Chapter 1 - THE THIRD NIGHT
Three days after our wedding, Mason Carter kicked the dining table across the room and announced that a wife had to be beaten before she became obedient.
The table struck the wall beneath the chandelier. White plates shattered across the hardwood floor, wine spread beneath the fallen chair, and sauce from the stuffed peppers splashed across the champagne satin dress I had worn because Mason said he wanted our first quiet dinner as husband and wife to feel special.
“A wife hands over her paycheck, cooks every night, and learns to keep her mouth shut,” he said. “If she won’t learn the easy way, she learns the hard way.”
I stared at the man I had married less than seventy-two hours earlier. His black shirt had come untucked, his face was red from whiskey, and the tenderness he had performed for nearly two years had vanished so completely that I wondered whether it had ever existed.
“My mother warned me about women like you,” he continued. “Your paycheck goes into the account she manages. You’ll help pay for this house, wake up at six to make my breakfast, and have dinner ready when I come home. When I speak, you stay quiet.”
I placed my fork on the only plate that remained intact.
“And if I don’t?”
Mason stepped toward me.
“Then I’ll make you.”
He expected crying. He expected bargaining. He expected the frightened silence his mother had apparently promised him would come after the first display of power.
Instead, I laughed.
His face twisted. “What’s so funny?”
“You never bothered asking what I actually do at the recreation center.”
Mason grabbed my arm.
That was his first serious mistake.
I rotated my wrist, broke his grip, shifted my weight, and used his momentum to send him safely onto the floor beside the overturned chair. He stared up at me in disbelief. I had trained in karate since I was seven, competed in kickboxing through college, and spent five days a week teaching women and teenagers how to escape people who believed size gave them ownership.
Mason lunged toward a dining chair.
I stepped aside, removed it from his hands, and controlled him on the floor without striking him.
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Then I took out my phone and pressed Record.
“Now,” I said, “tell me again who taught you that beating your wife is normal.”
