Every twisted move Luca made was an exercise in power and control. I eventually learned—after endless hours of letting him yammer on about himself—that his parents were hyperzealous control freaks who held him to impossible OCD standards and rigid, militaristic schedules. The other day Merritt described them as alcoholic and narcissistic. And maybe that’s the way he portrayed them to her. Either way, there’s no denying Luca’s the progeny of two unstable people, and I was the vessel for his rebellion—as were his messy mane, unkemptness, and penchant for torturing the helpless.
He told me stories of trapping small neighborhood animals—usually raccoons or opossums—throwing them in garbage cans, and dousing them in lighter fluid before tossing in a match and watching them burn. He also told me he stole a friend’s pet rat once. Experimented on it for a week before it finally died. I’d give anything to scrub those gory details from my brain, but I’m pretty sure they’re permanently embossed in my gray matter.
I don’t care how successful or happily married that man is now, there’s no getting around his sickness. It’s rooted to his core, a living, breathing wickedness that resides deep in his marrow. There’s no fixing him, no saving him, and there’s certainly no redeeming him.
While I came here to reclaim my life, I also came back to beat him at his own game, to show him he no longer has an ounce of control over me.
I’m in control now.
His life is in my hands.
I could ruin him—and I intend to—but only after I draw this out a little longer, make him squirm, bleed his bank accounts dry, and send his wife and children far from his grasp.
He doesn’t deserve them.
Delphine rests her chin on her hand, gaze focused on me. Maybe she’s replaying our initial meeting in her head, going over all the things I did and didn’t divulge.
“How’d you get away?” She frowns.
“I didn’t get away so much as I got lucky.” Luck has never been a friend of mine, but there’s a first time for everything. “One day last summer he showed up, put a cloth sack over my head, and marched me into the woods with a gun shoved into my back. The bastard shot me and left me to die.”
“How’d you survive that?” Her mouth is agape.
“He shot me in the shoulder—left side. I think he meant for it to go through my heart, but it missed. Went out the other side. I bled out . . . enough for him to probably think it was a fatal blow. As soon as he was gone, I wrapped my shirt around the wound and sprinted for the nearest clearing. Ended up at some hunter’s cabin, where I was able to clean myself up. Cleared out all the man’s canned goods when I was done. Ate until I was sick.”
I can still taste the salty-sweet tang of cold pork and beans.
“You didn’t go to the police?” she asks.
“It’s hard to explain the state of mind I was in after all of that . . . survival mode, I guess you could say. I was certain if he knew I was alive, he’d come back and finish the job, so I laid low for as long as I could.” I shift in my seat. “In fact, when I was pleading for my life, I promised him I’d stay as good as dead if he let me live. Part of me wonders if he shot me in the shoulder on purpose—if that was his messed-up way of letting me live.”
But then that would be assuming there was a kind bone in his body.
There wasn’t.
Delphine’s lips purse. “So . . . what made you decide to come out of hiding?”
“I was homeless, grifting from town to town, taking jobs no one else wanted because they were the only ones that paid under the table,” I say. “Every night, I’d sleep on a park bench or in an alley, and I’d look up at the stars and fantasize about what my life would’ve been like had I not gotten involved with him in the first place, had I just trusted my gut . . .”
“You can’t blame yourself, angel.”
“I don’t,” I say. “It’s not about that. I just . . . I want to move on, but I can’t. I can’t move on until I can get on my feet, and I can’t get on my feet until I make some money, and I can’t do that without a job. Can’t get a job if I’m legally dead—”
Delphine makes her way to my end of the table, wrapping her arms around my shoulders and blanketing me with her earthy-sweet scent. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Everything’s going to be okay. One thing at a time.”
“And meanwhile, he’s living large with his Maserati and his fleet of restaurants,” I say. “To watch him with his pregnant wife and to know what he’s capable of . . . he doesn’t deserve what he has, Delphine. That woman doesn’t know what she’s sleeping next to every night.”
“And how could she?” Delphine asks. “He’s a master manipulator.”
Maybe I can never force Luca to know the gnawing pain of hunger or to shiver himself to sleep in a drafty cabin, ankles tied and flesh mouse-bitten. But I can level out karma in other ways.
For instance, I have no plans of hurting Merritt or their kids—because I’m not an evil human being, not even close—but I want him to think that I could, to believe I might.
I want him to lose sleep. I want him physically ill with worry. I want his thoughts to be so filled with anguish he doesn’t have room to enjoy life’s little pleasures. And I want to drain his bank account while I’m at it—compensation for lost time and wages I’ll never recover. But more important than any of that, I want him to know he no longer has an infinitesimal speck of power over me.
His options are slim—which I’m certain is why he’s so mum around me, why he’s giving me everything I’ve asked for thus far.
He can’t abduct me again. If I go missing, Delphine will point the police straight to him, and it won’t be hard for them to connect the dots. And he can’t go to the police about the extortion—it’ll only invite more questions, and in the end he’ll implicate himself.
He can warn Merritt to keep her distance, but he’s not with her twenty-four seven. Since he’s so busy running his crumbling empire, he doesn’t have the freedom that I have. And his funds are running dry—at least according to his own staff—which means his cushy life is being enjoyed on borrowed time . . . and I intend to make that borrowed time as miserable as possible.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
MERRITT
His name is Everett John—it isn’t my first choice, but it’s what my husband wants, and with all he’s been through lately, I decided to let him have that one thing. Anything to put a smile on his face again.
The original Everett Coletto—Luca’s paternal grandfather—was the one who took him in when he was seventeen, sparing him his last two high school years under his parents’ reign of terror. I understand wanting to honor the man for that, but some of the stories I’ve managed to get out of Luca over the years paint the first Everett in a light that’s hardly a shade above flattering.
Still, the human memory has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with emotion.
His grandfather made him feel safe.
Doesn’t matter how or why.
“I don’t say this to everyone, but you’ve got a beautiful little boy there,” says our nurse, a middle-aged RN named Catherine, as she hovers over our sleeping infant in his hospital bassinet, a grandmother-ish tenderness in her crinkling eyes that reminds me of my mother. I’ll never know if having grandchildren would have softened her, but I like to imagine it would’ve.