Page 65 of Brutal Husband

“Take a deep breath,cara mia. Just relax and take your time.”

He speaks so soothingly that I feel my body unclench.

Finally, I feel myself go.

When Nero hears the trickle, the corner of his mouth twitches. “I thought you’d forgotten how. Or are you feeling shy around your husband?”

My cheeks heat, I lay the test on the counter, flush the toilet, and wash my hands. Nero immediately goes over and looks at the test, inspecting it as though it will reveal the secrets of the universe.

“How long does it take? What am I looking for?”

“Two minutes, and if it’s positive, there will be two red lines. One red line means negative.” That single red line mocked me for months.

I could watch the test with Nero, but I’m too anxious to keep still. “I can’t look. You tell me.”

I pace up and down the small room, anxiety and doubt swirling through me. I felt so sure I was pregnant when I held Nero’s gun to my heart. If I am pregnant, I don’t know what I’m going to do. If I’m not, I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle the devastation of yet another disappointment.

“You weren’t telling me the truth about getting a vasectomy reversed because you never had one, right?” I ask Nero, still pacing.

“I never got one,” he confirms, staring at the test. “From the first time we had sex, I’ve been trying to get you pregnant. A vasectomy goes against everything I want from this marriage.”

“This marriage? We have a marriage?”

He looks away from the test for a moment and glances at my wedding ring. “I notice you never took it off.”

“Where’s yours? The one I put on your finger on our wedding day.”

I feel a warm glow in my heart as I sayour wedding day. I married this man standing beside me, not the man who emotionally tortured me for months. This man has always wanted to get me pregnant, and now maybe I am.

“Guess,” he mutters.

Around a corpse’s finger in the back garden? The warm glow fades.

I try to fit the puzzle pieces of our relationship together. According to what he told me, Nero was the man who proposed to me, but Luca was the man who made all our wedding arrangements. I celebrated my engagement with Luca twice, but I married Nero. Splitting the man I knew into two people is giving me a headache.

Nero gives a sharp intake of breath.

I whirl around with a gasp. “What does it say?”

Nero is staring at the test with huge eyes. I can’t bring myself to look. He turns to me and folds me in his arms, holding me tight. His lips seek my ear.

“We’re having a baby,cara mia.”

I cling to Nero’s bicep and bury my face in his shoulder.

I thought I was mentally prepared for a pregnancy after so many months of hoping, but I burst into noisy, ugly tears.

“I am?” I sob. “You wouldn’t lie to me?”

“Look for yourself.” Nero shows me the test, and there are two red lines. I can’t believe my eyes. I’m not defective, immoral, underserving, or the million other accusations I flung at myself while my so-called husband and I were “trying” for a baby. Was Luca laughing at me behind my back every time I got my hopes up? Did he relish my pain?

“I thought you would shed a few happy tears, not sob like your heart was breaking.”

I wipe the tears from my face and shake my head. “You don’t understand how many times I’ve stood in this room anxiously waiting for a pregnancy test to develop, only to be disappointed. I would torture myself by taking three, five, seven tests after my fertile period, hoping for a different result, but I was always devastated.”

My husband wouldn’t comfort me. The man I called Nero would fix me with cold eyes and say in an uncaring voice,Oh, well. Maybe next time. And we’d go through the hopeless and humiliating ritual of him pretending to inseminate me like I’m livestock the next month.

With the real Nero, I fell pregnant shockingly fast. “I suppose I conceived the night you came back and broke into this house. I was barely awake when you forced yourself on me.” I give a shaky laugh. “What a story to tell people.”

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