Chapter 8
The collar had a bell because Victoria wanted warning.
Every time Isabella moved, someone could hear.
That was the practical reason.
The symbolic one was worse.
“She needs to learn that someone always knows where she is,” Victoria told me.
I stared at her.
“She is three.”
“Exactly when discipline begins.”
“No.”
She smiled coldly.
“That is when you began.”
I stopped.
“What?”
Victoria leaned back.
“You think your father raised you alone?”
Memory surfaced.
Not the passage.
A bell.
I remembered a small brass bell on the study desk when I was six.
If I interrupted, it rang.
I had to leave.
I had forgotten the humiliation and remembered only the rule.
Victoria had helped enforce it.
Not with a collar.
But with silence.
“You did this to me too.”
She shrugged.
“You became Lorenzo Bellandi.”
There it was.
Survival as proof.
Again.
I looked at her.
“And you decided my daughter should pay the same price.”
“She needs to understand the family before the family understands her.”
I almost laughed.
Meaningless sentence.
Perfect for cruelty.
Old people often wrap harm in language too grand to challenge.
I picked up the collar.
“No.”
Victoria’s eyes narrowed.
May you like
“She survived.”
“She should never have needed to survive you.”
