care if you talk to him, but if you talk to him, I'll have to talk to him. And I'm not ready to do that."
"So it's real?"
"What?"
"This kidnapping. I'm your prisoner."
"I feel like there are worse things for you to be right now."
"Better things, too."
"Like Giovanni's sex slave?"
"It wasn't like that."
"Wasn't it?" His eyebrow goes up. "You're wearin' a collar, Emmaleen. I don't care if it was your choice, it's weird."
Weird.
Weird.
I hate that word. And I hate that Lorcan says it to me now.
Because I had just come to terms with not being weird.
Jino had me convinced that my submission was something natural.
Maybe not 'normal' when considering the number of people who don't want a live inside a power exchange relationship. But it felt good to me.
"I like it," I tell Lorcan.
He shakes his head. "Nah, Emmaleen. Ya don't. You were programmed to like it."