Chapter 1 - THE RED LIGHT UNDER HER SHIRT
The metal door closed with a flat, ugly clang.
Emily Mercer knew better than to scream.
At eight months pregnant, she had learned that screaming only made Michael quieter.
Quiet Michael was worse.
He stood three feet away in the basement laundry room of their house outside Dayton, Ohio, rolling a socket wrench across his palm. Behind him, the homemade iron cabinet sat bolted beside the workbench, its interior altered with short metal points Michael had spent weeks adjusting.
He called it discipline.
Emily had stopped calling it anything.
Jason, Michael’s older brother, leaned against the dryer with a beer.
“Maybe she finally gets it,” he said.
Chris stood beside the stairs. Unlike Jason, he wasn’t drinking.
Michael opened the cabinet.
“Inside.”
Emily pressed one hand beneath her belly.
“No.”
Michael’s jaw shifted.
He didn’t touch her stomach. He had become careful about that lately. Instead, he stepped into the doorway and blocked the stairs with his body.
“You leave when I decide you’re allowed to leave.”
Jason gave a small laugh.
Chris looked away.
Emily moved backward, exactly as frightened as Michael expected her to be.
What he didn’t know was that beneath her gray T-shirt, clipped inside her bra, a recorder smaller than two fingers had been running for forty-three minutes.
She had been recording him for three months.
Not continuously. She couldn’t risk that.
Arguments.
Threats.
The click of the basement lock.
Michael explaining why pain was “the only language stubborn people respect.”
Jason laughing.
And occasionally, something stranger.
Numbers.
Bank names.
Arguments between the brothers that stopped the second Emily entered a room.
Michael tapped the wrench against his thigh.
“Last chance.”
Emily glanced toward Chris.
He had been staring at the floor.
Now he looked directly at her chest.
Not at her body.
At the tiny red glow barely visible through the fabric.
His eyes widened.
Emily’s breath caught.
Chris knew.
Michael noticed the exchange.
“What?”
Chris looked at his brother.
May you like
Then at Emily.
And for the first time in months, Emily couldn’t tell which of them she should fear more.
