He Laughed While I Was Hit novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Frozen

Rocco freezes every account she has and sends men to break down her door; Brennan drives her out, and Rocco's father is waiting at the gate.

My card was declined at the pharmacy.

It was the card I used for everything, and the cashier tried it three times.

"Maybe the strip's worn," she said, not looking at my cheek.

I paid for the arnica gel with the last twenty in my wallet.

Outside, I opened the banking app.

Every joint account had a gray banner across it: Frozen at the request of an account holder.

Rocco had done it before dinner.

My own salary account was frozen too, though his name was not on it.

It took me a minute to understand that his lawyers had told the bank I was a flight risk.

I called the bank and got a recorded voice.

I called again and got a young man who read me a script.

"We can't release it without both signatures, Mrs. Venturi."

"Don't call me that," I said, and hung up.

I had four hundred dollars in a drawer in Brooklyn and a sealed phone I could not open.

I walked back to the studio and plugged the gray flip phone into the cable Brennan had left on my counter.

The screen showed a battery and asked for four digits.

I tried my own birthday, and Fiorella's, and the date of our wedding.

The phone buzzed hard in my hand and showed a warning: two tries left.

I put it down.

It was not mine to break open.

Fiorella had put it in my coat on purpose, and until I knew why, I would wait.

Brennan texted me at ten.

I'm outside. I'll stay in the car. Lock your door.

I did not answer him.

I locked the door, put a chair under the knob, and lay down in my clothes.

At two in the morning, a key scraped in the lock.

It was not my key.

I sat up with my heart beating in my ears.

The lock turned over once, and clicked, and did not open.

The super had changed it, as I had asked.

Someone outside swore under his breath.

"She's changed it," a man's voice said. "He said she wouldn't think of it."

"Get the bar," said another.

The chair shook against the knob as a shoulder hit the door.

I did not scream.

I called Brennan.

He picked up before the first ring finished.

"Two men," I whispered. "On my landing."

"Stay where you are."

I heard his car door slam through the phone and through the window at once.

The shoulder hit the door a second time, and the frame cracked.

Then footsteps pounded up the stairwell, heavy and fast, and a voice I knew said, "Move."

"Mr. Doyle, this is not your..."

"Neither is she yours. Get off her floor."

There was a short, ugly scuffle, and somebody hit the wall.

Then feet went down the stairs in a hurry.

When I opened the door, Brennan stood on the landing with his shirt torn at the shoulder and a scrape across his knuckles.

One of the men was holding his jaw halfway down the stairs.

I recognized the other.

He was the bodyguard who had held my left arm in the boardroom.

He looked up at me, and for a moment he did not look like a man who hurt people.

He looked tired.

Then he turned and followed his friend out.

"Rocco's," I said.

"Yes."

I leaned on the cracked doorframe and looked at the splintered wood.

"He told them to bring me home."

"He told them something," Brennan said. "I don't think it was a request."

I looked at his knuckles.

"You're bleeding."

"I've had worse from a cabinet."

I almost smiled, and it hurt.

"Come to my lake house," he said. "There's a guest wing with its own door and its own bathroom. Nobody gets through the gate without my say."

"No."

"Britta..."

"Rocco will say I ran to you." I pushed my hair back. "Everyone already thinks it."

"Everyone already thinks what Rocco tells them." He stepped in close, without touching me. "Let them think it behind a locked gate."

I looked at the splintered door, and at the empty stairwell.

I thought of Rocco's bodyguard going home to report that I had changed my lock.

"The house is a hotel," I said.

Brennan waited.

"I pay for my room, one way or another. You don't hold anything over me. Nothing personal, and nothing owed."

"Done."

"And the license stays mine," I said. "I'm not licensing it to you either."

He actually laughed, one short breath of it.

"I never asked."

"You buy sixty percent of it."

"I buy lasagna in cartons," Brennan said. "I asked you to dinner twice, and I have not asked a third time. The license is yours."

I took my bag and my coat.

I took the gray phone and the arnica and the cable.

We drove north in the dark with the heater on, and neither of us said much.

At dawn the road narrowed between tall wet trees, and we came to an iron gate with a keypad.

A black sedan sat across the drive, its engine running.

Brennan slowed.

The rear door opened, and an old man stepped out onto the gravel, leaning on a cane he did not need.

I had sat across from him at forty Sunday dinners.

It was Aurelio Venturi.

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