Unmissing(64)

“Luca?” Merritt’s voice pushes through the wooden door, and the handle jiggles. “Luca, why’s the door locked? Let me in . . .”

She raps on the door, loud enough to be heard but low enough that it wouldn’t wake a sleeping child in the next room.

Our eyes lock. His lips press thin and his nostrils flare, but when he tries to respond, I flatten my palm over his mouth.

I was surprised to find their back door unlocked when I arrived. I mean, technically it was locked. The bolt had been shifted into the proper position. But a few hardy pushes were enough to jimmy it open. That’s the thing with these old houses . . . they can’t always be trusted. Something is always in disrepair, and you never realize it until the moment you actually need it.

“Luca,” she says, louder this time. “Open the door.”

He makes a face beneath my hand, a silent urge for me to do something. But the door stops jiggling and the floor creaks in the hall, as if she’s walking away.

I lift my hand from his thin mouth.

“She’s going to get a key,” he whispers.

Shrugging, I say, “Then I guess we’ll have some explaining to do in a minute, won’t we?”

Maybe I shouldn’t, but I find this entire thing amusing . . . even more amusing than the expression on his face when he walked into his house last month and saw me sitting at his kitchen table.

It was a precious little moment—one for the books.

But this is priceless.

“So what’s your plan?” he asks.

“Wouldn’t you like to know . . .”

“You’ve already destroyed my marriage. I’ve given you everything you need to get back on your feet. What are you going to gain from this?” He tugs at his restraints.

I remove the knife tip from his throat and climb off the bed to stretch.

“I want justice. And I want you to come clean to your wife about what you did,” I say, adding, “and what you are.”

“You want to know what I am?” He spits his words at me. “I knew you weren’t dead when I left you there. I never wanted to kill you. You’re only alive because I saved you.”

“You’re pathetic.” And delusional if he thinks I’m believing a word out of his ugly mouth.

“You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true. I might be a lot of things, Lydia. I’m fucked up and I know it. But I’m not a murderer.”

“You left me to die . . . I don’t see how that redeems you.”

I’d been captive for several years the night he choked on a handful of Marcona almonds. With a red face and blue lips, he gasped for air, mouthing directives for me to help him while I backed myself into the corner, praying for him to die.

In an unfortunate turn of events, he was able to clear the blockage himself.

But that moment has haunted me for years, that teasing proximity to freedom.

Would I have been a murderer if I’d left him to die?

“I shot you in the shoulder,” he says, “with a nine millimeter. I knew it’d pass through. Most people can survive that.”

“You couldn’t have known that.” I roll my eyes—mostly at myself for hearing him out. “You left me in the middle of nowhere, bleeding out . . .”

It wasn’t the first time he made me bleed. I’d existed a mere three weeks with his monstrous alter ego when he appeared late one evening, knife, bucket, and gauze in tow. With dead eyes, he sliced the flesh of my stomach as I writhed against my restraints, filling the small container with my blood. I passed out after that. When it was over, I was bandaged, my muscles aching where he’d slashed through them. And when I slid a hand across my pulsing scalp, my fingertips grazed torn patches.

I know now that he used my blood and hair to stage a crime scene—something to make the police have reason to suspect I’d been killed and disposed of. A local medical examiner was quoted as saying, “It’s highly unlikely a person could survive that kind of blood loss.” That douche was instrumental in getting the judge to approve my death certificate.

Idiots.

All of them.

“You weren’t going to die,” he says. “I just didn’t think you were stupid enough to come back.”

The door busts open, slamming on the other side. Merritt’s shadowy figure fills the narrow doorway, a skeleton key pinched between her fingers.

I expect him to solicit her help—or for her to react. But for an endless handful of seconds, the three of us are frozen in a silent standoff.

“Merritt,” I say, breaking that silence. “I’m going to need you to stay calm.”

Her watchful gaze passes between us.

“There’s something you need to know about your husband.” I nod toward the dresser. “Those papers over there—those are life insurance declaration pages. Luca has five million on you and your daughter.”

The skeleton key lands on the floor with a metallic clunk before she strides across the room and gathers the papers in her hand. Squinting in the dim light, she studies the words, pages through the documents, and checks the backs.

Her clear, crystalline eyes turn a bone-chilling shade of blue from across the room as they narrow in on her husband.

Safe to say she didn’t know about these . . .

“You disgust me.” She spits her words at her husband, still residing on the opposite side of the room. “You’re a sorry, pathetic excuse for a man.”