Chapter 4
news from outside
BELL
march
Everything changed after I found out that Noelle had moved to Canada. Canada!
The Del Gotti family was powerful. I had no doubt they would be willing to travel two to three hours to hurt my youngest daughter at Dennis’s request. But all the way to a random mountain town in Canada hundreds of miles away? I didn’t think so.
Even as Dennis hit me, a weight lifted from my chest.
My ex couldn’t hurt her. Both my daughters were beyond his reach.
Which meant I was, too, because he no longer had anything to hold over me.
I said nothing, but Dennis must have sensed my immediate change in attitude.
After a few hits and kicks, he held the phone out to me. “Call her,” he demanded, seething through his teeth. “Call her right now, you bitch. Tell her I’ve got every right to be there—to walk my daughter down the aisle.”
His daughter. Like she was some object he owned.
I stared at the phone, face swollen from his slaps, back radiating with pain from the kicks he’d dispensed when I’d curled into a ball on the floor.
I knew this was a test. A power play to prove my loyalty.
But I wasn’t loyal—at least not to him. Holly and Noelle were the only two people who mattered. And now they were both safe.
“I’m never going to do that,” I answered with a spirit I didn’t have before, even as he closed in on me with his fist balled.
april
He’d beat me unconscious for the crime of daring to go against him. It took days to recover.
But something had shifted after that March confrontation.
“Please” disappeared from his vocabulary, along with my outside privileges. There was no more pretense of civility. Just commands to clean this, cook that, and get myself ready for him in the bedroom.
There was also no more talk of me going to the salon to get my dreadlocks cut off.
Dennis made me order groceries through an app.
When I served him meals at the little table, instead of sitting there like an entitled king, he watched me with a baleful look, his fist curled around the handles of his knife and fork.
He never gave me permission to sit down.
He moved the table by the door and did his shady bookkeeping work there, hunched over a laptop, and the next delivery to the apartment was two pairs of handcuffs.
Dennis attached one ring of the first pair to the bed’s back railing system and watched with that same baleful knife-and-fork look every night as I dutifully clicked the other cuff around my thin wrist.
The next week, he installed a floor ring and attached the other set of handcuffs to it.
When he had to leave the apartment to meet with his shadowy employers in person, he chained me to that heavy steel floor ring. Like a dog. Who most definitely would not be getting her rental deposit back.
Before, I’d been a circus elephant, easily kept in line with a peg—his threat against Noelle. But now, I was officially his prisoner. Which meant he was officially worried I would run.
He was right to worry.
Especially after he told me the news about Holly. “Looks like she went to visit Noelle in that mountain town, and she suckered some guy there into marrying her, too. They’re going to have a double ceremony in July.”
He threw me a mocking smirk while reading Holly’s email on the phone he was still holding hostage. “Sure you don’t want to compromise, Belly? Call them?”
Compromise…
Translation: I’ve got you trapped, and the only way out is to do what I say.
But there had to be another way. That hope burned in my heart as I ignored Dennis’s questions. And concentrated on one thing:
Making it to their July ceremony.
may
By late spring, escaping was all I thought about. I impatiently bided my time, woodenly playing my part while I waited for the right opportunity.
He was always so careful about locking me up, though. Even when the intercom buzzed one morning with a guy saying, “I’ve got a delivery for Bell Winters.”
“Jordan,” Dennis corrected, throwing me an irritated look for daring to legally change both my and Noelle’s last names to my maiden one. “But hold on, I’ll be right down after I put something away.”
Something was me.
So, I was sitting on the floor, attached to the ring he’d installed there, when he returned with a vase filled with pretty deep-red, dark-pink, and rich-purple peonies. I knew they were from Holly and Noelle, even before I spotted the little white notecard with Mom written across it.
They always sent me my favorite flowers for my birthday, which almost always fell somewhere in the vicinity of Mother’s Day. And sometimes on the actual day.
With an inner jolt, I realized this was one of those years when that happened. That today was Sunday. Both Mother’s Day and my birthday.
“Noelle didn’t send me anything for my birthday,” Dennis grumbled. “Not once while I was in jail, or now that I’m out.”
I could feel his eyes on my face, wanting me to give him an excuse to hit me.
But Vacant Little Thing. I kept my expression pleasant and neutral.
“May I read the card?” I asked in that light and airy voice Dennis preferred.
“Yes, go right ahead, Belly,” Dennis answered. He even undid my cuff.
I wasn’t sure why he granted my request.
I think to taunt me. There, Belly, look at what you can’t have because I’ve got you imprisoned in your own apartment.
But it didn’t matter. I snatched the notecard up, too eager to hide my excitement over hearing from them.
The message was sweet and carefully worded:
Happy Birthday and Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. We know we haven’t been seeing eye to eye on things this year, but we love you so much, no matter what. And we’d really like for you to come to our Joining Ceremony in July and meet your incoming grandchildren.
They still thought I’d chosen this. The compromise in those careful words broke something in me.
Tears pooled in my eyes.
“Okay, that’s enough.”
Dennis ripped the notecard out of my hand. A few seconds later, both it and the flowers were deposited into the kitchen trash can.
The flowers set Dennis off again. “This is a travesty….” he said in the same politician voice he’d used to convince the people of Saint Everette that he deserved to be their next mayor.
He ordered me to text them back.
To tell Noelle he wanted to walk her down the aisle.
To insist to Holly that he had every right to be there at the summer double Joining Ceremony I fully planned to attend. By myself.
Of course, he could have just texted them himself. He’d been holding my phone hostage since November. But no, for some sick reason, he wanted me to do it. To give him that one last piece of my dignity.
Or maybe he just needed the excuse to hit me.
Who knew? Either way, I ended up nursing another black eye over the next two days while Dennis grumbled about me being ungrateful and how it was his money that paid all the bills.
He seemed to have conveniently forgotten that the only reason I wasn’t paying my own bills with my own money was because he was holding me hostage.
But I kept my mouth shut. And a couple of days later, Dennis went out again.
I couldn’t wait anymore.
That night when he returned to the apartment, I pretended to be asleep when he came over to release me from the handcuff he’d used to attach me to the floor mount.
The moment he unlocked the cuff, I bolted for the door.
I might have made it—if not for his latest installation: a chained lock.
It wasn’t enough to fully trap me, but just complicated enough to slow me down.
I had the door cracked open when—
His hand slammed down on my mouth, and he pulled me back inside, kicking the door shut behind us.
He released me after redoing the lock with one hand, but I’d barely taken a step back from him when he slammed his fist into my face.
It didn’t matter.
No pain in the world could compare to the despair I felt as he hit me again and again.
I’d had one chance, one chance, and I’d failed. That meant there was no getting away. I wouldn’t be attending my daughters’ double wedding.
No… While they walked down the aisle with flowers in their hair, they’d think I’d abandoned them. They’d never know the truth.
That I’d tried.
That I’d failed.
That I loved them more than my own life.