Is that defeat I'm hearing? Or is it something closer to horror—the slow-dawning realization that whatever he thought he wasrescuing me from runs deeper and darker than a simple locked door?
"Would ya mind explainin' what exactly ya mean by 'hospital time'?" The question comes out careful, deliberate—like he's bracing himself for an answer he already suspects will destroy whatever remaining illusions he's clinging to about the nature of my situation.
I pull in a slow breath and release it. The sigh carries six days of hospital visits, Rico's calculated fists, and the weight of everything I can't say without making this worse.
Because explaining the hospital time means admitting Rico put me there. Means connecting those dots for my hot, shirtless Heroic Kidnapper here. That Rico LaRiccia wanted to rape me and brained me with a statue instead.
Just before Giovanni blew his head in half.
Which carries a death sentence of mob war or… whatever.
Lying is explicitly forbidden. It's written in the Bavga Doctrine—Absolute honesty. No concealment, even of small things. Lack of honesty is betrayal.
But I'm also reasonably certain—maybe 101% certain, if I'm being precise about my confidence levels—that Giovanni would make an exception to that particular rule right now.
So I do what I've learned to do best over these five weeks of active involvement.
I choose my words very,verycarefully. "There was… an accident. It involved this." I place my fingertips on my temple where the evidence of surgery lingers as a patch of hair that is growing out, but clearly doesn't match the length of all the hair around it.
It's the kind of asymmetry you only get from emergency medical intervention, from surgical clippers wielded by trauma nurses who don't give a damn about aesthetics when they're trying to save your life.
The breath he lets out is pure sadness, carrying the weight of something breaking inside him. "He did that to ya? Giovanni?"
"No. It wasn't him. It was someone else. And he saved me from that someone else." I pause, meeting those storm-grey eyes directly, letting him see the finality there. "Beyond that, I can't tell you anymore. I'm sorry."
My voice doesn't waver even as my heart hammers against my ribs. "I'm going to disobey. You can punish me any way you feel is appropriate, but I cannot—Iwillnot—tell you the rest."
I watch him process this information, watch something shift behind those storm-grey eyes. He's trying to reconcile the naked woman on his couch—the one who says "Sir" like it's punctuation—with whatever he expected to find in Giovanni's basement.
"What is goin' on here, lass? Are ya tellin' me that Giovanni killed someone to save you?"
I say nothing, because what could I possibly say that wouldn't betray either Giovanni's secrets or my own increasingly complicated understanding of what happened that night?
His expression changes before my eyes—not all at once, but in increments, like watching someone solve a particularly disturbing equation. Like he's putting a puzzle together and just found that missing interior piece. Not the satisfying corner piece or the obvious edge. Not even the frustrating bit of kitten's eyeball from those deceptively wholesome jigsaw puzzles that promise simple domestic scenes but deliver hours of eye-straining torture.
No, this is the other kind of piece. The blob of pure black with no identifying features, no helpful gradient of shadow, no texture to guide you. That one missing piece that seems to carry almost no information attached to it whatsoever, yet somehow—maddeningly, impossibly—provides perfect illumination the moment it slots into place.
The moment everything suddenly, horrifyingly makes sense.
He drops down into the couch across from me with the kind of controlled collapse that suggests every muscle in his body is fighting the urge to do something more dramatic—pace, perhaps, or punch something expensive.
His hand flies up to his forehead, long fingers pressing hard against his temples like he's trying to physically massage away the migraine of understanding I've apparently just gifted him.
The pressure he's applying looks almost painful, knuckles white, jaw clenched tight enough I can see the muscle jumping beneath that perfectly maintained stubble.
Silent.
Completely, utterly, devastatingly silent.
Well. That didn't take long at all.
He knows.
Well, he doesn'tknowknow—doesn't have the full story, the complete picture, every sordid detail of how Giovanni Bavga became my jailer-slash-savior-slash-something-I-don't-have-vocabulary-for-yet.
But he knows enough. He's connected enough dots to see the shape of the thing, even if he can't quite make out all the fine details yet. He knows that whatever's happening in Giovanni's house, whatever arrangement has me kneeling naked in basements and calling a crime boss "Sir," it's not what he thought it was.
And judging by the way those storm-grey eyes have gone dark and flat, by the way his whole body has gone rigid with barely-containedsomething—shock, horror, disgust, I can't tell which—he knows it's so much worse than whatever scenario his heroic kidnapper brain had initially constructed.
