Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 102375 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 512(@200wpm)___ 410(@250wpm)___ 341(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 102375 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 512(@200wpm)___ 410(@250wpm)___ 341(@300wpm)
I lean forward, adjusting the audio gain. The words are muffled by distance, by the acoustics of that concrete chamber, by Emmaleen's ragged breathing.
But fragments surface.
"...not real... just a voice..."
"...won't hurt you..."
"...the monster..."
My spine straightens. Monster.
"...don't be afraid of him..."
The phrase settles over me like ice water.
Don't be afraid of him.
Not me. Not I won't hurt you.
Him.
Third person. Dissociation. Giovanni is talking about himself the way you'd discuss a stranger. A threat. An entity separate from the man holding her.
I stand, blood rushing in my ears.
Giovanni and I were close once. Closer than brothers. We trained together—Krav Maga at eight years old, jiu-jitsu at ten. By twelve, we were sparring partners who could read each other's movements before they happened. We ran the same drills, bled on the same mats, pushed each other until our bodies gave out and then pushed further.
Summers meant road trips. Winters meant snowboarding in the Poconos. Spring breaks, we'd disappear into the woods behind Mama Bavga's estate, building forts, shooting cans, pretending we were soldiers instead of mob heirs.
But that was before.
Before St. Augustine's Military Academy swallowed him whole at thirteen.
I calculate the years. Nearly two decades since Auggies. Nearly twenty years of separate lives, separate trajectories, separate traumas I never witnessed.
How did I not notice?
How did I not see the distance accumulating like snow—silent, incremental, until suddenly you're buried and can't remember what warmth felt like?
I thought we were still close. Still brothers in everything but blood.
But watching him now, listening to him fragment himself into pieces—the man and the monster—I realize I don't know my cousin at all.
Not anymore.
On the monitor, Giovanni rocks Emmaleen gently. Her eyes are unfocused, lost in subspace's fog. She might not even be hearing him. Might not register the words or the warning they carry.
But I hear them.
The monster.
I replay the scene. No pedagogical structure. No control. Just rage dressed as discipline, trauma masquerading as training.
Giovanni never recovered from the kidnapping.
The realization arrives fully formed, undeniable.
He was eight years old. Tied to a post. Starved. Beaten. Abandoned by his own father, who saw the kidnapping as an inconvenience to a business deal rather than a son's life in danger.
Salvatore has always viewed Giovanni as inventory.
Even now. Especially now.
Sending him to Riverview to oversee some backwater expansion—it wasn't strategy. It was exile. An insult wrapped in opportunity, a way to keep his disposable third son at arm's length while the real heirs, Marco and Angelo, handled actual power in Pittsburgh.
Giovanni killed Rico to protect this girl.
Giovanni is risking war with the LaRiccia family for her.
Giovanni is unraveling.
The monster, the monster.
The words echo. Loop, over and over, until they’re liturgy.
A memory surfaces—uninvited but persistent.
Enzo.
My German Shepherd. He was a present to me on my first birthday from my father’s best friend who bred protection dogs for elite clients. Twelve years of loyalty, companionship, protection. Executive-level training from the time he was a pup. One finger point would send him into attack mode. One word pulled him back.
Perfect discipline. Perfect trust.
Until the cancer.
I couldn't take him to a vet's office. Couldn't let strangers handle his death. Couldn't bear the clinical coldness of stainless-steel tables and fluorescent lights for a creature who'd been my brother.
So we did it at home.
My father, Manzu. Giovanni. Me.
Winter night, frozen ground. We dug for hours, breaking through ice-hardened soil behind the estate. My hands bled. Giovanni's did too. Neither of us complained.
My father made it quick. One shot. Enzo didn't suffer.
We wrapped him in his favorite blanket. Buried him under the oak tree. Marked the grave with stones.
Giovanni stood beside me the whole time. Silent. Steady. Present in a way that mattered more than words.
That was before Auggies turned my cousin into someone who talks about himself in third person like he's afraid of his own hands.
Another memory pushes forward. Unwanted. Uncomfortable.
Christmas of senior year in high school. Giovanni brought Lorcan home for the holidays. Lorcan Ó Fearghail—the Irish kid from Auggies whose family controlled Boston's docks. Polite violence wrapped in good breeding. Storm-gray eyes and a smile that promised either friendship or a knife, depending.
I remember being annoyed. Three's a crowd, especially when two of the three share secrets you're not privy to. I spent that entire break in the backseat of Giovanni's new Jeep—Salvatore's guilt gift, because while he might've considered his son disposable, gifts were a reflection of the giver, not the son receiving them.
I was always in the backseat. Invisible. Forgotten.
That’s why I heard them.
Lorcan and Giovanni, talking low in the front. I was half-asleep, head against the window, watching the Pennsylvania winter scroll past.
"...the dog story..." Lorcan's accent made it sound foreign, ritualized.
I perked up. The dog story. That was our private ‘code’ for that night we buried Enzo. It was something that bound us together. A cold, dark night of mourning. Giovanni’s arm draped over my shoulder. No words, just the sound of the midnight woods.