“Nate…he…” I choose my words carefully. I don’t want him to know Addie was involved too. No good can come of that. Anyway, this is between me and my husband. “He tried to kill me.”
Jay looks up at me, his expression frozen in horror.
“He tried to bury me in the dirt,” I say. “But I wasn’t dead. I waited for him to leave, and then I got back to the road.”
“Eve,” he breathes.
I shiver under his coat. “I want him to pay for this.”
“We’ll call the police right now.”
“No,” I say firmly. “I want to do this my way. I want to make sure that he pays for everything he has done.”
His brows knit together, below that jagged scar on his hairline. “Okay…”
“Is…is there anywhere you know that I can stay for a few days?”
“We have a tool shed,” he says thoughtfully. “It’s out in the back. Nobody ever uses it. I could stick a sleeping bag out there. It won’t be comfortable, but it’s warm enough with the door closed.”
“Perfect,” I say. “And there are a few other things I need your help with.”
He looks at me with absolute devotion in his eyes. “I will do whatever you want.”
And he does.
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Chapter Eighty
EVE
IT WAS Jay who hit Nate on the head with a rock and knocked him out.
I wanted to do it, but logically, it made more sense for Jay to do it. He is taller than Nate and likely stronger. If I did it, I might not have knocked him out. I couldn’t risk that. Not after the things I did to ensure he would end up in this very spot.
Jay and I have spent the last two days tormenting my husband. It was risky but worth it. I knew after he saw that raven in the kitchen, he would be convinced I was still alive and end up right here. Nobody else but me would torment him that way.
“The Raven”—his favorite poem of all time. I know it all too well.
Nate is unconscious on the ground, his handsome features slack. I want to take the rock from Jay and hit him again, but I need him to be able to wake up because we are far from done. He’ll regain consciousness soon, so we have to act quickly. Jay reaches into the pocket of his coat and pulls out a roll of duct tape. He holds it out to me.
“Want to do the honors?” he asks.
I certainly do. I bind my husband’s wrists together in front of him, and then I bind his ankles as well. As I finish tying his ankles together, he groans on the muddy ground. His eyes slowly crack open.
“He’s waking up,” I tell Jay. “Throw him in the hole.”
If Nate wasn’t awake before, dropping him into that shallow pool of freezing cold water does the trick. His eyelids flutter open, and he stares up at me, blinking against the droplets of rain. Jay stays carefully out of sight.
“Eve?” Nate croaks.
I don’t say anything. I allow him a moment to take stock of his situation. The fact that he is lying in a shallow grave, in a pool of muddy water, and his wrists and ankles are bound together. I watch the panic dawning on his face.
“Eve,” he gasps. “What are you doing? What’s going on?”
I stare down at my husband. When I stood before him in front of a judge on our wedding day—the happiest day of my life—I never imagined that I could hate him as much as I do at this moment. “You tried to kill me. You buried me in this hole.”
“I…” Nate shifts, struggling to keep his face above the muddy water in the grave. “I’m so sorry I did that, Eve. I made a terrible mistake. That’s why I came back.”
“That’s not why you came back. You came back to make sure I was really dead.”
His Adam’s apple bobs. “Okay, fine. You’re right. I did a terrible thing. I’m a terrible person.” He blinks water out of his eyes again. “But you’re not. This isn’t you. I know you.”
“You don’t know me.” I bark out a laugh. “You haven’t known me in years. And you definitely don’t love me.”
“I admit, we’ve had our problems…”
I laugh again. “Have we now?”
Nate is struggling to sit up, trying to keep his head above the shallow pool that has formed at the bottom of the grave. “Please, Eve. This isn’t you. You don’t want to do this. It won’t solve your problems.”
“Yes, you know all about my problems, don’t you? Considering you are the cause of all of them.”