Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 95046 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95046 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
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?"