Brutal Husband (Brutal Hearts #3)

Chapter 16

16

Rieta

N ero finally climbs off me, and I’m too exhausted and beaten down to move.

I know why this happened. I got comfortable and thought Nero had grown bored with following me everywhere, so I risked speaking with a divorce lawyer. That was a mistake.

I don’t believe him about reversing the vasectomy. I think it’s his twisted way of getting my hopes up again about a baby. He’s already done his worst to me, and so I let my body go limp and allow my eyelids to drift closed.

A dark shadow falls across my face, and I slowly open my eyes. Nero is standing by the side of the bed, and my eyes lock on that hateful daisy tattoo on his arm. Did he get it while he was gone just to mock me?

Then I realize there’s something in his hand. My eyes widen in fear at the flash of silver and glass.

Is that a needle?

I gasp and try to push myself up, but Nero puts his knee in the middle of my back and shoves me down again.

“Don’t struggle. You’ll only make this worse for yourself.”

There’s a burn in the back of my neck, and I scream in fury and pain. I can’t move even one inch with his heavy body pinning mine to the bed.

“There, cara mia ,” he says in a velvety voice, pulling the needle out and lifting his weight off me. “Such a good girl for me.”

I push myself up to sitting with trembling arms and feel the back of my neck. “What did you do to me? Did you drug me?”

Nero goes into the master bathroom to dispose of the hypodermic, and comes back to me. “I injected a tracker so I’ll know where you are every hour of the day and night. Nothing you do is going to be a secret from me from now on. Oh, and watch what you say on the phone because I’ll know that as well. Every call. Every text. Every browser search. Every website you visit.”

I shake my head in disbelief. This isn’t happening. This is a nightmare.

“Don’t shake your head at me, wife. I wouldn’t have had to do this if you didn’t go to see that divorce lawyer. If you run from me, if that tracker goes offline, I’ll kill everyone in your family. Your mom. Your sisters. Your uncles. If you dare tell anyone that your dear, darling husband isn’t so darling as he used to be, they will be the ones to suffer. If you see that divorce lawyer again, they’ll be the ones who pay.”

There’s a cruel sneer on his handsome face.

“Why are you doing this?” I sob, wiping the tears from my face, but they just keep falling. I know how much he loves seeing me cry. My vulnerability is oxygen to him. “You’re the one who walked out on me. You’re the one who needs a tracker, except I don’t care where you go or who you talk to.”

His expression is gloating. This man has me exactly where he wants me, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Instead of answering, he heads for the door.

“What is it you want?” I call after him, and when he doesn’t reply, I scream, “ Just tell me what you want .”

Nero stops in the doorway and stares straight ahead, his hands curled into fists and every muscle of his broad back taut with fury. He turns around slowly, his gaze narrowed with hatred. “Proof. That’s all I want, Rieta.”

“Proof of what ? I don’t know anything. I haven’t done anything.”

Nero doesn’t hear me, or he just doesn’t believe me. “And once I have it?” He draws his thumbnail across his throat, his eyes burning with malice. “You’re dead, cara mia .”

There are bruises all over my arms. Up the backs of my legs. I look like a banana that’s been shaken around at the bottom of a schoolbag for a week. The marks are everywhere but my face. Nero’s too clever to leave his violence where someone might see it.

I’m too ashamed for Mrs. White, our cleaner, to see what a mess Nero has made of our bedroom, so I clean up all the wood splinters and call a builder to replace the broken doors.

I want to go next door and see Annie, but I’m worried that if she asks me how I am, I’ll burst into tears and confess everything, putting her and her family in danger of my husband’s retaliation.

I’m afraid to leave the house, but Mia is worried about me, and she insists on coming over for movie night. As we sit together on the sofa watching a comedy, I tug the sleeves of my sweater down over my wrists to hide the bruises and smile at my sister, but the smile feels brittle on my face.

At one point, Mia pauses the movie and turns to me. “Is everything all right? You don’t seem like yourself. Is it Nero?”

I knew Nero was trouble from the second I met him, but I married him anyway. I was attracted to his unpredictability, his jealousy, his cruel mouth. I should have known better, and now it’s too late.

“Everything’s fine,” I say with what I hope is my most convincing smile. “I just feel a little under the weather. But I’m glad you’re here.”

It’s only half a lie. I’ve been feeling sick to my stomach ever since Nero forced a tracker into the back of my neck. My husband’s not at home right now, but I have no doubt he’s listening to every word I say somehow. Mia and her family won’t be safe if I confide anything about my nightmare of a marriage to her.

After Mia leaves, I flick aimlessly through the channels, paying little attention to what I’m watching. I end up on a true crime documentary, a story about a woman married to a man who told her he was in finance but who turned out to be an FBI agent with a whole other family. He would disappear for weeks at a time, telling her that he was on work trips, but he was with his other wife and his children. A real wife and children, not the make-believe family he’d created with her while he was undercover.

I grimace and change the channel. I’m sick of thinking about missing husbands, and I go into the kitchen and get a glass of water.

Something Nero said a few weeks ago seems strange to me.

Why did I leave you?

I don’t understand why Nero asked me that question, and he didn’t ask it in a tone of command, sarcasm, or anger. It sounded genuine. Something happened the night he disappeared, but I can’t remember what it was. Could it be that he doesn’t remember either?

But I’m the one who was drunk and hit in the head.

I stare out the kitchen window, gazing at the far end of the garden where the grass doesn’t grow properly, and the ground is shaded by a leafy tree. I must stare at that place for an hour as I travel down the corridors of my mind, trying to remember anything I can about the night Nero disappeared, but I run into nothing but dead ends.

I’m too agitated to sleep, and so I open the back door and step out into the garden. It’s raining, a steady, soaking downpour, just like the night my husband went missing. Did I come out into the garden then as well? Didn’t Mrs. White mention the garden the following morning?

Mrs. Lombardi, there’s blood in the hallway, and I noticed that in the garden…

She broke off what she was going to say when she saw the bruise on my face. The next time I looked at the garden, I didn’t notice anything out of place that I can recall.

I take out my phone and dial Mrs. White’s number while I watch the falling rain. She answers on the third ring.

“I’m so sorry to disturb you at this time of night, Mrs. White. I wanted to ask you something.”

“I’m able to come tomorrow if that’s what you need, Mrs. Lombardi.”

“No, it’s not that. The night my husband disappeared, what do you remember about the house the next morning?”

“The house?”

“You said there was blood, and something about the garden. It might seem strange, but would you please tell me everything you remember that was different that morning?”

“Your husband asked me the same question. There were drops of blood in the hallway, and footprints. Wet ones that had dried.”

“Just one set of footprints?”

“Yes, I think so. Small ones, so I think they were yours, coming in from the garden. The dirt was all churned up at the bottom of the garden, so I called Mr. White, and he came and raked it flat and sowed some grass seeds. Oh, and the hose was running. It had flooded the right-hand side of the terrace, and I turned it off.”

I wonder if I washed dirt off myself with the hose. That would explain the dried footprints and why I woke up in wet clothes. But why was I dirty?

“Mrs. White, if… If I asked you to guess what happened that night, what would you say?”

“Do you not remember, Mrs. Lombardi?”

“I don’t. I can’t remember anything,” I confess.

“Oh, you poor dear. I’ve always thought that you and Mr. Lombardi had a fight, you got hurt, and you told him to get out. Then you went down to the bottom of the garden to express your hurt and anger by taking it out on the dirt. My mother used to hit pillows and things after she had a fight with my father. I saw her in a storm of tears plenty of times. Then you rinsed yourself off with the hose and took yourself to bed.”

I imagine myself on my knees in the dirt, tearing at the ground with my bare hands and screaming out my rage. Is that what happened? I try to force the memory out of the corners of my mind and back into my consciousness, but nothing happens.

“Is there anything else you wanted to know, Mrs. Lombardi?”

I want to know the truth, but Mrs. White has given me as much as she possibly can. “No, that’s all, and thank you.”

Mrs. White hesitates. “Mrs. Lombardi, I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but I hope Mr. Lombardi treats you better this time.”

I hear her disapproval down the phone line. My stomach is so uneasy that it’s making me want to throw up. “Um, yes. Good night, and sorry again to disturb you.”

I shove the phone into my pocket and walk out into the rain. It patters on my cheeks and eyelashes and soaks through my clothes, but I keep putting one foot in front of the other, heading for the dark place at the bottom of the garden.

There’s just enough moonlight filtering through the clouds for me to make out the dirt spotted with tenuous blades of grass. It looks like it always has. Again, I try to picture myself losing control and scrabbling at the dirt in a panic like I did all those times Mom locked me in the basement. What if I wasn’t panicking that night? What if I was looking for something? Or hiding something?

I go to the shed, get a shovel, and push it into the soft earth. I dig until my arms burn and rain drips down my face. When I’ve dug several holes two or three feet deep, I hit something hard, and the shovel makes a gritty, crunching sound.

The shovel has cut through something that smells terrible. I’ve hit a bone. It gleams white in the moonlight.

I yank the shovel out of the dirt and get down into the hole, scooping the earth away with my hands and knees, praying that I’m not seeing what I think I’m seeing. There’s dark fabric, of the kind men’s pants are made from, and then some waterlogged leather, and a belt buckle.

I recognize that belt buckle. It’s the one Nero always used to wear.

No.

No, no, no .

I breathe faster and faster, black spots dancing before my eyes. I want to run away and hide, but I need to know. I grab the shovel and dig as fast as I can to reveal the corpse’s left arm. I have to rip open the sleeve of a jacket and a shirt to expose the gray flesh. Even in the dim moonlight, I can see the empty space between the other tattoos.

There’s no daisy on Nero’s arm.

I sit back on my heels, the stench of Nero’s decomposing body rising all around me. What did I do? Did I kill my husband?

If my husband is dead, then who the hell has been living in my house for the past four weeks? A ghost? Maybe Nero’s vengeful spirit has been haunting me. Either ghosts are real, or my guilty conscience has manifested him to torment me into remembering what I did to him.

But that would have to mean I hallucinated the encounters that Nero and I had with Laz and Mia and then with Mom. I’ll ask them if they’ve seen Nero. I’ll call them right now, and I’ll know if I’m going mad or not. I scramble out of the hole and brush the dirt from my hands. I don’t even want to cover up the body. If I murdered my husband, then I deserve to go to prison.

As I straighten up, I see a dark figure moving across the garden toward me.

A scream rises in my throat, but I’m frozen to the spot. It’s him, the vengeful spirit of my dead husband, and he’s come to finish me off in the most gruesome way possible. There won’t be any escape.

But the figure’s footsteps squelch in the wet grass. I can hear him breathing, and moonlight glints on his wet, angry features. Surely a ghost, even one I’m hallucinating, wouldn’t be so solid or make any noise.

The man standing in front of me is a living, breathing man, and I realize I made a terrible mistake. I talked to Mrs. White on the phone about the garden, forgetting that the man pretending to be my husband would be listening in.

The rain plasters his now see-through white shirt to his chest. Rain drops trickle down the tanned, tattooed flesh of his forearms. Among the roses, skulls, and snakes, there’s a daisy tattoo on his forearm.

A daisy tattoo that he got for me.

Because my name means daisy, and he knows how much I love them.

He insisted I carry daisies on my wedding day when I desperately wanted to, and Mom was arguing that they were tacky and cheap. Nero got the tattoo while he was gone because he missed me so much.

But he can’t be my husband because I think I killed my husband.

What the ever-loving hell is going on? What Invasion of the Body Snatchers nightmare is this? I’m alone with a corpse and a stranger, and the stranger has a murderous glint in his eyes as he stalks toward me.

I lunge for the shovel and brandish it protectively in front of myself. It shakes in my terrified grip as I back away. The stranger’s fists are clenched tight, and the tendons and veins are standing out on his forearms, making the daisy tattoo pop.

“Don’t come any closer. My husband never had a daisy tattoo on his arm. Who the hell are you?”

“I knew you would lead me to the proof.” The stranger looks from Nero’s corpse to me, and he’s breathing so fast and hard that he’s snarling with anger. “I’m the man who’s going to kill you, cara mia .”