A Defiant Liaison

XVI

"Many survivors insist they're not courageous: 'If I were courageous I would have stopped the abuse.' 'If I were courageous, I wouldn't be scared'... Most of us have it mixed up. You don't start with courage and then face fear. You become courageous because you face your fear." Laura Davis

*TW - Mentions of SA*

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XVI.

The very thought of his name paralysed Belle. The memory of his face, in all its forms, haunted her nightmares. They had done since she was a small girl.

The earliest memory that Belle possessed was the very first time that he had displayed his monstrous, gluttonous, evil self. While he had only been a young man of sixteen, young Belle had been all of five years old.

He had called her his favourite. He had given her treats that the others didn't receive. It sickened Belle to her core to remember ever feeling any sort of gratitude to him, now knowing what he had been planning on doing. If she allowed her mind to wander, she could still feel the innocence in her heart leave her the very moment he had shut himself in a room with her.

After the first time, Belle didn't want his favour. She didn't want his gifts. She didn't want to be within a hundred miles of him. But her life was not her own. She had no power, no say, and no right to refuse. But she did.

Every time, she fought. Every time.

This behaviour only made him angry, and he grew utterly obsessive.

Belle had never understood the word 'insatiable' before being at the mercy of him. And she was powerless to stop him. Nobody would help her. Nobody could save her. How could they? When they, too, were at his mercy.

Belle had never understood his obsession. She had never known what she had done to appeal herself to him when she had only been a five-year-old child when he had set his sights on her.

The only way she could make any sort of sense of what had happened to her was that some people were innately evil, and would, indeed, face judgement for the pain that had been inflicted upon others. Every scar she bore, save for the sabre wound on her abdomen that she had received while hiding from the smugglers with Alex, had been as a direct result of his anger.

But the scars that were invisible to the naked eye, were perhaps the worst of all.

Belle couldn't bear to be touched. She was too afraid to look people in the eye. She was too frightened to speak for fear that she would say something out of turn. She never felt safe.

But things had begun to change since she had met Peter Denham. Belle had felt the sort of security that she had never imagined was possible. She had found a man with whom she felt safe, and she had known what it was like to be held with gentle hands. She had finally known a good man, the sort of man who could only be a figment of her imagination were he not a living, breathing, blue-eyed, handsome, gentle giant in front of her.

Belle had fallen in love. Real love. Not ... not his kind. Really, she had not realised that she was falling until she was very really in it, in the very thick of it. And all Belle wanted to do was lose herself in it. She wanted to leap into Peter's arms and to ask him to take her somewhere they could be happy. She wanted to be married in the way she had seen while living in England. She wanted a family ... and she thought now that there was a real possibility that she could become a mother.

And at the same time, Belle knew that none of that was a possibility. None of it could be. The dreams that had tried to eclipse her nightmares had failed, because she was still bound to the man who had shut her inside of a room when she was five years old. The same man who had done so repeatedly, over and over, brutally, evilly, sickeningly, until she had escaped at eighteen during a hurricane.