I told him, “Looks like we’re now doing tetra packs of cat food because someone is a fucking pussy.”
I’ve had my fun playing poker and doing coin tosses with him. He usually loses poker and faces consequences. Three days without eating. He won once so he got hosed down with the pressure washer only at half strength and was allowed to shampoo his hair and brush his teeth.
The coin tosses. He always loses those because he never gets to see whether it was heads or tails.
He yoyos between pleading for his life to pleading for death.
“How about you kill me? Then you’ll have more free time to fuck my fiancée?” he suggested a few days before we got married and then he flashed a smile at me.
The bastard has balls on him, that’s for sure.
“How about I marry her? How about you stay down here for three years before I end you?”
He thought I went soft when he got away with shit before. Now he knows I’m not too legit to pay back those who fuck me over. I will never be too legit for that.
I told him before I left that I was putting a ring on her finger after putting him in the dark in the cistern so his cell could be upgraded.
He shouted that I’d pay for my sins, that he knew something I didn’t about some payback coming my way.
I then pissed on him in the cistern before putting the lid on it and leaving to go home and make arrangements to marry Violet.
It wasn’t just his comments calling her his fiancée that made me want to marry her immediately. Once I decided I needed to marry her, the urge was fierce. And it might have also had something to do with the fact that it hit me that day that it was the anniversary of my mother’s death. Also that we were only a few days away from Raymond being due in court – that if Violet is my wife and anything gets called into question, if anything goes wrong with the shit I’ve done that she’ll be taken care of? I don’t know, I just knew I didn’t want to wait another day. I also wanted that date on the calendar to stop being about Brianne Coulter’s death so it’s the day I made Violet my bride.
He rarely crossed my mind while we were away on our honeymoon. That was about us. And our last night before heading home when Violet handed me the burden of Raymond Iadanza by the fire, I took that seriously. I’d already decided to take the burden from her but having her hand it to me felt significant. I don’t want her worrying about him. I don’t want her plagued by the past three years. I want her happy, thinking about the future, I want her forgetting about him more and more every day until days, weeks, months go by without him being as much as a blip on her radar.
The other day I played a video of the back of her and her work friend Cammy talking about her honeymoon, telling Cammy how awesome her husband is. How I’m romantic, caring, how she’s happier than she’s ever been. Nodding enthusiastically when Cammy asked her if her new husband was also the best lover she’s ever had.
Though I enjoyed hearing her talk about me to her friends, I should probably take the cameras out of her office since I can’t really justify it anymore.
7
Violet
Two Days Later
Finally, I’ve found the right key. The lock turns.
I pull the key out and take a big breath before I pull the large slide-lock across at the top of the door and then the middle one before I squat to do the same at the very bottom.
I shakily turn the doorknob. Do I really want to know what’s on the other side of the door?
I have to know.
I have to know that, no, what my gut is telling me is wrong. It has to be wrong.
Ever since I saw inside that cistern, the rust-colored letter V and i, I’ve wondered. I’ve wondered why this old basement has a new-looking door with so many locks. That’s why I drove here by myself today. To see for myself. It’s been bothering me for two days, so I have to know.
A grotesque odor hits my nose and I’m about to lose the last meal I ate. I hold my breath and flash the light from my phone at the corner in there.
And what I see…
No.
Movement behind me makes me startle before I twist to look behind me.
My husband.
“Baby. You shouldn’t be down here,” he says.
“I probably shouldn’t,” I whisper, sadly.
My heart feels like it’s splintering apart right now.
“Violet…” Killian tries and hooks his arm around my waist from behind me.