Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
~NADIA~
I ’m loaded down with greasy burgers, fries, and shakes from another of my favorites here in Denver. Yes, I’m going to gain sixty-five pounds if I keep this up, but there’s a method to my calorie-filled madness.
This is Annika’s favorite meal in the whole world. And if I want to get information out of her, it won’t hurt to feed her something extra delicious.
I walk into the medi-spa and smile at Ivie behind the front desk.
“Hey,” she says with a bright smile. “You’re right on time. The last patient just left, and Annika and I are officially free.”
She clicks the mouse on the computer, then hurries over and locks the door.
“Annika is in her office, but we can have lunch in the conference room.”
“Perfect. I brought a ton of food.”
“You always were my favorite,” Ivie says as she winks and knocks on Annika’s door. “Nadia’s here with food. Come join us.”
“I’ll be right there,” Annika calls back.
“She’s been in a mood today,” Ivie says as she opens the door to the conference room. I set the bags of food on the table. “I’ve hardly seen her at all, and when I asked her what was going on, she blew me off. Very not like her. So, I’m glad you’re here. Between the two of us, we’ll get it out of her.”
“I have plenty to get out of her,” I reply and then sigh. “I hate feeling so disengaged from you guys. I miss you.”
“You’re here. We talk and hear from you. But we miss you, too. We need to be better about seeing each other more often.”
“Agreed. I wonder what’s going on with Annika.” But I know. It’s that asshole, Rich.
Ivie and I unpack the bags, and I just start to suck on the straw of my vanilla shake when Annika walks in.
I immediately know that something isn’t right.
She doesn’t look up as she sits in one of the comfortable chairs and starts unwrapping her burger.
“Thanks for lunch,” she says.
“Look at me,” I order her.
“Don’t be silly?—”
“Look at me, A.”
She looks up, and I want to punch the wall. “What the hell happened?”
“What do you mean?”
Ivie leans in to examine Annika’s face. “How did I miss it? Annika, you have a black eye. You tried to cover it up, but holy shit. What’s going on?”
“Oh, it’s nothing.” Annika tries to laugh and pops a fry into her mouth. “I tripped while walking down the stairs, and?—”
“No.” My voice is hard and low and leaves no room for argument. “What. Happened. To you?”
With her eyes still trained on her fries, she shrugs a shoulder.
“I’ve been begging you to talk to me for days,” Ivie says. Her voice shakes with emotion. “You can trust us. You know that.”
“You’re the only two I can trust,” Annika whispers.
“Tell us the truth. Let us help.” I reach over and take her hand in mine.
“I don’t know who he is anymore,” she begins. “As soon as we got married, everything changed. It was like a switch flipped, and he went from being a fun, laid-back man to the devil himself.”
She rubs her forehead in agitation.
“Suddenly, he wants to control everything. Even what I eat. When he said last night that I should stick with salad, in front of all of you, I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me. I was so embarrassed.”
“He said that you should get to see your family once in a while,” I prompt her. “What was that about?”
“I’ve been telling him for weeks that I wanted to go see you or invite you here, and he kept telling me no. No way. He’s systematically cut me off from my parents, from everyone I love—except for Ivie because we work together.”
“Just let him try to cut me off from you,” Ivie says with fire in her voice. “I’ll cut his fucking balls off first.”
“Down, girl.” I smile at an irate Ivie. “Clearly, Rich can’t get rid of us. We’re here to stay. This all started after the wedding?”
“On the wedding night,” she confirms. “We went to the honeymoon suite, and I took a bite of some cake—we had so much wedding cake left—and he took it away from me and tossed it in the trash. Said I’d never eat that garbage again. That I was too fat.”
I’ve never experienced rage so swift and all-encompassing. I wish he was here right now so I could bloody his damn face.
“Since then, he’s counted every calorie. I have to keep a log of what I eat and give it to him at the end of the day. If he thinks I’m lying, well…”
She stops talking, and Ivie and I share a look.
“He what, Annika?”
She simply points to her eye.
“He’s been hitting you this whole time?” Ivie demands.
“Not often, but more than once is too many times.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” I ask. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“If I tell, the family will kill him.”
“So?”
Annika shakes her head. “I don’t want him dead. I just don’t want him. But I’m married to him now. I’m just…stuck.”
“Bullshit.”
“No way.”
Ivie and I speak in unison.
“Divorce is an option,” I say. “My father will absolutely approve of that, especially when I tell him about the abuse.”
“You can’t.” Annika grabs onto me, her movements desperate. “You can’t tell. You have to promise me that you won’t tell anyone. ”
“Annika—”
“Promise,” she continues. “I don’t want them to hurt him.”
“And why not?” I stand and pace the room, so frustrated that I don’t know what to do with myself. “Annika, he’s hurting you. Daily. Why shouldn’t the family take care of it? Even if it’s not death, he should be ostracized. He can go fend for himself. There’s no place for him here.”
“I agree,” Ivie says. “You’re not this woman. You’re not a punching bag. No one is, and you have the resources to get out of this.”
Annika sighs and rests her face in her hands.
“I can’t leave him. Not yet.”
“What else is happening that you’re not telling us?”
“I think he’s involved in something bad. I don’t know what, but I have to keep an eye on him for a little while longer.”
“To what end? I refuse to let you get killed over this, Annika.” Ivie stands and leans over toward her friend. “You don’t have anything to prove.”
“I just need a little time,” Annika insists.
I want to rail at her, and I can see that Ivie feels the same. But my cousin has dug her heels in.
“If he hits you again, you fucking call me.” My voice is ice. “You call me, and I’ll come get you.”
“Okay.”
I want to ask about Rafe. I want to convince her to leave that pitiful excuse for a man today.
But she’s had enough.
Ivie and I share a long look. The silent message is clear.
We’ll watch, and we’ll protect her.
Two hours later, I can’t get to Carmine fast enough. But on my way to the Marinelli office, I call my brother.
“Thought you didn’t want my help,” he says, and I roll my eyes.
“Don’t be a baby. I have a question. When Annika started dating Rich, and when he proposed, did the family do a standard background check on him?”
“Yeah, I ran it myself. He’s so clean; he’s boring. And his family is the same. Why?”
“I just left Annika.”
I hesitate. I don’t trust Alex with much, but he and Annika were close when we were younger. I think he’d want to know about this.
“Let’s just say that Rich isn’t the happy-go-lucky guy we all thought he was.”
“What does that mean? Is he hurting her?”
I sigh. “I was at their house for dinner last night, and he was a major ass. The way he spoke to her, the way he looked at her, it was not good. And today, she had a black eye.”
“What the fuck?”
“It just doesn’t make any sense, so I wanted to reach out and ask if you’d run the background. I should have known that it was done, but I needed to double-check.”
“If he’s a con man, it slipped past me.”
That wouldn’t surprise me. Alex is lazy, and if Papa gave him the task of running the check, it wouldn’t shock me if he just looked at the surface and then let it go.
Except this is Annika. And Alex has always had a soft spot for our cousin.
“What are you going to do now?” he asks.
“She asked me not to do anything for a little while, so I’ll just be here in case she needs me.”
That’s not the whole truth, but he doesn’t need to know the rest.
“Keep me posted, please,” he says, his voice softening. “If this continues, we’ll take care of it.”
“Yeah. We will. Okay, I’ll let you know if anything else happens.”
He clicks off without saying goodbye, and I hurry into the office to see the three Martinelli brothers all huddled around computers.
They are a sight to behold. Carmine and Shane are both tall, dark, and handsome, with chocolate eyes. Rafe is on the lighter side with blue eyes, but there’s no mistaking them for siblings. And just walking into this room would send a normal woman’s blood pressure into the stroke-zone.
“I might have something,” I say as I walk into the room. All three heads come up to look at me.
“Hello,” Carmine says as he stands and pulls me to him for a kiss. Right there, in front of the others. “I haven’t seen you all day.”
“Don’t get mushy in front of your brothers.”
“I’ll get mushy wherever I damn well please.”
I laugh as Shane clears his throat.
“Stop pawing at her and let the woman talk.”
“Yeah.” I slap at Carmine’s shoulder as I pull away. “Stop pawing at me.”
“You didn’t seem to mind last night.”
“Really?” Rafe demands.
“Fine.” Carmine lets me go, and I push my hair away from my face.
“Okay, so last night, something seemed very off with Annika.”
“Clearly, she and the new husband are having issues,” Shane says with a nod. “You could cut the tension with a fucking knife.”
“Definitely,” I agree. “And he just wasn’t acting like himself. That jerk isn’t the guy we all knew before the wedding.”
My eyes are on Rafe as I speak. His face is rigid, and he clenches his jaw as I keep talking.
“So, today, I decided to go see her, take her lunch, and do some digging. After all, Annika and Ivie are my two closest friends in the world, and if Annika is hurting, I want to know why. And I want to make someone pay.
“When I got there, I discovered that she had a black eye.”
“What the fuck?” Rafe asks as he comes out of his seat. “The bastard hit her?”
“Yeah.” My voice quiets. “He did. And he’s done more than that.”
I relay what happened during my lunch with my friends. When I finish, all three men are pacing the office, each with mutiny written all over his handsome face.
“I’ll fucking kill him with my bare hands,” Rafe growls, but I shake my head.
“She wants time. And here’s the part that doesn’t add up, though I didn’t say anything to her at the time. She thinks he’s up to something.”
“Up to what?” Carmine asks.
“She didn’t say, but my alarm bells went off like crazy. I asked Alex if the family did a standard background check before the wedding, and he said that he did it. But my brother is lazy, and I know he didn’t dive very deep. He couldn’t have.”
“I can go so deep, Richard will feel me in his kidneys,” Shane says, reaching for the computer. His fingers fly over the keyboard. “Yeah, this first pass is pretty standard. Credit score is seven-fifty. No jail. Really nothing to report at all.”
“That’s too tidy,” Rafe says, his face still set in hard lines. “That reeks of cover-up.”
“Agreed. It would be easier if I had fingerprints.”
“Be right back.” I turn to leave, but Carmine stops me.
“You’re not going by yourself.”
“Well, then get a move on, and let’s go. I’ll call Annika from the car. She can meet us there. Let’s nail this whole mess on this slimeball.”
Carmine and I hurry to his rental. I barely have time to fasten my seatbelt before he’s peeling out of the parking lot and merging onto the freeway.
“How could my family let this happen?” I wonder out loud. “How the fuck did Rich make his slimy way into my family and start killing people? And why would he do it at his own wedding?”
“Smoke and mirrors,” Carmine says. “If it happened at the wedding, he’d be the last person anyone would look at. Son of a bitch. ”
“Why does a random doctor from Denver want to kill your father?” I wonder out loud. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Shane’s still digging. I don’t buy this whole boring suburban doctor bit. He’s hiding something, and we’ll find out what it is. In the meantime, we need to get those prints, and we need to make sure Annika is safe. I don’t like her being there with him.”
“I don’t, either.” I shake my head and watch the city zoom by. “It was all I could do not to kidnap her and make her come with me. I don’t want that asshole anywhere near her, ever again.”
I’m just about to call Annika when my phone rings in my hand. “Hey, I was just going to call you.”
“I need you.” Annika breathes hard in my ear. She sounds panicked.
“What’s wrong?”
“I need you to come to my house.”
“Carmine and I are headed there now. That’s why I was going to call. Are you hurt?”
“No, but if he gets here before you, I will be. Hurry. Please, hurry.”
She hangs up, and Carmine steps on the gas.
“You heard?”
“Yeah.” The set of his mouth is grim. “I don’t know what I expected when we came to Denver, but this isn’t it.”
“No. It’s not.”
I want to thank him. His family is under no obligation to help with this. But I’ve learned one thing in the months I’ve known him: Carmine is a man of honor.
All the Martinellis are.
They may be part of a mob family, but they do what’s right. And my instincts weren’t wrong when I decided to start trusting him.
He’s become much more than just a job to me. There are feelings in play that I haven’t taken the time to dissect, to just be with and figure out.
There just hasn’t been time. I need to do some sorting, determine where my head and heart are.
But for now, it’s enough to be able to depend on him—and to know that I’m safe.
Carmine drives through the open gates of Annika’s drive, and when we pull up to the front door, he cuts the engine, and we’re both out of the car like a shot.
Annika opens the door, her eyes wide in shock.
“What is it?”
“Oh, God.”