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 balefullook, 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 withMomwritten 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 formybirthday,” 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.
ButVacant 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.
