Brutal Husband (Brutal Hearts #3)

Chapter 10

10

Rieta

L az leaves my home, and I tell Mia we have to talk.

“What does it feel like?” I ask Mia when we’re seated on the sofa with glasses of wine. It doesn’t matter if I have a drink today. I know I’m not pregnant.

“What does what feel like?”

“For a man to have a crush on you? To feel his eyes follow you across the room and know that he’s thinking about you and only you. Burning for you.”

Mia frowns in confusion. “But you know how it feels. You have Nero.”

“Nero never looked and acted around me the way Laz does around you. At least, he hasn’t for a long, long time.”

Mia feels sorry for me. I’ve let my mask slip for a moment, and she’s seen the extent of my unhappiness. It’s not just that I can’t get pregnant, it’s also that my husband doesn’t love me.

How that truth burns. My husband doesn’t love me.

Later, when Mia leaves and meets Laz outside, I watch them through a gap in the curtains. They’re not even touching, they’re being so careful not to get caught, but I see how much love and desire burns between them.

I go back and pour myself another glass of wine, playing the evening over and over in my mind. Laz and Mia are like Romeo and Juliet. Forbidden and intense. I swallow down my envy and misery along with the wine. Before I realize what I’m doing, I’ve finished the whole bottle.

When my fertile period comes again, I feel sick to my stomach at the thought of passionless, robotic sex with Nero. I haven’t made any effort to leave my husband, so I suppose that deep down I don’t want to. I text him that I’m ovulating, and that night we endure our monthly ritual. I can tell that he hates it as much as I do. Once it’s over, I can hear him showering in his bathroom while I lie there with my legs propped up, waiting for his semen to take.

A few days later I’m emptying the dirty laundry hamper in Nero’s bedroom when something falls out of the pocket of a pair of his discarded trousers and rolls against my foot. I pick it up. It’s a yellow plastic pill bottle, and it’s a quarter full. There’s no sticker on the side saying the name of the drug, so I tip some of the pills out onto my hand and examine them. They’re blue, diamond-shaped pills, stamped with the logo of a drug company. I open the browser on my phone and search the name and description of the pill, and the drug name appears immediately.

Viagra.

My husband needs Viagra.

Did Nero always use Viagra? Once he took my hand and pressed it against his erection, saying, Feel what you do to me, baby. I want you so much. It’s one of my most treasured memories of him, but now I wonder if it was a lie.

I trawl through the memories of our brief courtship, and the moment that I keep coming back to is our wedding. Nero could blow hot and cold, but the moment he left our wedding reception seems like when the line was drawn. Later that night when he entered the bridal suite, he’d changed. What happened to my husband in those intervening hours? I wonder if he got hurt during the fight with Paul Shields in some way that he’s not telling me, or if he discovered a secret that rattled him to his core. I know so little about my husband and his past. I’ve met none of his family, and I don’t even know if he has any friends. Could he have suffered some kind of psychological damage or physical assault that’s made him unable to enjoy sex? Perhaps he found out something terrible about his parents, like his mother was raped and he’s the result. That kind of revelation could damage a man. Or maybe he had a mentor that he trusted like a father, and he was betrayed. Maybe Nero himself was raped, which is a heartbreaking thought. I go over and over the possibilities, weighing each one against my husband’s secretive behavior, but I have no idea what the truth could be. If Nero trusted me enough, he’d confide in me. Our courtship was a test about whether I was a trustworthy person, and I failed.

I put the pills and laundry back where I found them and pretend I never saw them.

Over the next few days, I do an excellent job of forgetting all about the little blue pills until a terrible thought occurs to me. What if the Viagra isn’t for me?

That thought sends me into another tailspin. Is he having an affair? The sex between us is nothing like the sex I know he craves. Nero could be popping these pills and going to town on some beautiful, willing woman who isn’t me.

I’m driving mindlessly home from the store the following day, sunk in my miserable thoughts, when I see Nero passing me in the other direction. I’m not on the right street, and I should make a left if I want to head home, but instead, I make a U-turn and follow my husband. I follow him across town without really knowing why I’m doing it.

Nero visits one of his clubs. He strides confidently inside, and a few hours later, he leaves again, exchanging a few words with one of the bouncers as he goes.

The next morning after he leaves the house, I go into his bedroom, seize his crumpled shirt from his laundry basket, and bury my nose in it. No woman’s perfume. No suspicious receipts in his pockets. I feel like there’s something important I’m missing. Something he’s hiding from me that I have to discover.

So I keep tailing him. To and from his office. To his clubs where he meets with his business associates. I only ever see him with men. Is he having an affair with a man? I focus my attention on watching him through the windows of bars and restaurants, but he never touches anyone, and his gaze never lingers on anyone, man or woman.

There’s a strange comfort in mindlessly following Nero back and forth across the city. All this restless energy I have has to go somewhere, and when I’m too tired to follow him or I lose him, I go home and drink wine in secret before falling exhausted into bed.

On the outside, I maintain the facade of a happily married woman trying her best to have a baby. Day by day I see the tension growing between Laz and Mia. Sooner or later it will all fall apart between him and Mom, and then they can be together. It all seems so romantic between them.

Until suddenly it’s not.

Mom throws a party to celebrate her marriage, and Laz announces to everyone that Mia is pregnant. The announcement comes as a shock even to Mia. She and I leave the party together, and with my arm around her, I can feel her shaking with rage.

“He switched out my birth control,” she tells me. “I could kill him.”

We sit anxiously together while we wait for the result of her pregnancy test. It’s positive. Mia’s pregnant. For a moment, I’m so envious I can barely breathe, but I keep it inside because my sister is clearly devastated by this news.

Mia can’t go home. I’m afraid of what Mom will do to her, though as far as I know, she’s only ever hit me and locked me in the basement. I tell Mia that she can stay with me while she figures things out with Laz and to make herself at home while I go pick up some things for us.

I make it into my car and halfway down my driveway before my mask slips, and my broken sobs break free. My life is so empty that I wonder if I even exist.

Someone knocks softly on the driver’s side window. “Rieta, are you okay?”

I lift my head and see that Annie is leaning over to peer into my car. I roll down the window.

“Oh, I’m just… My sister’s having a baby.” I try to smile, but my face collapses into messy tears.

Annie pats my shoulder in sympathy. “Oh, sweetie. Let me get you into the house.”

I wipe the tears from my cheeks. Mia’s inside, and she can’t see me upset like this. “No. Not inside. Can we go somewhere else? I need a drink.” My eyes land on nine-year-old Harriet, purple barrettes in her hair and a pastel backpack hanging off her shoulders. “Oh. Never mind. I’ll, um…”

“We can all go,” Annie says warmly. “I know a place. Noah’s at my sister’s playing with his cousins. We can go in my car.”

Annie takes us to a restaurant a few streets away that’s quite chic, but with staff who are relaxed enough not to mind that we have a child with us. Harriet digs colored pencils and paper out of her backpack and starts drawing without needing to be prompted to occupy herself while we talk.

“Every waking moment, she’s drawing,” Annie says, smiling at her daughter. “I think she’s going to be an artist one day.”

She’s lost in motherly pride for a moment before turning to me. “Tell me about your sister. I didn’t know Isabel was seeing anyone.”

The waiter places a large glass of cold white wine in front of me, frosted with moisture. Thank God. I pick it up and swallow down a large mouthful.

“Not Isabel. My other sister, Mia.” Now that Laz has dropped his bombshell, I don’t suppose there’s any point keeping Mia’s secret. I tell Annie everything about my sister’s relationship with our stepfather, though I keep the details vague for Harriet’s sake.

Annie’s eyes grow rounder and rounder. Finally she sits back with a shake of her head. “What a way to announce the pregnancy. Does Laz love her?”

“Until today, I would have said yes without reservation. Now? I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out soon.”

I play with the stem of my wine glass. What do I even know about love?

“It’s going to be so hard seeing Mia and Laz together,” I whisper. “Does that make me a terrible sister?”

Annie starts to assure me that I can’t help the way I feel, but she trails off when someone stops in front of our table. Actually, two someones.

“Is everything all right, Rieta?”

I lift my head at the sound of the familiar voice. Nero is standing over us with someone I presume is a business associate, a man with neat, strawberry blond hair, a fair beard, and an expensive-looking suit.

“Oh, yes. Um, Mia’s pregnant.”

There’s an awkward silence. It stretches on and on until Nero’s business associate, clearly desperate for something to break the tension, says to Harriet, “You’re an artist? You’re very good.”

“I’m drawing unicorns,” Harriet says proudly, beaming up at him.

“I can see that. I own a dozen horses. Do you like horses?”

Harriet’s eyes grow round. “Wow, you must be so rich if you own twelve horses.”

Nero clears his throat. “Costa, our table is ready. We won’t intrude, Rieta. I’ll see you at home.”

He and his companion move to the other side of the restaurant and accept menus from the waiter. The man keeps glancing over at us, which makes me wonder if my husband is talking about me. I hate my wife. She’s a liar and a dead fish in bed. I need Viagra just to get it up. My skin crawls with shame, and I finish my first glass of wine too quickly.

Over the following days, the rest of the truth comes out about Laz and Mia. She was secretly working as a stripper, and he paid her to dance for him. Now Laz has disappeared, abandoning his pregnant stepdaughter. Mom makes Mia’s life hell, and I’m afraid of what she’ll talk Mia into doing if Mia goes home with her.

“You can stay here as long as you need to. My home is your home,” I assure Mia.

Mia’s pale face is filled with uncertainty. Apparently I haven’t been hiding my envy of her pregnancy very well. “Rieta, it hurts you even to look at me right now. Are you sure you want me here?”

I sigh and fiddle with my bracelet, wishing I were a better sister. “I won’t lie to you. I am envious, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to abandon you when you need me. I really am happy for you, I promise.”

“If you’re sure. The last thing I want is to cause any more trouble.”

I reach out and take Mia’s hands in mine, and I smile at her. “I’m sure. We’re sisters. I’ve got your back, always.”