Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 91489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
I blink. “What did he say? When he talked to me?”
She gives me that conspiratorial nurse look—half pity, half privilege. “That’s between you two, honey. But he only left after you opened your eyes this morning. Said he had business to take care of.”
Business. Right.
The kind that involves cleaning up after shooting your cousin in the head.
I close the notebooks and run my fingers over their leather covers—smooth, weighty, expensive. They smell faintly of ink and antiseptic. His handwriting hides inside them like pressed flowers—devotions disguised as documentation.
Six days of Giovanni Bavga sitting vigil beside my bed, tracking my heartbeat like a stock ticker, as if sheer observation could bully my body into staying alive.
Six days of the most dangerous man I’ve ever met trying to quantify faith.
Six days of a poet trapped in a mobster’s skin, bargaining with God through data.
And I wasn’t even awake for it.
Didn’t feel his pen move, didn’t hear his sighs, didn’t witness his attempts at control crumble into confession.
The one time someone loved me without requiring participation, I slept through it.
There’s irony in that. A poetic symmetry.
Giovanni writes to prove I’m still alive.
I read to confirm he once was.
The stainless case gleams beside me, too deliberate to ignore. Inside, another relic: a passport.
I almost laugh. How poetic. A ticket to somewhere else, just when I’ve finally arrived in my own body.
It’s not my old one—though it might as well be a ghost of it. The first vanished five years ago when they cleared out the house after the accident. I filed a police report, told Officer Whatshisname it wasn’t about the document itself. It was about the stamps—Paris, Rome, Zurich. That layover where my father insisted on sampling seven kinds of chocolate like it was a diplomatic mission.
That passport was proof that once, we were a family. That we existed outside of grief.
This one is newer. The leather stiffer. The paper clean.
My photo—recent. No bangs, no forced smile. Just me, stripped of pretense.
But the name... Emmaleen Collins.
Wrong birthday. Blank pages.
It’s beautiful, in a way. A resurrection forged in bureaucracy.
And tucked inside, a boarding pass. Cream stock, heavy enough to feel like a promise. Private jet. Destination: blank.
I hold it between my fingers, careful not to bend it.
He didn’t just make a way out.
He made this: a mirror image of the thing I lost. A perfect echo.
Once, my parents gave me a passport so I could see the world.
Now, Giovanni gives me one so I can leave it.
And beneath it, in that precise, arrogant scrawl that somehow learned tenderness—
Have a nice fresh start, Miss Take. You earned every reward.
No declarations. No apologies. Just... closure wrapped in possibility.
A goodbye shaped like belief.
I trace the letters with my thumb, half expecting the ink to smudge.
It doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t. He’s always permanent.
I’m the one thing he couldn’t quite hold still.
I close the passport and press it against my chest, where my heart is performing some kind of protest—uneven, insistent, aching in ways that have nothing to do with my injuries.
This is how men like Giovanni Bavga love, isn’t it? They don’t hold you tighter; they build exits. They don’t promise forever; they eliminate interference. They make arrangements. They clear paths. They hand you freedom dressed up as logistics and then disappear before you can say thank you.
He’s setting me free.
And he’s paying for my wings.
But why? Because I saw him kill Rico? Because I’m a liability? Because attachment is a weakness a man like him can’t afford?
Or—God help me—because he actually gives a damn what happens to me?
The room answers with its quiet excess. The ridiculous abundance of flowers. The private suite that smells like sterilized wealth. The stack of cash—$31,750, exactly.
The reward he promised.
A transaction completed. A contract closed.
Except nothing about my chest feels balanced or clean. It feels hollowed out—like something vital was excised while I was asleep.
Six days.
Six days of him sitting beside me, writing confessions in those notebooks. Talking to a version of me suspended somewhere between this world and the next.
Six days of—what? Guilt? Duty? Devotion? I don’t even know what word fits.
And now he’s gone. Off to handle “business.”
Which probably means bleaching blood and erasing cousins.
Meanwhile, I get a new name, a stack of money, and a blank destination line.
It should feel like salvation. It should feel like winning.
So why does it feel like loss?
I trace my thumb over his handwriting—Miss Take. The nickname I hated. The one that made me feel defective, like a misprint of a person.
Except now I see the joke. The tenderness hidden in the cruelty.
Miss Take.
Not mistake. Not wrong. Not failure.
Miss. Take.
Take the chance. Take the out. Take your life back.
And damn him—he meant it.
I close my eyes, passport still pressed to my chest, and listen to the proof that I’m still here. The pulse he counted. The life he guarded. The decision he made when I couldn’t.