Chapter 2 (Glory): Freedom

                                        

                                              
*** TW for domestic physical abuse ***
Copyright © 2025 by GroveltoHEA
We hold within us an amazing capacity to endure, to survive, to overcome.
Even when we've lost hope.
Even when we've given up.
Some spark within us, tiny though it may be, refuses to give in to what our brains are telling us: our situations will never change, things will never turn around, our lives will never improve. This current hell will be as good as life gets for us. We learn to never say it can't get any worse because we've been shown, time after time, that we haven't yet reached rock bottom. There is always somewhere lower to fall, more suffering to come, more hits headed our way, both literally and figuratively.
As my husband's fists pummeled me into oblivion that last time, I gave myself up to it. I welcomed it. It was release from my prison, and I wanted nothing more than to slip away permanently rather than endure this again, to not have to face that I no longer had dreams but nightmares filling my waking and my sleeping.
For years, this had been going on. Years that had drained me of everything but that instinct for survival, and even that had been whittled away to indifference. I lived every day with the possibility that this might be the day he killed me, but I'd become too afraid to try to escape the long and brutal reach of my husband and his family.
Now, my pastor and his wife were standing at my hospital bedside, and their very pregnant daughter, Tabitha, and her husband, Garrick, were on the other side of my bed. If you're paying to read this, you are reading a 온라인카지노게임 stolen from groveltohea on wattpad. Go to wattpad and search for Mother and Glory and read it for free instead of paying thieves. I'd met Garrick at church on several occasions and despite his size, he was a giant cloud of cotton candy wrapped around a teddy bear who couldn't hurt a fly if he had to, a gentle giant who I was sure would cry if he even stepped on a spider. 
The way he looked at Tabitha was the same way Pastor Rick looked at his wife, Samantha. It was a look of total and complete love, and I had no doubt that both Samantha and Tabitha were completely safe with their men. It was all in their eyes, in the happiness that danced between them like something you could see.
I'd wanted those looks of love and infatuation at one time, but I'd soon learned that I didn't want my husband looking at me...ever. Nothing good came of it when those frighteningly empty eyes focused on me.
"Do you understand what I'm telling you, Glory?" Pastor Rick asked gently.
No, I really didn't. It must be the pain meds I was on because how was I divorced? How could I be free from my husband and his family?
"I don't..."
Garrick jumped in, his voice harsh despite him trying to soften it. "You're divorced. The divorce was final the day he attacked you. It's why he lost it on you and took off."
"But I didn't..."
Tabitha took my hand, her face tense. "Glory, you need to understand this in case you're questioned. The divorce was handled quietly, but you are divorced. You are legally divorced."
I was in such a fog, but I think I understood...to an extent. I might be divorced from the monster but I still wasn't safe from him.
"That won't matter to him. He'll still find some way to kill me. He was always threatening that, and he won't care if we're divorced."
Garrick and Pastor Rick exchanged a look that I didn't understand, but what I didn't understand about men could fill a public library. 
With a deep sigh, Garrick looked me in the eye and I had to revise my thinking about this man. He was a cotton-candy wrapped grizzly bear. But even so, he somehow didn't scare me.
"Hear what I'm saying, Glory. Your husband won't ever be back. He will never bother you again. He can't." Garrick's voice dropped to almost a whisper. "Dead men tell no tales, and they also can't hurt anyone ever again."
I sucked in a breath. Did...had he...was I really free? The devil from the depths of darkness was dead?
"Do you understand, Glory?" Samantha asked gently. "You will never be hurt by him again."
There was no build up, just straight to sobbing as a flood of joy and relief burst from deep within me; these were the tears that come from discovering you're free from the monster that had been controlling your life, free from the one who smiled even as he inflicted pain.
Samantha and Tabitha were on either side of me, murmuring soft, comforting words as I cried until I had no strength left to cry any more.
For the first time since my honeymoon night, I was safe from the demon who'd dragged me into hell.
I was a widow, I realized, but on paper I was divorced. I didn't know how it happened, but it somehow had, and the four people standing in this room knew about it to some degree. I suspected Garrick knew the most, then Pastor Rick, and Tabitha and Samantha probably just knew my former husband could never hurt me again.
But his parents...oh, they were another problem.
"But what about my in-laws? They won't rest until they have answers about their son and they'll try to blame me, and --"
"Mother's watching them. They won't be a problem," Garrick said.
I looked up at him again. "That's sweet of your mom, but I don't think she's a match for them. They're beyond evil, just like the son they raised."
Garrick burst out laughing. "Not my mother. My brother, Mother."
Pain meds are dangerous, amplifying things in such a way that even the mundane is like a night at a comedy club. The way Garrick explained that made me start giggling uncontrollably. My pastor and his family probably thought I was losing my mind -- I'd gone from sobbing in relief to laughing like a loon in minutes.
"I'm sorry," I snorted, "but mother, brother, mother. That's so funny. It rhymes."
After a while, when I realized I hadn't laughed like that since I'd married him, I was back to sobbing again. I was free to laugh or cry at will now and apparently I was making speedy withdrawals from my emotional credit union to make up for lost time.
"I'm sorry," I choked out an apology. "It must be the pain meds kicking in."
"His brother's road name is Motherboard," Tabitha explained. "All the brothers call him Mother for short. He's the MC's tech genius."
"Oh. It sounds like Garrick has a big family with all those brothers."
"They aren't related by blood. They belong to a motorcycle club, the Lords of Mayhem, and all the members call each other brothers," Tabitha explained.
"Do you know Conall Alasdair? He's in the Mayhem, too, and he's been bringing me the flowers."
"Conall, huh?" Garrick asked with a wide smile. "Conall is Mother."
"Oh. I see." Did I, though? 
"Glory, I promise you, it's upsetting and confusing right now, but we're going to help you through this," Samantha promised. "Rick and I want you to come stay with us after you're released. Let us put you in a little cocoon for a bit, give you time to catch your breath so you can decide what to do."
Kindness, when you haven't experienced much of it in the last few years, was hard to comprehend. 
I looked at the fresh flowers on my rolling table at the foot of my bed, at the three other vases filled with flowers. More kindness in floral form. The nurse had even brought me a good-sized stuffed bear that I could snuggle with today.
They knew what I wanted and needed. I was terrified to go back to that house where I'd lived with my husband...ex-husband. I was terrified his parents would come to the house when I was home. Being put in a little cocoon sounded like heaven.
So I nodded.
Then I began crying again. It seemed tears had become the symbol of my freedom.
And I could cry because I was free.