Deadly Devotion

Chapter 22

Chiara

In the weeks that followed, I came too close to losing my mind.

Nico stayed at the hospital for a week, and after insisting and disregarding the doctor's recommendation, we took him home so he could rest. His period of recovery lasted 3 weeks, during which I had to juggle my online classes, Nico's business, and his sour attitude. He was upset, to say the least, that he wasn't allowed to leave the house. When he had insisted on coming home, I had made sure that he understood that he was to follow my instructions to a T. He had  agreed then, thinking that if he gave me his puppy eyes and called me a few sweet names in Italian I would be lenient and allow him to do whatever the fuck he wanted. Needless to say, he was very wrong. Visitations were not allowed, and other than my brothers, Lorenzo and Sebastian, no one was to set foot inside of the house, which made him feel even more isolated.

I had learned, over this period of time, that my husband was a toddler in a grown man's body.

“You know,” he had said one night, after I had cleaned his wound and wrestled him into bed, “when the doctor said I should refrain from strenuous physical activity, I don't think he meant sex.”

I had scoffed then, rolling my eyes and shoving his hand away from my boobs. “Yeah, well the doctor is not here, and we're not taking any risks until you're fully healed.”

“You're killing me, amore.” He had whined, nuzzling his face in the crook of my neck.

“You'll live.”

Nico was currently in the living room, pretending it was a change of scenery from our bedroom and flipping through the channels of the TV. I sat across from him, tablet in hand as I combed through weeks of security footage. After I had killed the hired shooter, I asked Sebastian how he managed to get so close in the first place, and he told me that he had scaled the roof and waited until he got a clear shot. There were no other mansions around us, none that were close enough for him to use to get to ours, which only left one more option.

I scoured the footage of that day, looking for any clue as to how our defenses were breached. It didn't take long for the first clue to appear. The front gates looked clear, no suspicious activity to speak of, so I switched to the service entrance surveillance, and that's how I found him.

The security around that area wasn't as tight as the main gates, but it was efficient. Four guards handled the back entrance each shift, covering the alley that spilled back into the main road too.

The night shift ended at exactly 5:00 a.m. The morning shift started right after. As soon as the guards changed, they split into two teams, surveilling the entrance, the alley, and walking all the way around the house to secure the entire area and meeting up with the other guards at the front gate. The entire thing took exactly 4 minutes and 32 seconds, with less than 2 minutes of the service entrance being unguarded. It was then that the shooter snuck in, taking advantage of the little hole in our security to scale the roof and hide there until he shot Nico.

That could only mean that someone was watching the house long enough to figure all of this out.

This revelation led me to scour months worth of security footage. When I talked to Cecil, I was convinced that she was lying about the whole thing. She had said that she never met a delivery guy and that she found the flowers by the back door everyday as she came in. It seemed impossible then, because I knew for a fact that to get to the back door, she had to go through the service entrance, and not only was that area covered in security cameras, it also was guarded day and night. But with the knowledge that there were 2 minutes where the guards were unaccounted for, it was possible that someone was sneaking in to leave the bouquets by the door.