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)
"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.
But he knows enough. He's connected enough dots to see the shape of the thing, even if he can't quite make out all the fine details yet. He knows that whatever's happening in Giovanni's house, whatever arrangement has me kneeling naked in basements and calling a crime boss "Sir," it's not what he thought it was.
And judging by the way those storm-grey eyes have gone dark and flat, by the way his whole body has gone rigid with barely-contained something—shock, horror, disgust, I can't tell which—he knows it's so much worse than whatever scenario his heroic kidnapper brain had initially constructed.
Does he know who Rico LaRiccia is—heir to the most powerful crime family in New York, the man whose disappearance would send shockwaves through every organized crime operation from Pittsburgh to Manhattan?
Does he know Rico's missing, that somewhere on Giovanni's sprawling estate or buried in the Pennsylvania woods there might be a body that could bring down empires?
Does he know that Giovanni was one of the last people to see Rico alive, that whatever happened left blood on expensive Italian shoes and a cousin-shaped hole in the LaRiccia family tree?
Does he know that I'm a witness—not just to violence, but to murder—and that the only safe place for a witness who isn't conveniently dead is, apparently, a sex dungeon?
A meticulously designed training facility where I kneel on leather mats and count my failures in crop strikes, where exhaustion becomes discipline and discipline becomes something disturbingly close to peace?
Where I'm handed demerits specifically calibrated to both punish me and make me come apart at the seams in the same devastating moment?
Not sure.
But… likely.
Very likely.
Without warning, Heroic Kidnapper launches into what can only be described as a death spiral of frustrated intellectualism.
"You're like—Christ, you're like Persephone, aren't ya? Ate the pomegranate seeds knowin' full well they'd trap you in the Underworld. Or maybe you're Bluebeard's wife, curiosity killin' more than the cat. No—you're Sartre's bad faith personified, pretendin' you've no choice when choice is all you've got left—"
His accent thickens with each literary reference. The 'g's drop off his words entirely.
"—or is it Stockholm syndrome wrapped up in Foucauldian power dynamics, the prisoner internalizin' the warden's voice until she can't tell submission from desire—"
I should probably be offended that he's comparing me to cautionary tales from Western canon. Instead, I'm cataloging his references, mentally checking them against my own reading list.
Persephone—Greek mythology, Homeric Hymn to Demeter, later versions by Ovid.
Bluebeard—fairy tale, Perrault, feminist retellings by Carter and Atwood.