The pacing accelerates. Slows. Stops.
His boots are inches from my closed knees.
I keep my eyes lowered, fixed on a point approximately six inches beyond my folded hands, exactly as Jino taught me. Peripheral vision shows me the scuffed leather of his boots, the frayed hem of his jeans, the tension in his stance.
"Stand up."
I rise. Slowly. The movement starts from my core—spine lengthening first, shoulders settling into alignment, weight transferring smoothly from knees to feet. No wobble. No hesitation. Pure mechanical precision.
Jino would award me zero demerits for this execution.
The thought arrives before I can stop it, and I hate how pleased that makes me feel.
"Sit down." Heroic Kidnapper jabs his finger toward the couch—a sharp, impatient gesture that carries the weight of command, the kind that belongs to men who've never had to ask twice. "Like a normal person, yeah? Not like you're waitin' for Mass to start or some bloody priest to hand out communion wafers."
I settle onto the couch. Spine straight but not rigid. Hands folded in my lap, left over right. Knees together. Eyes lowered until given explicit permission otherwise.
This is meant to demonstrate that submission is natural for me, that Giovanni didn't break something that wasn't already cracked. Proves I chose this.
Except.
My body obeyed before my brain finished processing the command. The instruction traveled from his mouth to my muscles without bothering to check in with my conscious mind first, bypassing every cognitive checkpoint like it owned the route.
That margin of time—that crucial, paper-thin gap between hearing an order and consciously deciding whether to comply—has vanished somewhere along the way. Evaporated. Been systematically extracted through Jino's endless circuits of kneel-stand-bow-repeat until nothing remains of it. There's just stimulus and response now, stripped down to pure behavioral mechanics.
Command and obedience.
Action and reaction.
No buffer zone where choice happens, no moment of hesitation where my brain gets to weigh options and select a course of action like a rational human being.
I've successfully Pavlov'd myself into furniture that arranges itself on command.
I lift my eyes in time to find Heroic Kidnapper staring at me, his expression cycling through horror and fascination. Like he's watching a car accident in extremely slow motion and can't decide whether to look away or grab popcorn.
"You may speak. What's your name?"
"Emmaleen Rourke, Sir."
The "Sir" slips out automatically. I didn't plan it. Didn't think about it. My mouth just… supplied the appropriate honorific because that's what mouths do when addressing authority figures.
His jaw tightens. "How long have ya been with Giovanni?"
I calculate quickly. The hotel gala feels like it happened in a different lifetime, but the actual timeline is disturbingly compressed. "Approximately six weeks, Sir."
"Six—" He cuts himself off. Starts again. "Six weeks. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Six weeks and you're already?—"
He doesn't finish the sentence.
Doesn't need to.
"Including the hospital time. Which was six days, so if you subtract those from the total timeline, the actual duration is more accurately five weeks of active... involvement." I pause, realizing how clinical that sounds, how I'm parsing time like it's data in a spreadsheet rather than the slow erosion of my personhood. "Sir."
The honorific arrives a bit late, but quick enough to qualify as automatic. Like breathing.
Good girl,some terrible part of my brain whispers.You remembered the rules even while doing math.
"Hospital time?" he manages. His voice carries something between shock and resignation—like a man watching his worst-case scenario unfold with even worse details than anticipated.
