Brutal Husband (Brutal Hearts #3)

Chapter 17

17

Rieta

T he stranger steps forward and takes the shovel out of my hands. Just takes it away from me because I’m shaking too much to defend myself. With rain pouring down my face, I wait for the blow that will knock me unconscious.

A blow that I’ll never wake up from because this man is going to kill me.

The stranger turns away from me toward the grave and starts digging. The wind whips rain into my face as I stand there shivering, and it takes me a moment to understand what he’s doing. He’s uncovering Nero’s head and shoulders. He wants to be sure who it really is. After a few minutes of digging, the stranger brushes dirt away from the corpse’s face. He even lifts the body up so he can examine his whole head.

I don’t want to look, but I must. The falling rain has cleaned the mottled flesh. Nero’s dead, decomposing face, wet from the rain and deformed in places, but recognizably him, stares out of the grave.

A memory pierces me so sharply that I cry out. A night just like this one in the pouring rain. The rough wood of the shovel handle against my palms.

Where are you? I’ll fucking kill you, bitch. Nero’s back to me as I lift the shovel.

I whirl around and dry heave, falling to my knees on the slippery ground. I retch again and again, my stomach heaving painfully. When I look up, the stranger is standing over me in the dark, gripping the shovel in both hands.

“Did he beat you?” he asks in a hard voice. “Did he torture you? Lock you up?”

I shake my head, shakily getting to my feet.

“Then why did you kill my brother?” he demands.

I look from Nero to the stranger. The two men look identical, or at least identical to how Nero looked when he was alive. They must be twins, but I’ve never seen twins who look alike as much as Nero and this stranger. I’m trembling so much I can barely get the words out. “I…don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“How convenient,” he says in a hard, sarcastic voice. “Try again.”

“I—I—” My throat locks up from terror. This must be how a wounded deer feels as the hunter lines up the final, deadly shot.

“You want to know how I know it was you?” he asks. “I searched this house high and low for clues, and what do I find? Blood on this shovel’s handle. I talked to the cleaner, and she told me all about the blood and dirt in the house and the garden hose that was left on the night my brother disappeared.”

When I don’t move, the stranger begins filling in the grave and all the holes I dug with an exclamation of disgust. He stamps down the earth and then seizes me by the arm. He throws the shovel in the shed and drags me toward the house.

I suppose he doesn’t want to risk being seen as he strangles the life out of me. In the living room, he throws me down on the rug and stands over me, breathing hard. Rainwater is dripping from my clothes and seeping into the wool rug beneath me.

He pulls a blanket off an armchair and throws it around me. “Dry yourself off and stop shaking. I want answers.”

I pull the blanket tight around my body. Adrenaline is spiking through my veins, and I can’t stop shaking. I stare at the stranger’s big feet in leather shoes. I know these shoes. They’re my husband’s shoes. He’s wearing Nero’s clothes.

“How did you kill my brother?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I whisper.

“There’s a wound on the back of his head. Did you hit him while his back was turned, you coward?”

I can feel the shovel heavy in my hands. I did, didn’t I? I had to do it. I think he was going to kill me. But why?

“I’m losing my patience, Rieta. Your amnesia won’t keep you alive for very long. Why did you kill my brother?”

“I’m trying to remember. Nero and I—”

“Luca.”

I raise my head and gaze up at him, perplexed. “I’m sorry?”

“My brother’s name was Luca. I’m Nero.”

Anger blossoms through me. “Stop messing with my head. I’m confused enough as it is. I don’t know you.”

“I’m Nero,” he says, sinking down on his heels until we’re at eye level. His dark brown eyes are my husband’s eyes. Everything about the two men is exactly the same. If I didn’t just see an identical corpse in the back garden, I wouldn’t believe that there are two of them.

The stranger points into the back garden. “That’s Luca you killed, and I want to know why.”

“But who is Nero?”

He seizes me by the hair and snarls in my face. “I’m asking the questions.”

I gasp in pain. Whoever he is, he’s going to kill me, and I don’t even care. I killed Nero—Luca—and then I blocked it out, so I deserve to die. If I had any answers for this man, I’d tell him everything, but I just can’t remember.

“Just finish me off, please,” I beg him.

“Why?”

“Because I’m a killer. I murdered my own husband. Or I murdered the man who I thought was my husband.”

“Why did you do it?”

“I don’t remember.”

He squeezes his fist in my hair and shakes me. “Liar.”

I wince from pain. “I swear, I don’t remember. The night that my husband disappeared, I was drunk, and then I hit my head. I don’t remember how. I woke up in bed and my face was covered in blood.”

“So fucking convenient.”

“I would think so too, if I were you.”

Rage expands his pupils. He seizes me by the throat with both hands, and I topple back onto the floor with him on top of me. I don’t fight him. I would want blood if it were my sister out there in a shallow grave.

I feel my windpipe close, and I start to choke. The stranger’s eyes blaze into mine. It hurts so much to be strangled, but I still don’t fight him or try to push him off. My hands clench the blanket as I wait for darkness to take me.

The stranger releases me with an exclamation of disgust and throws himself away from me. I drag breath into my burning lungs and slowly sit up.

“You’re not getting away with this so easily,” he says bitterly. “I’m getting answers before I kill you.”

Getting to his feet, he pulls me up with him, his fingers digging into my arms, and takes me upstairs into the en suite bathroom.

“I’m washing off this mud and the stench of my dead brother, which means so are you. I don’t want you out of my sight. Get in there.” He shoves me into the shower.

Nero pulls off his clothes and turns on the water. I’m deluged by the hot spray, and my clothes stick to my body. The stranger, however, is very naked. I didn’t lie around naked with my husband, as I expected to do as a married woman, but I wasn’t wholly unfamiliar with his body either. The tattoos decorating this man’s flesh are my husband’s tattoos. My fiancé’s tattoos. All exactly the same, except for the addition of the daisy.

The stranger’s angry gaze keeps drifting to me as he soaps his body, water and suds streaming down his muscular chest. I don’t want to stare at him, and I don’t mean to look, but suddenly, a certain part of his anatomy is pushing its way into my field of vision. I feel my face grow red and water droplets bead on my lashes. My husband never looked like this around me. Not unless he’d taken Viagra.

Instead of being embarrassed, the stranger goes on soaping himself and staring at me, seeming to enjoy my embarrassment.

Eventually, he turns the water off and reaches for a towel. I get a glimpse of his naked back, and dozens of scars crisscross his flesh. Not old, white, shiny scars. They’re raised, and many of them are red. I wonder if that means they’re relatively recent.

“How did…”

The stranger faces me and narrows his eyes, and I recall what he snarled in my face earlier. I’m asking the questions.

I can feel the ache of bruises forming on my throat. I swallow the words and stand dripping on the tiles in silence.

The stranger dabs his face with a towel and then wraps it around his hips. Strolling through to the bedroom, he orders, “Get out of those wet clothes and go to bed.”

Go to bed? I thought he was going to kill me. Maybe he’s tired and decided that killing me in the morning will do. Fumbling for a towel and wrapping it around me to cover myself, I strip down to my underwear, and then I take those off as well. In the bedroom, I awkwardly pull on an oversized T-shirt and leggings while keeping myself covered with the towel.

Nero watches me. “Why are you getting dressed like that?”

He saw me naked the times he forced me to have sex with him, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to parade around naked in front of him by choice. Ignoring him, I move to my side of the bed and pull the bedclothes back. Nero does the same on the other side.

I pull back in surprise. “You’re not going to sleep down the hall?”

“Why would I sleep down the hall?”

“Because you always…” Right. This man isn’t Nero, who seemed as though he’d rather die than share a bed with me.

“I’m not letting you out of my sight until I get answers. Speaking of which…” Nero goes over to the closet and takes out a necktie. Turning to me, he draws the silk through his fingers with a smile on his lips.

I back away from him in horror. “You’re going to tie me up and screw me after finding your dead brother in the back garden? You’re sick.”

He comes around the bed toward me, and just as I’m about to run for the door, he grabs me and lashes my wrists together. Then he ties the other end of the necktie around his own wrist.

“Who said anything about screwing you? I can’t have you fleeing in the night. Get into bed.”

He pulls me unwillingly into bed, discarding his towel just before he gets beneath the covers. He could at least put some clothes on. With a snap, he turns out the lights, and I lay there frozen in the dark, anticipating his hungry hands and devouring mouth. Nero’s thigh is touching my hip, but he doesn’t move. When I take a peep at him through my lashes, his eyes are closed.

The necktie is tight around my wrists, but not so tight that it’s uncomfortable. The bed is warm and cozy, and I slowly start to relax. It’s been an exhausting day. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, and strangely, I feel no desire to get away from this man, and I don’t have any fear of dying. His presence beside me is oddly…comforting. The necktie around my wrists makes me feel safe.

Which is complete madness when I think about it.

I’m drifting toward sleep when my husband’s dead, decomposing face bursts into view in my mind. I open my eyes with a gasp.

“Would you go the fuck to sleep?” The man beside me snarls in the darkness.

“I’m trying,” I pant. “I wish I hadn’t seen Nero’s face.”

“Luca’s face. And you’re the one who put him in the ground.”

“Seeing him dead was a shock to you, but it was a shock to me as well. We may not have had a happy marriage, but he was still my husband.”

There’s a short silence.

“How was it not happy?” There’s a note of curiosity in his voice.

“I’m not talking about my marriage with a stranger.”

“We’re not strangers.”

A chill goes down my spine. “What are you talking about?”

“Just what I said.”

“I knew you before I was married? Or after?”

There’s a long silence from the stranger. I’ve given up hope of him answering until he finally says, “Yes.”

“What does that mean?”

But he doesn’t reply. As I listen to the stranger beside me breathing, exhaustion overwhelms me, and I fall asleep.

I wake in the morning with the sensation of someone looming over me and saying my name.

“I said, wake up, Rieta.”

My eyelashes flutter open. Nero is leaning over me, his arms braced beside my head. Strange, my husband never willingly gets so close to me. He looks handsome with his dark hair falling into his eyes and the shadow of dark stubble on his jaw.

“Did you get your beauty sleep? Good,” he says, without waiting for me to reply. “What’s the last thing you remember before Luca disappeared?”

“Sorry, who—” My foggy brain doesn’t understand what’s happening. I rub my eyes and arch my back. That’s when I feel it between my legs.

I glance down. We both stare at the thick shaft of his cock pressing between my thighs. So high between my thighs that there’s friction against my clit beneath my clothes.

There’s a sharp, needy ache between my legs. This is definitely not my husband. Last night’s memories crash over me—the body, the stranger, almost being strangled to death—but all my body cares about is that I’m close to an aroused man. It’s been a long time since I was pressed up against a genuinely aroused man. Since I lost my virginity, actually. To someone. But who?

I gaze suspiciously at the man braced over me. My husband and this man were twins. Crazily identical twins. I wonder if they ever pretended to be each other, on dates for instance.

My attention wanders down his strong throat, his broad chest with its scattering of dark hair. His muscular stomach, and the even darker strip of hair from his navel arrowing right down to his…

I swallow. Can you call a cock beautiful? This one’s beautiful. I want to stroke the hard, velvety-looking flesh and the thick vein that meanders along its length.

“My eyes are up here. I asked you a question.”

As hard as this man is, sex seems to be the last thing on his mind. My gaze snaps back to his, and I rummage in my sleepy, aroused brain. A question? Oh, yes. What’s the last thing I remember before Luca disappeared? “Oh—um…Nero and I ate dinner together, but then he left. I followed him to his office after drinking far too much wine.”

“You and Luca ate dinner together,” he corrects. “Why did you drink so much wine? You barely used to drink at all. You had a Coke on our first—”

My eyes widen. “Our what?”

The stranger’s jaw grinds in irritation.

Was he going to say, our first date ? I did drink a Coke that night. He was so cold and rude to me, at least at first, and then he hypnotized me with desire and pushed a diamond ring onto my finger.

“And you had a Negroni,” I whisper.

“Answer the question. Why were you drinking so much?” He jostles my body as he shifts on his hands, and the plush thickness of his cock rolls against my clit.

I try not to cry out, but I do. I moan, and my bound hands press against his chest. “Ah—I was unhappy. My husband had been cold to me every single day of our marriage, even when we were trying for a baby, and I’d given up hope he’d ever change. I wanted a divorce.”

“A baby?” he says sharply. “You were trying for a baby with him?”

A second later he’s up and off the bed, ripping at the knots that bind us together as his eyes flash.

He looks as good standing up as he did lying down. I’m a married woman who’s not used to the sight of a man in all his glory, and this man’s body is glorious. All lean muscle and tattoos, though I think he’s leaner than my husband used to be. The man who took my virginity wasn’t this lean either. Still, his physique is so very touchable, and I have to clench my hands as soon as they’re untied so I don’t reach for and stroke the dark patch of hair in the middle of his chest.

“Don’t try to run,” he warns me. “I will find you wherever you go. That tracker is still securely in the back of your neck.”

I scowl at him. That’s right, the tracker. I have no confusion about which man forced it into my flesh. His hand strokes my nape, feeling for the small lump beneath my skin.

“You don’t have to worry. There’s no one I can run to for protection.”

His deep brown eyes stare down into mine. For a moment, his gaze flickers to my mouth. “Your sister and her husband promised to protect you. I heard them with my own ears.”

“You threatened them. I’m not going to put my niece Mirabella in danger to save myself. The mess that I’m in right now is my fault, so I’ll either fix it myself or die.”

“How noble of you. Get dressed, we’re going out.” He drops his hand and yanks a pair of gray sweats out of the wardrobe. Once he’s pulled them on, he slams out of the bedroom.

His footsteps thunder down the hallway, pause, and then come back.

“How do you take your coffee?” he calls through the door.

My eyebrows shoot up in surprise. He’s going to make me coffee after keeping me lashed to him all night? “Same as always.”

There’s a beat of silence, and I remember how this man put a white, sugarless coffee into my hands the morning after he turned up again after being absent so many months. I didn’t realize it was strange at the time, but I should have. My husband treated me with disdain, but he did make me the occasional cup of coffee, and he always remembered how I took it.

“Black, two sugars,” I tell the stranger.

His footsteps march off down the hall and disappear downstairs.

I wash my face and brush my teeth, twist up my hair and pin it, and then dress in jeans and a white tank top. Cautiously, I head downstairs to the kitchen. The stranger is moving around in there, and when I peek around the doorway, there he is. Shirtless and making coffee, his dark hair falling into his eyes. The gray sweats hug his firm ass and thighs and provocatively outline his still thickened cock.

He looks like my husband. Sounds like my husband. But the way my body is reacting to him, this is not my husband. Looking at this man makes me feel completely different to the way my husband made me feel.

The stranger notices me staring at him. “What?” he rubs the stubble on his jaw as if worried he has something on his face.

“I’m trying to tell the two of you apart.”

“Don’t bother. We don’t have any distinguishing moles, and Luca’s tattoos are identical to mine. We had a tattoo artist copy them onto his body exactly.”

So they’re the stranger’s tattoos, not Luca’s. I remember seeing Luca studying his tattoos like he didn’t recognize them after our wedding, and now I know why. It feels strange referring to the man I knew as my husband as Luca, and I just can’t deal with calling this man Nero.

He passes me a mug of coffee, and I stare at his forearm.

“They’re not all identical,” I say, reaching out to touch the daisy. “He didn’t have this one.”

He jerks his arm back as if I’ve given him an electric shock. “So what?”

“Why a daisy?”

“It’s just a tattoo. Don’t read anything into it.”

I study his face in silence. “Where are we going today?”

“You’ll see. Bring your coffee upstairs. I need to keep an eye on you while I get dressed.”

Instead of doing as he says, I slide onto a stool at the counter and take a sip. “You don’t have to watch me every moment of the day. I’ve wondered about that night for months, and now that I’m getting closer to the truth, the last thing I want to do is run.”

“Why wouldn’t you run? I’m going to kill you as soon as you tell me everything.”

I take another sip of my coffee, surprising myself about how nonchalant I feel.

He stares at me for a long time, and then shakes his head. “You’re a strange woman, Rieta Lombardi.”

He goes upstairs to get dressed, and I watch his broad, scarred, and tattooed back as he leaves the kitchen. That’s another thing that’s different about the two brothers. The scars. But there’s something else as well. This man looks at me like I’m the only woman in the world, even when his eyes are filled with hate.

I look out onto the sunny garden while I wait for him to return. Maybe I am a strange woman, but I want answers. A man is buried in my back garden, and my strong sense of right and wrong tells me that the person responsible has to pay for his death, and that person is probably me.

Fifteen minutes later, the stranger comes back downstairs, freshly shaved and wearing a black suit and leather shoes. I don’t recognize the clothing. He looks sharper and more dangerous than my husband, who always favored traditional suits.

He notices me staring as he buttons his suit jacket. “What?”

“Your clothes. They’re different.”

“I bought them the other day. There’s no need for me to pretend to be someone I’m not anymore.”

As he strides past me, I breathe in, and a rich, aromatic scent surrounds him, one that I’ve smelled before, but not for months. He smells like my fiancé.

The man who kissed me and caressed me.

The man who rescued me from the basement.

As if moving through a dream, I reach out and take hold of this stranger. He looks at me like I’m crazy, but I don’t care. Going up on tiptoe, I put my face next to his freshly shaved cheek and breathe in. My eyes drift closed in pleasure. He smells like the marriage I always wanted. The scent makes me want to burrow against his chest and never let go.

“Rieta. What the fuck are you doing?”

My eyes snap open. Both my arms are wrapped tightly around his waist. My cheeks heat from embarrassment, and I slowly disentangle myself from this man and follow him out the front door.

We drive across the city, and I start to feel sick as I realize where we’re going. To Nero’s office. Apart from that flash of memory with the shovel in the back garden, the last thing I remember from that night was seeing Nero’s—Luca’s—car parked outside.

I cross my arms across my chest tightly as I gaze through the windshield at the entrance, my stomach suddenly clenching with anxiety.

“Remember anything?” the man asks as he switches off the engine.

I shake my head. “I have a sense of dread. I don’t know why.”

Inside the building, there’s no one there. My husband’s business affairs ground to a halt without him, and I suppose everyone who worked for him was given severance by his lawyers and found other jobs months ago.

In my husband’s office, I stand in a corner with my nails digging into my palms while the stranger goes through the papers on the desk. He boots up the computer and enters the correct password.

Over the monitor, he shoots me a baleful glare. “Are you just going to stand there? Look around. See if anything jogs your memory.”

I gaze doubtfully around the room. Once or twice I picked my husband up after work, but I’ve never been in this room before. Nothing about it sparks any memories, but I dutifully walk around the room. It’s a large, luxurious space with heavy blinds on the windows. I open them, letting in the sunlight. Curious that they were closed. I thought people enjoyed sunlit offices, but my husband was a secretive man.

My fingers trail over the back of a white leather sofa and across a long, glass-topped cabinet displaying a few expensive-looking sculptures and a crystal bowl. The pale carpet is thick beneath my shoes. My foot passes over a dark spot, and then I pull it back.

Is that a drop of blood?

I get down on my knees and touch the reddish-brown spot. It’s old, and it’s been cleaned, but the stain is a stubborn one. It could be blood, but I’m not sure.

Out of the corner of my eye, something glistens in the dark beneath the cabinet. There’s about three inches of dusty space where the cleaners haven’t been so scrupulous.

“What’s that?” I murmur to myself.

“What’s what?”

I flatten myself against the carpet and reach under the cabinet until my fingers touch something small, cold, and flexible, and draw it out.

I turn it over in my hands, frowning. It’s a tartan hair barrette. I think I—

I gasp in shock.

No.

Please don’t let this be what I think it is. But the more I examine the hair clip, the more certain I am. I cover my mouth in horror.

Nero gets up from the desk and comes over to me. “What’s that you’ve found?”

Tears well in my eyes. I didn’t want to believe it was true, but I already had all the answers I needed at my wedding. How could I have been so willfully blind?

Memories flood back to me of that night, so fast that they hit me like a tidal wave. Splintered sentences and flashes of Luca’s face, and then whole conversations. I remember the rain and the blood and the tears.

I remember everything .

Nero grasps me by the elbows and pulls me to my feet. “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

Nero and Luca ran the same business and wore the same clothes. Twin brothers who shared everything including courting the same woman. Did Nero know what his brother was up to?

My skin crawls at the thought, and I pull myself out of his arms.

“I remember everything, and I know what happened to Luca.” I hold up the hair barrette for Nero to see. “But I want the truth from you first. You’re going to tell me everything about you and Luca and what went on behind my back, and you’re going to tell me who killed Paul Shields.”