Page 56 of Brutal Husband

Rieta is standing on the top step, her face bloody and tear-streaked, her eyes filled with terror. She must have been hitting her head against the door, she was so afraid.

Her eyelashes flutter and her knees buckle, and I catch her in my arms. We sink down onto the floor together, and I rock her back and forth as she cries. There’s only blackness beyond her, and the freezing, damp, musty scent of the basement. It’s unlikely that anything in the basement was going to threaten her life, but the fear was real to Rieta.

As I stroke her hair and comfort her, she burrows into my arms, clinging on for dear life. The sensation is a surprising one. I’ve never had a woman seek my protection before.

“Don’t leave me,” she begs.

My answer is swift and fierce. “I won’t. I’ve got you.”

I pick her up in my arms, carry her into the living room, and lay her on the sofa. There are cuts on her forehead, and blood has trickled down her face to mingle with her tears. Fucking hell, even her fingernails are torn and bleeding. Rieta must have felt as though she was being buried alive. Meanwhile Giulia has taken herself off to bed for a good night’s sleep, the sadistic bitch.

I kiss Rieta’s knuckles, but when I try to leave her side for a moment, she panics and grabs hold of me, leaving smears of blood all over my shirt. It’s only after I assure her that I’ll be right back that she allows me to go fetch something to clean her up with. I find a first aid kit in a downstairs bathroom and run a washcloth under warm water.

As I clean the blood off her and put Band-Aids on Rieta’s fingers and brow, I keep asking myself, how could this have happened? What kind of nightmare family is this, where a daughter is treated with so much cruelty for breaking off a marriage to a stranger? If this is the way Giulia treats Rieta now, I wonder what kind of horrors she subjected her to in her childhood.

A tight feeling spreads through my chest. I want to protect this woman. I need to know that nothing like this is going to happen to her ever again.

Rieta has calmed down a little as I’ve tended to her, and she’s watching me with big, confused eyes.

I give her a glass of water to drink and press a kiss to her lips, and then I shout for her mother to come downstairs, injecting all the rage that I’m feeling into my words.

A moment later, Giulia appears. She looks at her daughter, and then at the blood on my shirt and the furious expression on my face. Her expression is filled with disdain. She’s not afraid of me.

I’ll make her fucking afraid of me.

“Why was Rieta locked in the basement? You knew Rieta would be so terrified that she would hurt herself, and you locked her down there anyway. Apologize to your daughter.”

When Giulia refuses to apologize, I see red. Seizing her by the throat, I seethe in her face, “Apologize to your daughter, or I will strangle the fucking life out of you.”

Rieta doesn’t try to stop me. She doesn’t even make a peep.

Good girl, you just let me deal with this.

Giulia apologizes, but unwillingly, and it’s not enough. I want to see her suffer. I want to take Rieta out of this hateful place, but things are too complicated right now.

I make Rieta the only promise I can and seal it with a kiss. “You will never be lost in the dark ever again,cara mia. I will always find you.”

This woman is going to be my wife. She’s not going to suffer in that house for a moment longer than she needs to. My own mother would hardly win mother of the year, but she wasn’t a spiteful bitch like Giulia Bianchi. In most of my childhood memories, she had a cigarette held between her fingers, gazing out the window as though something was lying heavily on her mind.

All throughout my childhood, I sensed that something was missing. Someone important. I could feel their absence like an ache, and when I said that to people, they told me it was because I never knew my father. That didn’t seem right to me. I didn’t miss my father. I didn’t care about my father. I was told that he had died when I was a baby. It was someone else who was missing, and they haunted my life.

Then eighteen months ago, a ghost walked into my life.

The drive back to my office is a short one. Not the official office that belongs to Nero Lombardi, but the place where we go when we need to speak with each other. It’s a nondescript office building sandwiched between a drycleaner and a Chinese restaurant. I live in the apartment above the office. It’s not luxurious, but I don’t need luxury, and it’s not like I can bring guests here anyway. Everything about our use of this building is a closely guarded secret.

I park at the back, swipe through the security door with a card, and go inside, heading upstairs to the office.

He’s sitting at the desk typing away on his laptop. He glances up briefly as I enter the room, and I see my own face looking back at me.

“I fixed it,” I tell him.

“Fixed what?” he asks absent-mindedly.

“Things with Rieta. The broken engagement.”

He frowns, still typing. “I didn’t ask you to do that.”

The back of my neck prickles with annoyance. “Does everything I do have to be cleared with my brother?”

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