The guy locked up in our basement is a bad man. He must be.

The only men who end up in our basement are bad ones. That’s what my father tells me. I only didn’t believe him once. So he said, “C’mere, Bel,” and showed me pictures and news stories about what the man had done to other people.

“Danny, that’s too much. She’s too young to be looking at all that,” Mama kept saying.

But she never told him not to do it. So I got shown. And I stopped not believing him after that.

Until now.

The guy Daddy’s been keeping downstairs doesn’t look like a man. I thought that back when Daddy dragged him through the house, unconscious. And I think it now as I walk down the stairs to our unfinished basement, having already decided what to do.

I come to a stop outside the cell Daddy installed. Steel bars hang from the ceiling with a small gap left beneath. High enough to pass a plate through without me needing to open the door, but not high enough for the bad men to have any hope of escaping.

But the guy inside the cage Daddy built looks like a boy—a teenager. Maybe even the same age as me. Scrawny under all the blood from the cuts. And though his face is a mangled mess, I remember thinking the first day I came down to give him food that he was way too young to be here.

He’s going to die today. Or as Daddy calls it, “take a walk in the woods.”

I know because Daddy left the house with a shovel earlier this afternoon, grumbling about having to “do this shit in the winter.” And later on, Mama told me to go downstairs to take the bad man’s order. She only makes special meals for the bad men when it’s their last.

But this isn’t a man, I think as I stare at the figure in the cage.

It’s freezing down here. No matter how high Mama and me turn up the heat, we can’t ever get it warm. Even in summer. And it’s winter now.

The boy accepted the hot plates of food with chattering teeth the first few times I slipped the one meal a day Daddy allows under the bars.

Not today though. Now the boy just lies on the concrete floor, a pile of blood covered bones, not saying anything. But I know he’s awake, because the one eye that isn’t swollen shut stares back at me, angry and electric. He has long lashes. I thought that when he first came in—that he was one of those boys. Pretty like you see on TV.

My mama says I’m pretty like the girls on TV. And Daddy says that’s why he told her to name me Bella, because I was the most beautiful baby he’d ever seen, even prettier than his real kids when they came out. Still, I don’t spend a lot of time at the mirror like Mama, and I’m not down here because I want somebody to tell me I’m pretty.

“You can have anything you want,” I tell the boy, loud enough for Mama to hear up in the kitchen beyond the open basement door. “Anything. Mama’s going to the store special for you, and she’s a real good cook.”

It’s been a week. And a week is usually enough time for the bad men to become desperate for my father’s beatings to end with a meal made specially for them. But the bad boy only stares at me through one eye. Like he’s imagining coming through the cage and ringing my neck.

“Please, just say something,” I whisper. “We need her to leave the house.”

“You don’t have his order yet?”

I look up from the cell. Mama’s at the top of the stairs. Just far enough down to see her heeled black boots and some dark brown leg beneath her wool midi skirt. But not far enough for her to see into the cell.

She never comes down here. Daddy says she’s not as strong as me.

And I agree, which is why I don’t say what I’m really thinking. That this boy is too young to be taken for a walk in the woods. That we should let him go before Daddy gets home from digging his winter grave.

If Mama were capable of going against Daddy on anything, we wouldn’t be living in the woods a good fifty miles away from any major city in Massachusetts.

Instead, I say, “Spaghetti and meatballs. That’s what he wants.”

“For real?” Mama asks, still just half a body at the top of the stairs. “That’s all?”

“That’s all,” I confirm. Hoping she believes me.

Eventually, her boots turn around, and I let out a held breath as she picks her way back up the steps. Part of me thinks about waiting until I hear the front door close. But I don’t have that much time. Daddy could be back any minute.

As soon as she clears the basement door I ask the boy, “Can you walk? I can drive you to a hospital in Daddy’s car. But I can’t get you up those stairs by myself.”

Moments tick by, and I become afraid he’s too broken to get up.

But then with what looks like considerable effort, he raises himself to his forearm. And a few moments later he’s on his feet. Swaying, but standing. I take it and run to the wall to retrieve the extra set of cell keys. They’ve been there for as long as I’ve been bringing food down to the bad men—so since I turned eight. But this is the first time in the nine years I’ve been delivering food down here that I’ve touched the keys.

Trying not to think too hard about what I’m doing, I grab them off their hook and come back to the cage. “We’re going to have to wait until Mama leaves the house,” I tell him as I push the key into the lock. “But then we can go—”

I stop when I hear a loud bang, followed by the stomping of shoes—a gang of them. And then someone’s talking in the kitchen. The voice isn’t high-pitched and breathy, like my mother’s, but deep and clipped. And menacing.

“What are you doing here?” I hear my mother ask. Her voice is loud but trembling.

The menacing guy’s voice doesn’t carry as far as hers. I only hear bits and pieces. “Where…that fuck…tell me…bitch!”

But those words are enough. My father would never call my mother a bitch. Or bring other men here—not even ones from his own crew. We’re the thing he hides, from both his real family and his crime family.

But apparently, we aren’t hidden anymore.

I stand there frozen, trying to figure out what to do. Run up the stairs to help Mama or go over to Daddy’s gun cabinet.

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” Mama answers, her voice shrill with panic.

And then there are no more decisions to be made. The sound of a gunshot punches the air so loud I suddenly have a clear understanding of why Daddy walks the guys so far from the house after their last meals.

Mama…

Grief erupts inside my chest, only to cut off abruptly when I hear footsteps at the top of the stairs. “Going to check the basement,” a nasal voice calls out.

There’s no more time to think about my beautiful mother bleeding out on the kitchen floor. I look around. There are two cabinets. One where Daddy keeps his guns and one where he keeps his weights. A place to fight and a place to hide.

Hide, my gut tells me.

I jump over the weight bench and scramble toward the cabinet. Daddy isn’t like most fathers. He works out every single day—often in front of the bad men. So his weight cabinet is mostly empty, save for a few scattered ten-pound iron plates resting on the metal floor. I crawl in and close myself in with those cold weighted plates, just as the man who decided to investigate clears the last step.

I watch a tall, thin man in a track suit yell, “He’s down here!” through the cabinet’s narrow crack.

The steps don’t creak but groan under the weight of the next guy who comes down. So I’m almost not surprised when I see the man who appears.

My dad is the biggest person I’ve ever met in real life. This guy is bigger. A behemoth in a pea coat and my breath catches at the thought of the kind of hurt he could inflict on somebody.

“Luca. Fuck, Luca… What did that greasy fuck do to you? Motherfucker!”

It’s the same voice that spoke to my mother. The huge guy has an Italian accent. Not Boston Italian like Daddy, but like the ones you hear on TV. The kind that makes me think about horse heads, Emmy-winning HBO shows, and guys named Tony.

Big Italian Tony disappears from my vertically-sliced POV and then reappears with the bad boy. He isn’t carrying the boy, but he might as well be, he’s bent down so far under his arm to prop him up.

“We got the moolie mistress. Anybody else?”

“Daughter…” the boy croaks.

Fear ices my heart, and my hand quietly finds a weighted plate. When they open the door, I’ll throw the weight as hard as I can—

“But she’s gone.”

Big Italian Tony looks around, scanning the basement.

Later when I go over these moments again and again in my nightmares, I’ll come to the conclusion that Big Italian Tony had to be wondering who put the key in the lock.

But right then, all I can do is silently pray for him to believe the boy. Believe I’m no longer here.

My prayer is answered.

“Alright,” the guy says. “Let’s get you up to the car.”

I linger in the weight cabinet as long as I can stand it after they leave. Two, maybe three minutes. I try to play it safe. Try to be cool.

But sooner than would probably be recommended by the National Council of Black People with Good Sense, I burst out of the cabinet.

The image of my mother wounded on the kitchen floor is all I can think about as I run toward the stairs. Because there was only one gunshot. Maybe if I call an ambulance, she can be sav—

The explosion throws me off my feet. I fly through the air and land ugly, the back of my head hitting the concrete floor so hard a painful ringing immediately erupts between my ears.

Weird, I’ll think later. Weird that the ringing was the thing I minded most in those painful moments before I passed out, only to be found two days later by the fire inspector sent out to the house. Without any thought given to the fact that though it was midday, the world had gone completely dark.