Rebecca Coleman escaped one life. Now she has to survive another.
Rebecca fled her small Florida town—and a controlling mother who taught her to doubt herself—to become Bella Valentina, a burlesque performer who has finally found freedom, confidence, and a family of her own.
Then one bad decision takes it all away.
A photoshoot at an abandoned nightclub becomes a trap. Rebecca and her fellow dancers are abducted and pulled into a human-trafficking operation run by the ruthless Mr. Rainaldi and Antoinette, a woman who understands that the surest way to control someone isn’t with chains. It’s by making her question everything she knows about herself.
For Rebecca, the tactics are terrifyingly familiar.
Isolation. Manipulation. Gaslighting. Fear.
The same weapons that shaped her childhood are being used to dismantle the woman she fought so hard to become. But Rainaldi and Antoinette have underestimated her—and the bonds between women with nothing left to lose.
To survive, Rebecca will have to become someone neither her captors nor her mother prepared her to be.
Someone harder.
Someone dangerous.
Someone capable of crossing the line between victim and villain.
Inspired by the work of anti-trafficking organization Freedom 180, poet and educator Pamela G. Holmes delivers a dark, fiercely compelling Florida crime novel about coercion, identity, sisterhood, and what happens when survival demands more than innocence can afford.
Some cages don’t have bars. And some women refuse to stay inside them.