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)
His eyes search mine, watching for my response.
My breath catches. It sounds perfect. Absolutely, terrifyingly perfect.
"But this isn't special to you." His eyes don't leave mine, holding steady with the weight of absolute certainty. "This is part of my curriculum. If you want me to train you properly—if you want the real thing, not this halfhearted shadow of submission—then I need freedom to do whatever I want with your body and mind. Complete control. No restrictions. No boundaries according to Giovanni Bavga’s rules."
Oh. The truth of what this means suddenly hits me. I open my mouth. Close it. My brain is short-circuiting, misfiring like wet circuitry. Processing the proposition he's just laid at my feet like a loaded weapon.
He wants Giovanni's permission to fuck me, which means convincing Giovanni to give up control—to relinquish the one thing he hoards more fiercely than oxygen, more carefully than state secrets.
Which is... impossible. Completely, utterly, categorically impossible.
Giovanni wouldn't—couldn't—
"Here's the challenge." Jino's thumb presses deliberately against my lip, the touch both tender and territorial—a contradiction wrapped in skin and intent. "If you can convince Giovanni to give me that freedom—real freedom, not conditional, or temporary, or contingent on his mood, or his paranoia, or whatever emotional crisis he's nursing on any given day—then I'll become your Master again. Full training. Proper discipline. All the rules from the Doctrine, strictly enforced down to the smallest infraction. Everything you're asking for in those late-night thoughts you think no one can hear. Everything you're begging for beneath that careful silence of yours, the one you've perfected so well it's started to feel like your actual voice."
He lets his thumb drift lower, tracing the line of my jaw with deliberate slowness, forcing me to feel the weight of what he's proposing—the enormity of it, the impossibility, the seductive pull of it anyway.
"The real thing," he continues, his voice dropping lower. "Not this half-measure, half-disciplined shadow of submission he's constructed for you. The genuine article. The kind of control that doesn't answer to anyone, not even to him."
Jino leans closer, his voice dropping to something almost conspiratorial.
"Convince him, and you get what you want. Fail, and you'll never see the inside of my school room again."
The weight of it settles over me like a stone dragged across still water—heavy, deliberate, impossible to ignore.
He wants me to convince the man who killed for me to share me with someone else. This proposal cuts so much deeper than the training sessions themselves, deeper than the deliberate temptation of the crop brushing across my nipples with calculated precision, or the way he fingers me into overstimulation just so he can watch me fail, just so he can mark another infraction in that endless ledger of my mistakes.
This is something else entirely. Something that rewrites the entire architecture of what we are.
This is full access.
This is unrestricted claim.
This is ownership—not the carefully negotiated, conditionally granted kind that Giovanni exercises with his rules, and his notebooks, and his careful calculations of reward and punishment.
This is the kind of ownership that answers to no one, that operates outside the bounds of Giovanni's permission, that exists in defiance of his authority.
Or half-ownership, perhaps. Which is still so far over the monster's blood-red line that it shouldn't even be a consideration.
Hell, now that the proposal sits between us, crystallizing into something real, I'm not even sure how Jino negotiated his way into this arrangement in the first place. The training sessions, the discipline, the touching—all of it required Giovanni's explicit permission. His blessing.
In fact, the more I turn it over in my mind, the clearer it becomes. This couldn't have been Jino's idea from the start.
It was Giovanni's.
All of it.
He wanted to get rid of me. To make me vanish from his life completely, without the mess of simply throwing me out. And his method was elegant in its cruelty—he would withhold himself entirely. Deny me his touch, his presence, his attention. Make Jino into the instrument of my fear, the thing that would finally convince me to run.
But that carefully constructed plan crashed and burned spectacularly when Jino gave me aftercare that Giovanni withheld. When he touched me with gentleness instead of only severity. When he saw what Giovanni refused to see.
Jino was furious that Giovanni didn't perform aftercare that first night. So he did it himself, shattering whatever cold distance Giovanni had tried to maintain.
Oh.
Okay.
I guess… Jino actually likes me. More than likes me, maybe.
Which makes things infinitely harder, infinitely more complicated. Because if I've pieced it together lying here naked on this basement bed, then Giovanni—who sees everything, who calculates ten moves ahead before anyone else has even noticed the game has started—Giovanni already knows.
And jealousy, real jealousy—the kind that sinks claws into a man's chest and doesn't let go—makes monsters do truly monstrous things.