Saint? Oh, Father Patrick's gonna have fun dissectin' this one.
"What the fuck did ya just call me?" I only ask because my brain needs time to catch up with the absolute Patty Hearst world I've been dropped into.
She stays perfectly still in that disturbingly precise kneelin' position with her forehead pressed to the stained carpet and her arse in the air like she's waitin' for instruction.
"My Saint," she repeats.
Like I'm runnin' the Stanford Prison Experiment out of a stolen Buick.
I should probably be more concerned about the implications of that than I am. But this is neither the time, nor the place for that particular spiral. "Get out of the boot."
Immediately, she complies, but her body unfolds slowly. Like she's performin' some kind of ceremony I wasn't meant to witness. Her spine curves, shoulders roll back, tits thrust forward as she rises from that kneelin' position with the kind of grace that comes from repetition.
From trainin'.
From bein' broken down and rebuilt into somethin' that knows exactly how to move, when to move, and how to present itself.
Christ.
"Faster," I growl, because I can't watch this—whatever this is—for another second without my brain supplyin' commentary I don't want. "For fuck's sake, let's go. I'm freezin', woman."
She speeds up then, climbin' out of the boot with less ritual, but still too much control for someone who should be terrified. When her bare feet hit the gravel drive, she doesn't even flinch at the cold or the sharp stones diggin' into her soles.
I grab her roughly by the arm—partly to move her along, partly to see if she'll react like a normal human being and pull away, or protest, orsomethin'.
She doesn't.
She just lets me pull her, pliant and obedient, toward the cabin door. Her skin's warm under my palm despite the November air bitin' at us both. Too warm. Like her body's runnin' hot from somethin' that has nothin' to do with temperature.
I shove the door open with my free hand and drag her inside, then push her toward the couch. "Sit."
She stumbles slightly when I release her—the first uncoordinated movement she's made since I opened that boot—and I turn away to deal with the practical matters of not freezin' to death in a cabin that hasn't been used in three months.
Lights first. The switch by the door controls the main overhead fixture, which flickers twice before stayin' on and castin' yellow light across the sparse interior.
Then the heat—there's a thermostat on the wall that I crank up to eighty because fuck it, we're not rationing electricity tonight. The furnace kicks on somewhere below with a mechanical groan that sounds like it's complainin' about bein' woken up.
I flip two more switches—kitchen light, bathroom light—just to chase away the shadows that make this place feel like a tomb instead of a safe house.
When I turn around, she's not on the couch.
She's kneelin' on the floor.
Right there in the middle of the room on the cold hardwood, like she's waitin' for Mass to start, positioned with her knees pressed together, hands resting on her thighs palms-down, eyes forward, chin lifted just enough to expose the line of her throat and that fuckin' collar still locked around it.
The position's different from the one in the boot but no less deliberate. No lesstrained.
"I didn't tell ya to kneel," I say. "I told ya to sit."
She doesn't move. Doesn't even blink. Just maintains that perfect stillness like she's waitin' for permission to exist.
How long has she been under Giovanni's control? Weeks? Months? Long enough for this to become automatic—for her body to default to submission the way most people default to breathin'.
Ya know exactly how long it takes, Father Patrick whispers.Ye've seen it before.
"Shut up," I mutter.
The naked woman's eyes flick toward me for just a second before returnin' to that forward stare. She heard me talk to myself and she's not reactin' to that either, which means she's either completely dissociated or she's been trained not to respond to things that aren't directed specifically at her.
