She shrugs up one shoulder. "We could warm to it, doncha think?"
Could we?
Is she askin' me?
I let out a breath that sounds suspiciously like a laugh.
"Right, so here's the thing about kidnapping-adjacent scenarios," I start, matchin' her rambling energy with my ownspiral. "There's a critical difference between stealin' someone because you're a twisted bastard who wants to own them, which is objectively horrific and deserves whatever circle of hell Dante had in mind for that particular brand of evil—probably the seventh, violence against persons, which seems appropriate—and stealin' someone because you walked into a friend's mansion expectin' to find nothin' more incriminatin' than a forged ledger or maybe some compromising photographs, and instead you find a naked woman wearin' a collar emergin' from the shadows like some sort of Gothic nightmare, and your brain just—goes white, completely fuckin' white, no thoughts, just action, and suddenly you've shoved her in your trunk without any coherent plan beyond 'get her the fuck out of there' because somethin' about the whole scene triggered every alarm bell you've spent thirty-one years installin'."
I pause for breath.
Look at her.
She's lookin' back. "Is that what happened? You saw… white?"
I blow out a breath. "I actually lost time, Emmaleen. That's how fuckin' fucked that whole thing was to my brain. Which, if I'm bein' honest, has spent the last thirteen years tryna forget another… sex-slave-adjacentscenario that… ended badly."
She repeats my words. "Sex-slave-adjacent." It's a whisper. But there's some kind of recognition in it. She looks at me. "Can we… talk about Giovanni now?"
Shit. Did she just put it all together? Is she gonna ask me about our oath? "What did he tell you?"
She blinks at me. "What do you mean?"
"I mean… I can't hear your thoughts, but I'm very good at readin' faces. And I think you just came some kind of conclusion."
She plays along. "In regards to…"
"Giovanni. Sex-slave adjacent."
Her smile is real, her laugh genuine. "Oh God," she says, laughin' properly now. "I'm always the last person to figure anything out. Like, genuinely—if there were Olympic medals for being oblivious to critical context, I'd have a gold one and lucrative endorsement deals. Because apparently BDSM contracts are just... a thing? A real legal framework people use? And here I was thinking—if I'd known you could formalize dominance hierarchies with actual clauses and exit strategies, I might've handed Tyler a seventeen-page agreement with subsections about acceptable volume levels for insults and mandatory cooling-off periods before furniture-based violence. You know, really lawyer my way out of getting shoved down stairs through strategic use of the Oxford comma and force majeure provisions."
She pauses.
"Would that have worked? Can you actually terms-and-conditions your way out of abuse if the font is small enough?"
It's a brill deflection. An almost fun deflection. If ya don't think too hard about what she just admitted.
But she didn't answer my question. So I ask a different one. "Are you afraid of Giovanni?"
Emmaleen sighs. "No. But like I just said. I'm not the best judge of character. That probably says more about how broken my threat-detection system is than it does about whether Giovanni's actually safe."
I keep my eyes on the road.
Process that.
Christ.
The silence stretches. I don't know what to say, so I let it.
She's the one who breaks it. "Lorcan?"
"Hmm."
"ShouldI be afraid of Giovanni?"
I look her in the eyes and nod. "Yes, Emmaleen. Ya absolutely should."
She blows out a breath. Turns her back to me. Stares out the window. Rests her head against it. "OK. Well. I'm tired. So…"
