Page 76 of Brutal Husband

“I’m Nero,” he seethes.

While I’m immobilized, Luca shoves me onto my stomach with his foot and lashes my arms behind my back.

My brother makes a phone call, but my brain has been rattled around so hard in my skull that I can’t follow the words. It sounds like someone is coming here. If someone is coming here, then our carefully constructed lie is about to fall apart. Rieta is the only one who can know that there are two of us.

I twist around as much as possible to see my brother standing over me. “What the fuck do you think you’re—”

Luca jabs the Taser into my lower back, right against my spine. I nearly black out from the pain. When I come back into myself, I’m panting, and my arms and legs feel like jelly.

“I don’t know who repulses me more. Her or you,” Luca says. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him sound so deadly furious before. “She was so eager to spread her legs for you, the disgusting little whore. I’m going to make her regret that. And you? You think you have any say in who Nero Lombardi is? You were meant to do as you were fucking told and never challenge me. Why was that so hard?”

Luca straightens up and drives his foot into my stomach with so much force that I can’t drag a breath into my lungs.

“I’m sending you away. While you’re suffering, I want you to remember that I’ll be here making Rieta suffer ten times as much as you are. That stupid little bitch will have no idea why,and there’ll be no one coming to save her. Because you’re never coming back.”

The door opens and I hear several sets of footsteps.

“This is my brother, Luca,” he says. “Get him out of my sight. I’ve sent you the place where I want him taken.”

I’m lifted onto my feet by several pairs of hands. “I’m Nero! That’s Luca. Let me go. Get your fucking hands off me.”

The men are deaf to my protests as they drag me toward the door.

“Wait,” Luca calls.

The men stop. There are footsteps behind me, and I feel a tug on my left hand.

Luca comes around in front of me and holds his hand before my face as he slides my wedding ring onto his finger. “I’ll need this when I go meet my wife. I hope there are no hard feelings, Luca. You left me no choice.”

I lose all control, shouting and kicking and wrenching myself back and forth in my captors’ arms. I almost pull myself free.

“Get a hold of him,” Luca shouts.

Something slams into the base of my skull, and the world goes black.

I awaketo an almighty thumping on my skull. It takes me a moment to realize that some of the thumping is coming from inside my own head, and the rest is a motor banging away. There’s a strange rushing noise all around me.

With a groan, I open my eyes and lift my head. I’m in a strange, cylindrical room full of crates that have been lashed down, and it’s freezing cold.

Where the fuck am I?

I’m able to sit up, but it takes a lot of effort because my hands are tied behind my back. Not far away, a man sits in a fold-down seat that’s attached to a wall, and he’s reading a newspaper. Beside him is an oval-shaped window.

Something clicks in my foggy brain. I’m on a plane? I think I am, but this isn’t a domestic aircraft. From the looks of things, I’m in a dirty and banged-up freight plane.

The man reading the newspaper peers over it at me and calls out in accented English, “He’s awake.”

A second man appears, and he doesn’t bother looking at me as he digs around in his frayed army green jacket for something. It’s a hypodermic syringe that he fills from a half-empty bottle.

He approaches me with his dirty fucking nails and what looks like an alarming intention to stick me with the needle.

I back away as much as I can against the plane’s fuselage. “No, don’t, what the fuck—”

The stranger pins me down with his boot and jabs the needle into my neck.

The world goes black once more.

When I wake up,I’m being dragged out of a vehicle and across snowy ground. There are men speaking around me, but I can’t understand a word of what they’re saying. At first I assume it’s because of all the drugs they’ve pumped into me, but then I realize it’s because they’re not speaking English.

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