Annabel Lee ─ emily prentiss

seven

IN HER room with the door closed, Bel didn't even hear the knock on the front door or the two people who entered the house. She did hear her name, because Carrie screamed it.

"Annabel!" Carrie yelled up the stairs. "Down here, now!"

Bel's heart fell out of her chest. She abandoned her English homework and padded downstairs, failing to swallow down the knot in her throat. Carrie stood by the front door with her arms crossed. Fred wore a grimace to end all grimaces. Next to them were a woman Bel didn't recognize and Dani, her social worker. Judging from the fact that the woman was dressed like a lawyer on court day and had a clipboard in her left hand, this was the inevitable CPS visit she'd been awaiting since her conversation with Emily two nights ago.​​ Emily must have called right after they got off the phone. The New York CPS hotline took calls 24/7 and sent someone within 48 hours.

"Hey there." Dani's gaze was soft, but she wasn't smiling. She gestured to the stranger. "Bel, this is—"

"Amelia Edwards. I'm with CPS." The strange woman stuck out her hand, and Bel shook it. Instead of letting go, Amelia inspected her hand. "Is this from the glass?"

When Fred pushed Bel to the ground, the glass left small cuts all over her palms. Writing had been a bitch the past two days.

Bel saw no sense in lying. "Yes."

In the corner of her eye, she saw Fred whisper into Carrie's ear. A cold wave of terror rolled down her body. The fear she felt the other night was nothing compared to what she felt right now. When she was talking to Emily, a CPS visit didn't seem like a big deal. Now it seemed like the end of her world. No matter which direction this went, it would not end well.

"What is this about, exactly?" Fred interrupted pointedly. Amelia dropped Bel's hand and looked at him.

"Two nights ago, we received a call alleging that Annabel was hit with a glass bottle as punishment and pushed on top of the broken shards." She turned her head back to Bel. "Can you tell me how this happened?"

"My—" Bel's body threatened to shut down on itself. "My boss asked me to stay a couple extra hours. I called the house to ask permission, but no one picked up, so I left a message. When I got in the door, I got hit by a glass. F—" She shut her eyes and told herself that Emily wanted her to speak up. "Fred started yelling at me. I was wearing short sleeves, and he hit my arm hard with a whiskey bottle. It didn't break when he hit me, but he dropped it and it broke. He grabbed my ponytail and pushed me to the ground, which was when my hands got cut up on the glass. Then he had me clean up the glass and the whiskey before Carrie gave me a few paper towels and locked me in my room."

Amelia was writing something on her clipboard. "She told you to stay in your room?"

"No. Locked me. There's a lock on the outside. I'm locked in from eight PM till 7 AM."

Amelia wrote that down too. "Mr. and Mrs. Howell. What—"

"That morning, she said she would be home by six-thirty." Fred's fingers curled into fists. "When we didn't answer, she should have just taken that to be a no. She should have come home when she was supposed to. I am well within my right to discipline her. I didn't mean for the glass to break. It slipped out of my hand. She tripped onto it."

Carrie nodded, corroborating the story.

Bel couldn't move. Her tongue was made of lead.

"I'm just going to take a look around." Amelia strolled past them into the kitchen. Carrie and Fred followed, leaving just Bel and Dani.

"How are you holding up?" Dani kept her voice low. "After the abduction?"

"That's the least of my problems right now," Bel managed to whisper. She could live with flinching whenever a car slowed down beside her and always keeping her key between her fingers when she walked outside alone. The probability of getting snatched again was low, and now she was prepared. But she couldn't defend herself in this house. If she tried, Fred would beat the hell out of her day after day. He wouldn't kill her. He would just torture her. To her, that was a fate far worse than strangulation by a serial killer. "This isn't gonna end well."

"The woman who reported the Howells said she was FBI. How'd you make that happen?"

"Damn it, Emily." She hoped the call would have at least been anonymous. "She was one of the agents who handled the investigation. I talked to her the other night. She said she had to report it." She met Dani's eyes. "It's going to be bad, Dani."

Dani wasn't an idiot. She knew Bel told the truth. Unfortunately, whether or not Bel stayed with the Howells wasn't up to her. It was in CPS' hands.

Bel stood completely still, her limbs turned to stone, as tears dribbled down her cheeks. She felt like completely breaking down, but her body would not move. The disaster of emotions shut her down. Fear. Anxiety. Sadness. Grief.

She missed her mom. She missed her dad too, but it was different with him. He died six years ago, the year she turned eight. At least then, she had her mom to grieve with. They also knew his death was coming—he had lung cancer and had been deteriorating for months. With her mom, who died three years ago, it was sudden. Her mother was prescribed Xanax for anxiety and insomnia. It caused respiratory depression, which killed her quickly. Bel's mother had been a foster kid with no family who aged out of the system, and her father cut contact with his family when he immigrated to the U.S. from Norway at 18. She had no one and went straight into the foster system, where no one really gave a damn that she'd been recently orphaned. It left her emotional wounds only half-healed. She didn't even know where her parents were buried. Not that anyone would take her if she did know.

She stayed there still and quiet until the CPS lady finished the inspection. Dazed, Bel answered a few more questions on autopilot, her brain not processing the words leaving her mouth.

"Don't let this happen again. We'll be in touch," was the last thing Amelia said to Bel and the Howells. Translation: "you wasted CPS' time."

"Bel." Dani touched her shoulder. Bel snapped back to reality. "I'm gonna get going. You know how to reach me if you need me."

"Mhm." Bel nodded stiffly. As soon as Dani was gone, someone grabbed her ponytail and yanked it hard.

★★★

Once again, Bel sat in the back corner of her room. This time, the damage was much worse. By tomorrow, her left eye would be black. Her arms and back were already bruised from Fred's belt, still stinging after twenty minutes. His belt lashings were never fun, but tonight was the worst of them all. They were the result of pure rage, done with every ounce of force in his body.

"You're the most ungrateful little brat I've ever met," Fred spat at her, pulling his belt out of the loops in his jeans. "We've put a roof over your head and food on your plate. We gave you a place to sleep. You have nobody, and we were gracious enough to take you in. This is how you repay us? You call the state because you don't like that we disciplined you for violating our rules, the only thing we've ever asked you to do?"

There was so much she wanted to say to that. She never, ever broke their rules. When they treated her like a maid, even making her scrub the grout between bathroom tiles with a toothbrush, she never complained. She never resisted when they pulled out a belt or a spatula because she accidentally chipped a mug while putting it away or missed a few droplets of cleaning spray when she wiped off the refrigerator's stainless steel door. She never objected to them locking her in her room for eleven hours overnight and sometimes even during the day on the weekends. She never said anything about how dehydrated all of their restrictions made her, not even the few times when she almost blacked out in the morning. She apologized profusely all the time. She said thank you constantly. She didn't understand why they hated her so much, or why they did the things they did.

"I'm sorry," was all she said through her tears. "I was stupid. Someone asked about what happened and took things too far. I shouldn't have said anything. I'm so sorry."

"Damn right," Carrie growled, grabbing her wrist tight to make sure Bel couldn't run. "Pull a stunt like that again and things are going to get a lot worse for you."

Holding back tears, Bel took out her phone and dialed Emily's number. It rang and rang until finally sending her to voicemail. The waterworks started again as she left a message. She wished Troy had just killed her.