face like you did,
but she’s all fucking
MINE now, bitch.
My vision tunnels, and my chest feels like it’s been hit with a sledgehammer. That’s Antonio. It can’t be any-fucking-body else. He’s referencing the video I sent him of me fucking her, coming on her face, calling her mine on her birthday after I caught them out at a club together at 3 in the morning.
I almost throw the phone, but instead I white-knuckle it, force myself to breathe through the roaring in my ears. My blood feels like it’s boiling, destroying me from the inside out.
I type without thinking—first to my hacker, then to Valentina. Valentina texts back immediately.
Help me find this
fucker. Now.
Oh shit. Fuck, Tommy,
I’m sorry. Who’s the guy?
Fucking Antonio.
Abbiati? No fucking way.
It fucking is,
now fucking find him.
I’m out of town, but
I’ll do everything I
can, I promise.
The phone slips in my grip as reality presses down. The only good news is that my Gi is alive.
I send the video to my brothers and then watch it again. And again. And again. Looking for details, anything that will tell me where she is and what’s happening to her.
Gi. My Gi. The roar of hurricane winds in my brain makes the room spin, makes my chest feel like it’s splitting. There’s nothing in the world but that roaring fury. And the promise that I will burn Antonio alive for this.
7
Giovanna
Darkness presses against my eyelids, heavy and damp. It’s not the kind of dark you get from closing your eyes; it’s thicker, like wet layers of cotton. I think my eyes are open, but I can’t tell. Maybe they’re not. Maybe I’m blindfolded. I don’t remember putting on a blindfold, but then I don’t remember much at all.
Something moves against me—a rhythm, a weight rocking into me—but feels far away, too far to mean anything. It feels like I’m on a boat, on a choppy ocean. But other than the movement, I don’t feel any other sensations on my skin. I don’t feel my skin at all. It’s like it’s evaporated, gone, and my whole being is just static. There’s no pain, but there’s also no feeling at all. There’s just…nothing.
Colors bloom behind my eyes, an oil-slick of colors that blend and separate in slow motion, smearing across the backs of my eyelids. I try to wiggle my fingers, to grip the rope the wayI sometimes do, to make the blood flow back into my hands. I can’t tell if I’m moving at all. My wrists are hot where the rope bites them, but even that feels more like a memory than a sensation.
A voice slides through the dark, low and masculine, slithering into my brain like a snake. Familiar but not friendly.Who is that?I want to ask, but my mouth won’t open. My tongue is heavy, my lips glued together.
A sound rises, faint and wet—a moan. Is it me? Someone else? I don’t know. The noise folds over itself until it slips away and becomes part of the air.
My thoughts float in, out, sideways. Disconnected. Maybe they’re fixing my ankle. Maybe they’re doing surgery, and I’m in a hospital and I shouldn’t be awake. Where is Tommy? Tommy looking up at me on his knees in the rain. Tommy’s smile. Tommy’s strong arms wrapped around me.
I search my body for an anchor: the pain in my injured ankle, sore muscles from being tied to a bed, headache from not eating. There are none. There’s just weight and lightness and a dark red haze pushing at the black edges of me.
Have I been rescued? Maybe this is what rescue feels like: blind, numb, afloat.
