Chapter 1

My wrists chafed at my bonds in the darkness, even as I wondered how the fuck I was gonna get free. Then again, with Danielle now out of the room, and likely to be gone for a good while, I had some time to work out a solution. I recalled that I had a pair of hair clippers from a family shaving kit and it struck me that they should be powerful enough to cut my restraints. After that, of course, I would be out the door and give my vicious bitch of a wife a nasty surprise of her own.

Any love that I had for her was now twisted with anger and hate at her despicable cruelty. My arousal was only due to having seen a sexy woman get fucked in so many ways, but that required part of my brain to forget that this was part of her psychological torture plan. She was clearly demented or insane or something. Perhaps she had borderline personality disorder. I wouldn’t be shocked if she did.

In any case, I hobbled my way to the bathroom, turned on the lights, and sure enough found my clippers. It took no small amount of work to cut through the bonds, but once I freed my hands, liberating my feet was much easier. I stared at the chafe marks left by the restraints and decided to keep the bonds themselves as evidence. I also knew that I needed to go to the hospital. I didn’t know what kind of drugs Danielle had used on me to put me under long enough for her to tie me up, and there was a legitimate concern about their side effects.

I found my phone, checked the bank account, and moved as much as I could into another account that I had thankfully never closed or mentioned to Danielle yet. There were sounds for that. For one thing, I didn’t know how much I would have to pay a lawyer for his or her fee and I would definitely need one. For a second, I didn’t know how much the doctor co-pay would be, either.

Furthermore, I wanted Danielle to deal with the first shocks of my revenge, which would be financial in nature. Two could play that revenge game, couldn’t they? She was gonna be on her own henceforth, anyway, no loving hubby to pay her way for anything at all. It would be a case of “goodbye, dear,” indeed, to use her own parting words to me.

I was never into the whole “burn the bitch, burn the bastard” mentality in the past, but now, now I wanted to douse that stupid cunt with gasoline, light her on fire, and then piss on the ashes. Of course, that was metaphorical ... mostly. All I knew was that I was Simon Avanti, Jr. and I was about to teach my darling wife why we Italians invented vendettas (okay, half-Italian, half-Jew, but who’s counting?). I was Simon in any case, and what Simon said was supposed to go, right?

I quickly gathered whatever else I could, rushed out the door, piled into my Jeep, and headed straight for the Urgent Care facility posthaste. I doubted that I even bothered to lock the front door, but who cared? It wasn’t my home anymore. I wanted nothing more to do with that place. Danielle and her loverboy Ramone could keep it, for all I cared.

That was when it hit me, why Ramone was so familiar ... he was my cousin! Ramone Divoli, of all people! Ugh, what a traitor! That would make family reunions rough, if I ever bothered to show up for them. I had been a little too groggy to remember him earlier, but now I was much more alert, thank Heaven. Well, the family could spoil his rotten ass, but they could do so without me. They had always coddled him, but I never did. Maybe that he was so eager to make me suffer.

When I got to the Urgent Care Center, I stopped in the parking lot long enough to take several pics of my injuries, just in case I needed them for documentation. Oh, yes, I was a methodical prick when it came to revenge and Danielle was about to learn what that would entail. Others might act on impulse or white-hot rage, but I would act with a cold fury and meticulously plan every detail down to a science.

I was in the waiting room for a good while, of course, at which point I started getting texts from Danielle. Where was I, she asked. I ignored her. Why had I left the front door unlocked? I ignored that one, too. The next one was ... why had I moved money from the joint-account and why were my possessions gone? I ignored that still, as if I never even saw it. The phone rang. I let it go to voicemail. It rang again, same result. It rang a third time and I could see that she had the temerity to leave an actual voicemail this time.

“Honey, if you’re hearing this, please call me back. We can work through this. I just had to teach you a lesson, that was all. You said it yourself. We can work through this. We couldn’t until I taught you the lesson. Now that I have, we can work it out. Please, don’t do anything rash. I didn’t mean the ‘goodbye dear’ part as permanent. The Ramone thing ... it was a one-night stand, that’s all. Please come home! You’re starting to scare me, Simon.”

“Mr. Avanti?” the nurse called me up by then.

She was a very pretty Asian lady with a more slender physique or build than I usually preferred, but that was okay. Anyone who didn’t remind me of my nasty wife was far more attractive to me all of the sudden. In any case, I showed her the chafe marks and she looked at me in real shock as well as concern. She also noted an elevated pulse and high blood pressure, both systolic and diastolic. Well, duh ... I thought ... that tends to happen when one is drugged, bound, and held hostage in one’s own home.

“Mr. Avanti ... this is ... very troubling. I’ll let Dr. Habib know about this for sure. This wasn’t playful bedroom bondage, was it? This was abduction and false imprisonment. Those are crimes, sir. You’ve been a victim of a crime. Dr. Habib will have to report this matter to the police. Were you drugged at all? I didn’t see any evidence of sexual assault, so hopefully we can rule that out, but perhaps we should do a rape kit, just in case,” the nurse, whose name read Pham, informed me now.

“No ... I wasn’t raped. But I didn’t agree to be tied up at all. I was basically hogtied, as you can see from the ligature marks. Yes, I believe that I was drugged, because I came to from an unconscious state already in captivity. My wife ... she did this. With help from her ... partner,” I told Pham, eager to throw Danielle and Ramone under the bus now.

It was an eternity until the poking and prodding, which included a blood and urine screen, finished, and Dr. Habib entered the room. She was a seriously gorgeous Middle Eastern woman, though her professional attire minimized her sultry sex appeal to a limited extent when she was all business as with right now. Her eyes were as wide as saucers as she read what information she could find on her chart. It was very alarming indeed. She even looked a bit traumatized from reading the chart, as if it brought back really nasty memories or flashbacks.

“Mr. Avanti, this is deeply disturbing, I don’t mind telling you that. It appears to me, from little information I can collect, from the evidence, that you’ve been the victim of a serious and violent crime, not just a little conjugal horseplay. You said that your wife, Mrs. Danielle Avanti, drugged and restrained you? She said that she had a partner. Was the partner a man or a woman? Were they ... sexually intimate with your wife? Were either or both of them sexually intimate with you during this ... crime?

“That’s clearly what it was. At the very least, reckless endangerment, false imprisonment, kidnapping, assault, depraved indifference, domestic violence, the list of criminal charges potentially invoked is legion. This is also a very serious betrayal by one’s own spouse, and no, I don’t necessarily mean the adultery part. I mean abduction, captivity, drugging, and endangering your health with drugs whose side effects we may not fully realize for months, maybe even years.