“Nina,” I said carefully. “I need to know the truth. I understand if you can’t talk about it, but, baby, just nod your head, yes or no. So there is absolutely no misunderstanding. That day in the elevator…did your husband hit you?”
She bit her lip, then slowly, she nodded.
“Multiple times?”
Another slow nod.
I inhaled deeply and exhaled through my nose. Don’t kill him. Don’t kill him. Yet.
“Did he…” I shook my head as I reached down and fingered the rip in her dress. God, I could hardly think it, let alone say it out loud. But I had to. I had to in order to do what needed to happen next. “Did he rape you?”
She bit her lip. Two more tears fell down her porcelain cheeks. And then, so slowly it followed the crack in my heart, she nodded one last time.
“So it wasn’t claustrophobia that day, was it? That’s—that’s why you’re afraid of elevators. Because of what he did to you in one.”
It made sense, now. She wasn’t afraid of any other confined spaces. Cars, planes, trains. Crowded rooms, balconies. None of them made a difference. But it was elevators—especially that elevator, I realized—that made her jump into a terror because of this.
“I couldn’t get out,” she whispered. “Matthew, I couldn’t get out!”
It was then I finally pulled her under my arm, stroked her hair until she started to calm again.
“Was that the only time?” I asked. I had to.
Her face buried in my shoulder, she shook her head silently.
“And was it...was that the first time?”
She paused. And again, shook her head.
“The last?”
Another pause. One more shake, side to side.
“Usually…I would just let him take what he wanted. After a while, it was easier than fighting him. Except for the times I just had to.” She touched her wrist with one hand.
“And after you and I started—”
“No,” she interrupted vehemently, sitting up in a fury. “Oh, Matthew, please believe me. I never cheated on you—”
“Cheated?” I said with disbelief. “Do you really think that if your husband raped you, I’d consider it cheating? As if I, the other fucking man, even had a right to say it anyway?”
“You have a right,” Nina said, sniffing. “You have a right to what belongs to you. As have I, do I not?”
I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing even though my blood was boiling. Sure, there was a part of me that wanted to agree with her, say she belonged to me.
But it wasn’t quite right.
“I don’t make that choice, doll. You do.”
“Well, I did,” she said, her voice floating sweetly through the air. “Every day since I met you, my love.”
“And when you did fight him?” I asked, even though I already knew.
Every bruise I had ever seen on her beautiful body was flashing through my mind. The shadows on her delicate wrists. The fading marks on her thighs or neck.
I closed my eyes, not wanting her to see the strong urge to murder I knew must have been reflected in them. The anger I felt toward myself for not knowing, and yet somehow knowing. And never really acting on it.
It would be so easy. It scared me how easy it would be, and how attractive. Haul him out on the premise of a citizen’s arrest. Bring him into the park and shove him in the trunk of my car. Wait until it was dark, then take a drive out to East New York. Maybe to The Hole, where we had first found his fall-down properties. Or nearby Betts Creek, right behind the water processing plant.
A couple of cable ties at the wrists. Dunk his feet in a pair of concrete boots. Down he’d go, into the mud and sludge with the rest of the leeches to rot. One call to Derek, or even Eric, and the evidence would be swallowed forever. No one would ever fucking ask what happened to Károly Kertész or Calvin Gardner, because the world all knew it would exponentially be better off without this piece of slime in it.
But.
Nonno’s face flashed before my eyes. His bid for me to do him proud. To be better than the rest. Not to sink to the lowest denominator, give in to every one of my base instincts, even when they screamed at me to find vengeance.
Yeah, it would be easy, for sure. But that didn’t make it right.
So instead I prayed, harder than I had ever done in my life. I prayed for forgiveness. I prayed for grace. I prayed for the strength to keep my weapons in my pocket and not turn them on the enemy who deserved them more than any man I had ever known.
Holy father, grant me the strength to forgive. Grant me the strength to walk away. Grant me the strength to be worthy of the gifts you have given me. Especially the love of this woman in her hour of need…
“Matthew?”
Nina’s voice, clear as a birdsong, brought me out of my trance.
“Who else knows?” I asked.
She blinked. “N-no one.”
I shook my head. “Someone knows. Your staff, maybe? A cook, a nanny? Did anyone ever say anything?”
She looked incredibly uncomfortable. “I—well, perhaps my old assistant, Moira. And maybe our cook, Marguerite. But they never saw anything.”
“Anyone else?” I prodded. I needed more, for her sake.
Nina swallowed. “And…C-Caitlyn.”
That genuinely surprised me. “Caitlyn? Your best friend? The one who literally tried to be you for ten straight years?”
Sadly, she nodded, allowed me to pull her back into my chest. “Ironic, isn’t it? The one person I trusted with my secrets was the one who had the most to hide from me.”
“Nina,” I said as I stroked her hair. “Baby, why didn’t you tell me? Fuck, I could have helped.”
“I wanted to protect you,” she whispered. “You, Eric, Jane, Olivia. Oh God, but I couldn’t even do that, could I? You heard him, Matthew, he’s not going to stop. And he’ll take Olivia, and he’ll take her like he took all those girls, and he’ll s-sell her, I know he will, and—”
“Shhhhh,” I said, wrapping both arms around her now. “He’s going to do nothing of the sort.”
But she pushed me away, suddenly full of action. “I can do more. I must do more. I can’t keep these secrets—look at them, look at the way they hurt people! I don’t want to hide anymore. I’ll refile on grounds of abuse. The lawyers said if I did it that way, it will be messy, but would be maybe harder for him to fight in the end…even if it is just my word against his…”
As she babbled on about her divorce plans, I examined Gardner’s swollen carcass, which was now snoring.
“Nina,” I interrupted suddenly. “That’s not necessary. But did you mean what you said about not hiding anymore?”
Beautiful and tear soaked, she nodded. “Y-yes.”
My girl. So brave. So damn valiant in ways I was only starting to understand. Ways I’d spend the rest of my life trying to understand if she would let me.
I pulled out my phone and scrolled until I found the contact I wanted.
“Zola!” Derek answered at once. “What’s up, man, it’s been a minute. How are you?”
“Hey. You at work?”
“Yeah. Actually, I’m at the station right now catching up on some paperwork. What’s going on?”
“Two things. I’m at the Met with Nina. I’m sitting here on a citizen’s arrest of Calvin Gardner.”
“Zola…” I could hear the disappointment in his voice. The same kind of tone men took when they saw a friend go too far down the rabbit hole with a girl who was no good. I knew what they all thought. That I’d thrown away my life.
“This is different, King,” I said a little too sharply. “Look, we have evidence of sexual assault against his wife, all right? I need you to send a squad car here ASAP to pick him up.”
“Sexual assault? Zola, come on. He’s not breaking the law by going to a party, is he? And do you really even know that—”
“Yes, I fuckin’ do, Derek!” I broke out. “I saw it myself!”
&nb
sp; Derek was quiet a minute. “Okay. Okay, sorry, man. Anything else?”
“Yeah. Call Jenny Kester in the domestic crimes unit in Manhattan. You have her home number?”
“Um, yeah…”
“No one will take my calls right now, King. you know that. But Jenny’s a good egg. We went to law school together.” I rubbed my face, wishing there were more I could do. But this was the right thing to do. “Tell her this is coming from me and that you need an emergency subpoena for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
“Zola, come on. Do you really want to involve another DA in your obsession with this girl? It’s over, man. She lost.”
“It’s not over,” I said, looking up at the cameras that hung from the corners of the room, and which I knew for a fact were installed in every elevator. “These are new charges. Rape in the first degree. And we have video proof.”
Nina’s mouth fell open with dread. “We—we do?”
“The Met has had twenty-four-seven surveillance cameras in every exhibit and elevator since 2004,” I told both her and Derek. “I know because of...well, some things that happened here last year.” I didn’t want to say to Derek that I had gone into the security room and personally deleted the evidence of Nina’s and my tryst in the elevator last year after learning that it recorded remotely even when it was offline. “Unless that elevators just ‘happened’ to be out of order that day, there is a recording somewhere of what he did to you, Nina. Irrefutable evidence.”
Nina blanched. “I…oh…”
The look on her face stopped me from rattling off more orders to Derek. Instead, I put my hand over the receiver. “Do you want to let him go?”
“I…I…”
My heart thumped with her. “Yes or no, Nina.”
She blinked, and then her face hardened. “No. I want him in jail.” She shook her head and straightened. “Let them release the tape if they want. I’m done hiding his secrets too.”
“That’s my girl.” I kissed her on the cheek. “All right, Derek. You’re asking for the security footage from the elevator bank that goes to the Costume Institute, March and April of 2013.”
“All right. And who am I looking for here?”
I paused. I almost didn’t want to say, because I knew Nina wouldn’t like it.
But Derek was good. I knew he wouldn’t joy-watch any of that shit, although whoever ended up prosecuting the case would, and so would the others. I’d seen footage of shit like that before. It wasn’t easy for anyone to look at that sort of thing. It made any decent human being sick to their stomach.
“The perp is Calvin Gardner. And the victim…”
I turned and found Nina watching me, her gray eyes turned to steel. She was crying and wild, but I was so fuckin’ proud to say she had never looked less like a victim. She nodded slowly. Do it, she seemed to say.
“The victim is Nina de Vries.”
Derek swore softly to himself. “You really don’t know how to stay out of trouble with this girl, do you?”
I looked at Nina again and touched my finger to her face. “Good trouble, though.”
She smiled, then placed a soft kiss on my lips.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“It’ll be there, King, I promise. We’ll wait here with Gardner for the patrol unit. First floor. The Greek room.”
“And I thought I was going to have a quiet night at home,” Derek said. “Wait there. I’ll be there too.”
He hung up. Nina and I sat there for a moment, still digesting everything for a few moments. Then, finally, I managed to push myself up from the ground.
“Duchess, I’m going to need that sash around your waist,” I said, even as I started stripping off my own white bow tie. It was a shame to be ruining any part of the suit Nina had bought, but it had to be done.
She handed me the garment, and then I crossed the hall to where Gardner lay. I bound his hands firmly behind his back, then sat his sloppy ass up so that he was sitting against a balustrade leading down to another floor, and tied his hands to the balustrade behind him.
Then I sat back on my heels, and without any mercy, reached back and slapped him across the face as hard as I could.
“Wake up, you stupid son of a bitch.”
Gardner blinked, groggy and his eyes fixed on me, and then he registered where he was and what had happened.
“I—what? What the fuck!”
“Calvin Gardner,” I said. “Károly Kertész. Whatever the fuck your name is. In about ten minutes, you’ll be under arrest for rape in the first degree. That’s a class B felony, punishable by up to twenty-five years in prison. And I don’t care how many judges you think you can bribe in this city—I know more. And now I will personally make sure your sloppy ass lands behind bars if it’s the last thing I do.”
Postlude
New York Star
August 4, 2018
Disgraced investor sentenced for first degree rape of socialite wife
Setting a landmark precedent for marital rape, Calvin Gardner, originally known as Károly Kertész before changing his name in 2004, was sentenced today for twenty-five years in a maximum-security prison for several counts of physical assault and rape of his estranged wife, New York socialite Nina de Vries. The case first burst on the scene when a 2013 video recording of Ms. de Vries being assaulted by her husband in an elevator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was leaked and went viral.
Gardner has faced nothing but legal woes over the last few years, but managed to elude them until last month, when former Brooklyn prosecutor Matthew Zola uncovered long term extortion of local judges and law enforcement officials. Mr. Zola was originally an attorney with the bureau pursuing the trafficking charges that Mr. Gardner eluded late last year.
“Even though I was off the case, something wasn’t right,” he said. “As a friend of the family, I couldn’t let it slide. So I did some digging, and it was pretty obvious what was going on.”
As a result of his work, six separate judges in the New York City districts have been indicted with child rape and corruption charges. Additionally, the Brooklyn DA has filed an appeal in the original sex trafficking case against Mr. Gardner, for which the disgraced businessman could face an additional fifty years if convicted. Additionally, the Italian government recently made a public extradition request for Mr. Gardner to stand trial for the murder of Giuseppe Bianchi, a literature and arts professor in Florence.
Ms. de Vries was not present at the sentencing and could not be reached for comment, but many speculate she may be present next week for the final hearing of her divorce proceedings against Mr. Gardner, which she refiled on grounds of abuse. Ms. de Vries is asking for full custody of their daughter, whom she has revealed is not even biologically related to Mr. Gardner, but a product of Ms. de Vries’s affair with Professor Bianchi when she was an exchange student abroad.
Epilogue
September 2018
Matthew
“Darling, I really don’t think it should go there. Wouldn’t you like that big, heavy bookshelf in your own private office?”
Brandon and I turned from where we had just set one of my bookshelves on the far side of the living room. Brandon straightened and wiped his brow, which shone with sweat, and I pulled at the collar of my grime-stained t-shirt. We both turned to find Nina leaning against the wall, dishtowel in hand, looking a dead ringer for Grace Kelly in a light blue skirt, a thin white tank top, and her hair tied back in a ponytail at the base of her neck.
“You know,” Brandon said, “there are these people. Called movers. And you can actually pay them to move things that might break your back. You know, like bookshelves?”
“Nina and I like to do things ourselves,” I said with a wink at my fiancée. “Ain’t that right, doll?”
Nina flashed a smile brighter than the rays of sunshine dappling the room through the windows. “Indeed, my love. But to come back to the question of your lovely shelf…”
After a summer of sitting o
n pins and needles in New York, it was officially move-in week for Nina and me—and one I never thought I’d make too. As of today, we were officially Massachusetts State residents, living in the little white craftsman Nina purchased at just twenty-one for a future she barely allowed herself to imagine. Today we were finally taking real, solid steps toward the happy ending we’d almost had to steal.
It hadn’t been an easy summer. Four solid months of keeping things quiet while the Manhattan DA built their case against Calvin. Then six weeks ago we caught a break when Caitlyn Calvert turned out to be a better friend than Nina thought. After she quietly pled guilty to charges of conspiracy, trafficking, and identity theft, Caitlyn also provided the Manhattan ADA overseeing Nina’s rape charge with a shocking amount of evidence that Calvin Gardner had been stalking Nina for years before they met and had essentially conned her into marrying him with the intent to embezzle as many assets as he could. Tapes, emails, text messages, letters. Caitlyn had been documenting Calvin’s every move for more than fifteen years.
As a result, the terms of Nina’s prenuptial agreement were still overturned, but in her favor, not in Calvin’s. Which meant that overnight, she became the sole owner of the Lexington Avenue penthouse, the house in Newton, what little was left in their savings account, and sole guardian of her daughter, Olivia, while the government seized the rest of the more illicit holdings of Pantheon and Calvin got a jail cell where he could rot.
Nina had decided to drop her own suit against her former friend. I thought she was being too nice, but she insisted retribution wasn’t her style.
“You know,” I had told her the day she made her decision. “Catholics don’t believe in karma.”
Nina had used part of the summer to convert to Catholicism in anticipation of our wedding the next year, and we spent a surprising amount of time debating what Nina found to be the more questionable parts of the faith.
The Honest Affair (Rose Gold Book 3) Page 30
