Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 102375 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 512(@200wpm)___ 410(@250wpm)___ 341(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 102375 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 512(@200wpm)___ 410(@250wpm)___ 341(@300wpm)
"Compliance benchmarks by day three," Jino continues, unaware or unconcerned that I'm cataloging him like evidence. "Complete linguistic repatterning by week two."
The rosary beads inked down his fingers look like chains binding bone to bone. How had I never seen it? The way the skeletal stigmata on his palms mirror the wounds I was made to contemplate during Lenten services at Auggies—where, along with fifteen other boys in pressed uniforms, I knelt for hours, back straight as the rod that would correct any of us who slouched.
We were close once, Jino and I. Before the fracture.
I remember him at thirteen, both of us in my father's basement, learning to throw punches. Jino's technique was always perfect—economical, nothing wasted. While I relied on my height, my reach, Jino studied angles. Found the precise point where pressure became pain.
"The collar on day four," he says, measuring the space between the kneeling mat and the mirror. "Visual reinforcement of her submission..."
I had Chateau Bavga, the country club memberships, the tailored suits even as a teenager. Jino had a split-level ranch house, a father who worked sixty hours on the docks, and clothes from department stores. But he wore everything like armor, pressed and precise. Made his modest possessions into a statement of control.
Then came the divide: St. Augustine's Military Academy. Auggies. My father's alma mater, where sons of privilege were broken down and rebuilt according to sacred geometries of power. Where every infraction earned swift, calculated punishment. Where silence was currency and standing at attention became more natural than relaxation.
Jino never walked those halls. He never felt the bite of the dress ruler across his knuckles for a collar buttoned incorrectly. Never stood at inspection as Father Dominic checked the shine of his shoes with a white glove. Never recited Latin conjugations at 5 a.m. while standing in the snow.
Yet looking at him now, at the "Dies Irae" etched across the back of his neck, suddenly I see something. Day of wrath and doom impending! David's word with Sibyl's blending, Heaven and earth in ashes ending!
I see Auggies written into his skin. He became the thing I was forced to become, but he did it willingly, methodically, on his own terms.
"Twenty demerits minimum the first day," Jino says, his voice like water over stone. "Subject will likely accumulate thirty..."
The word "subject" pulls at something in my memory. The clinical detachment. The categorization of human beings into obedient units.
Lorcan would understand this moment. Lorcan Ó Fearghail, my brother-not-brother from Auggies. The only one who truly knows me. The only one who was there that winter night.
Not the night with Enzo. Not Jino's dying dog wrapped in a favorite blanket, laid to rest under an oak tree with solemn words.
The other night. The girl. The panic. The frozen ground that took hours to break through with stolen pickaxes. Lorcan's face illuminated by moonlight, his breath clouding in the frigid air as we dug. His voice, steady and certain: "Deeper, G. It needs to be deeper."
I force the memory away. Lock it behind the door where I keep all the things I can't afford to remember.
"Punishment routines categorized by infraction type," Jino continues, pulling a small notebook from his pocket like that’s where notebooks live. He begins marking it. Keeping records of his spiral.
Looking at him—really seeing him—I understand something fundamental. Jino created for himself what Auggies created in me. A system of perfect control. A world where every action has a predictable consequence. Where chaos can be contained through ritual and discipline.
But there's a difference. A critical one.
Jino believes in the system. He's internalized it completely, made it the skeleton beneath his skin, the foundation of his being. The discipline isn't something imposed on him—it's something he's chosen, cultivated, and perfected.
I survived Auggies. I absorbed its lessons, wielded them when necessary. But I always retained something separate—a quiet defiance, a recognition that the system was flawed. That there had to be space for breath, for fire, for the uncontainable human spirit.
"The final phase requires complete psychological surrender," Jino says, testing the weight of a wooden dowel in his hands. "The subject will believe the choices are her own."
He's right about Emmaleen. Right that she represents danger. Right that her knowledge could destroy everything—could bring Luca LaRiccia's vengeance down upon all of us. She is a liability, a crack in the foundation, a variable in an equation that requires absolute certainty.
But he's wrong about the solution. Wrong in a way only someone who worships control could be wrong.
Jino sees Emmaleen as chaos that must be contained. A wild element to be disciplined into submission. A threat to be neutralized through strategic reconstruction.
I see her differently. As necessary. As vital. As proof that the doctrine—my doctrine, Auggies' doctrine, the endless rules and structures we've built our lives around—can be broken. Remade into something that breathes.