Once he agreed, the breath went out of me. I let the phone slip from my hand and passed out.

When I woke again, my whole body screamed with pain.

"Quit faking. Wake up." Luke nudged me with his foot, his voice thick with irritation.

A violent cough tore out of me, and I spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor.

I wiped my mouth and fixed him with a stare. "Don't push your luck."

He turned, picked up a sheet of paper, and forced it into my hand. "This stock transfer agreement. You're signing it."

I let out a hollow laugh and let the page drift down to the floor. "I'd die first."

That stopped him cold. He looked at me, bloodied head to foot, and something in his eyes flickered, like he didn't recognize me.

The old me had leaned on him every single day. Obeyed him.

Luke crouched down and reached out to wipe the blood from my forehead. I turned my face away and said, faint but clear, "Keep your filthy hands off me."

He paused. Then he stood and looked down at me from his full height. "Stop making a scene. Sign, and I'll let you go on being Mrs. Randall, fair and square."

Under that imperious stare, I tore the transfer agreement to shreds.

He swept Tonya against his side and slammed the door on his way out. "Sit here and think about what you've done. Until you're ready to sign.

"Let's see how long that backbone lasts." His voice dropped, smooth and gentle now. "Tonya's the easy one. She actually understands me."

Once they were gone, I gritted my teeth and dragged myself to the study computer to dig through his records on the company asset transfers.

Luke's machine was wiped clean. But I found it anyway, a second hidden system buried underneath.

I typed in his birthday, then our wedding anniversary. Neither worked. In the end I tried Tonya's birthday, and the hidden system opened right up.

I clicked through fast and found exactly what I was looking for, the dirty work he'd done in broad daylight.

I copied it all to a hard drive, the transfer records, the core trade secrets he'd stolen out of my father's company.

The study was dead silent, nothing but the sound of my own breathing. Every breath dragged pain through me.

When the screen flashed that the save was complete, I sagged back against the chair.

Then footsteps came pounding down the hallway.

Luke kicked the door open, his eyes locked on me like a snake's. "What did you do to my computer?"

I slid the hard drive into my clothes and said the first thing that came to me. "I was retyping the stock transfer agreement."

He bought it. The cold drained out of his face, and he hauled me up out of the chair. "Good. You finally learned. Now come with me to your father's grave."

I had no idea what he wanted at the cemetery. While I was still turning it over, we were already there.

Tonya stood waiting, pointing and gesturing at a crew of construction workers. As I watched, an excavator drove forward and shoved my father's headstone flat to the ground.

She saw me and lit up with a smile. "I'm starting my own business. This lot's already registered under my name. I had a feng shui master come out, and he says the energy here is the best there is. I'm putting up a fifty-thousand-square-foot shopping complex. Your dad can watch over my little venture, help it thrive."

She leaned close and dropped her voice in my ear. "On paper it's a mall. In real life? A red-light district."

Rage roared up in me. I threw myself in front of the excavator, waving my arms. "Stop digging!"

Tonya stepped closer and said softly, "You should go die. Right alongside your father."

I struck her across the face with the back of my hand. She clapped a hand to her cheek, weeping prettily, and at the same moment she pressed her body in against mine and cried out, loud enough for everyone to hear, "As long as you spare the baby, you can hit me as many times as you want."

Then she shoved a knife into my hand and dragged my wrist, my fist, toward her own belly, murmuring at a pitch only the two of us could catch, "All that prep with the blood pack finally pays off."

Tonya cupped her bleeding stomach and looked past me, tears streaming. "I was only begging her to spare my baby…"

Luke's face went black with fury. "I came here out of decency, to tell you your father's grave was being redeveloped. And this is how you act. A dog can't change its nature."

I didn't bother explaining. "It's my father's grave. Who are you to hand it over to a woman you've known three years?"

Luke looked me dead in the eye. "Don't you dare call Tonya 'some woman.'"

"Three years ago, someone drugged me in a bar. If it weren't for her, I'd be dead."

Three years ago, a rival had hidden a bomb in the bar Luke always went to, and slipped sleeping pills into the liquor he liked. When I found out, I ran into the flames after him at the risk of my own life. He came around fast enough. I was the one who walked out with the skin burned off my lower back, who spent a full month in the burn ward getting skin grafts.

When I was discharged and went to find him, I found him instead with Tonya, the two of them tangled together in our wedding suite.

So why was Luke standing here now, saying Tonya was the one who saved him?

He waved a hand. "Level the rest of it."

I ignored the roar of the excavator and threw my arms around my father's headstone, holding on for everything I had.

Luke kicked me clear of it and took a hammer to the stone I'd carved with my own hands, smashing it apart.

I clawed my way back toward the grave. The ashes were all I had left of him now. I dug into the patch of earth that belonged to my father with my torn-up hands, blood streaking my fingers in seconds, and I didn't care, I only wanted one last thing to keep.

Luke came back lugging a bucket of acid. I locked my arms around the urn, the way my father used to hold me when I was small.

He ordered his bodyguards to pry me up. The urn slipped from my arms and hit the ground, shattering, my father's ashes scattering like broken snow. I reached for them and the guards held me fast, never letting go.

In that instant something split open in me, and only one thought was left: every last one of them would pay.

Carrying all of that hatred, I felt the darkness close over my eyes.

When I surfaced again, the back of my hand throbbed in slow waves. The monitor beeped its steady rhythm. I dragged myself upright, and there was Luke.

He watched me with a flat calm. "You could have just signed and made this easy." He paused. "But you never did learn to behave."

I thought of how he'd destroyed my father's ashes for that woman, and a mouthful of blood rose in my throat.

He gripped my shoulder, suddenly tense. "Lie back down."

I stared at him with everything I had. "Keep your dirty hands off me — they've been all over other women. You're not worth the touch."

His face froze, then twisted ugly. "You'll never admit you're wrong, will you. Let's see how long you can keep this up."

"From now on, stop hurting Tonya. She saved my life, she's carrying my child. Treating her well is the most natural thing in the world." Impatience crept into his eyes.

Every word went in like glass.

I held the tears at the rim of my eyes and forced out a smile. "Fine."

His gaze went knife-cold. He'd just opened his mouth when a cry came from Tonya's room.

His eyes melted in an instant, and his voice rushed out soft. "Baby, I'm here."

On his way out he knocked the hand they were transfusing. The needle tore through my skin and I bit down hard against the pain. He didn't even notice.

"That's right. In two days I'm announcing the baby to everyone. You're not allowed at the party. I won't have you getting some twisted idea into your head and hurting her." He dropped the words at the door and was gone.

Good. In two days the evidence of his crimes would surface. In two days I would be gone too.

I picked up my phone and scrolled to Tonya's post on social media.

In the video, Luke kissed her belly with a face full of joy while her fingers stroked through his hair.

I set the phone down, listening to the laughter coming through the wall, and my mind drifted.

The night we married, he told me, righteous and certain, that for my happiness he refused to have children. He would even go to the hospital and get a vasectomy.

He pulled me close and kissed me again and again, telling me he couldn't bear to watch a baby ruin my body.

That was where the happiness ended. Then he changed, all at once, into something brutal and selfish.

The next day I pulled out every line and went to sign my discharge papers.

The nurse told me the payment had failed. Wrong password. I tried five times and got the same error every time, until they were looking at me like a woman trying to skip out on her bill.

The password was our wedding anniversary. There was no way I'd typed it wrong, but the truth was landing anyway, cold and undeniable.

I still remembered the day we married, going to the bank together to open a joint account, his hand over mine as we set our wedding date as the password.

"I want you to remember our wedding day forever, to love me every year just like you do today." At the VIP counter he'd tapped the tip of my nose, doting. "Every time we feel happy, we put money in. This is our happiness fund."

Now the system flagged me as a thief. I patted myself down. There wasn't a single thing of value left on me.

I was fumbling for some way to explain when Tonya came drifting out of the elevator.

She raised a hand to greet me, tugging her collar open as if by accident, and there on her neck was the purple diamond necklace, the one Luke had commissioned exclusively for me. Below it, the skin was scattered with kiss marks.

"Anne, Luke changed the password last night. He probably hadn't gotten around to telling you." Tonya smiled, pleased with herself. "He was a little rough with me last night, trying to make me happy. You're not upset, are you?"

I stared at Tonya without a flicker. She wore the smug little grin of someone who'd finally won, eyes shining with the pleasure of mocking me.

I turned to the nurse. "This woman stole my bank card. She'll settle the bill for me."

Tonya's mouth puckered into instant, wounded innocence. "Now when did I ever steal your card? If it's really yours, why don't you know the PIN?"

"You've been eyeing my money this whole time. You're nothing but a stray with nowhere left to go, and I'm going to send you to prison and let the criminals in there teach you a lesson for me." She pretended to lift her phone and call the police.

I saw it clearly. She never even unlocked the screen. She just stood there in front of me, putting on her little show of talking to an officer who wasn't there.

"Oh, and if you kneel down for me right now, I'll hang up immediately." She watched me like I was entertainment, waiting for me to drop to the floor and sob.

All the old pain, all the humiliation, went scalding hot in my chest at once. I reached out and seized the amethyst necklace at her throat. "This necklace belongs to me. Since I don't want it anymore, it'll go toward what you owe."

"You vile woman! You've left my neck all red!" Tonya clutched her throat, doubling over as if in agony, a perfect picture of misery.

Luke came rushing over, suit jacket thrown crookedly over his shoulders. "Tonya, what happened?"

Before he reached us, she dragged her own nails across her throat. In an instant, five thin lines of blood opened across that pale skin.

She threw herself against Luke's chest before I could say a word, sobbing. "She said this necklace was hers and ripped it right off me. Then she ordered me to kneel and apologize to her."

Luke looked at the blood beading along her neck, and his breathing turned heavy. He didn't even ask me what had really happened. "You used to be so gentle. How can you keep coming after Tonya like this, again and again?"

I said nothing. I just looked at him, calm.

I knew what I was to him now. A clown whose only job was to keep his beloved happy.

The red flooded his eyes in a heartbeat, like a beast about to swallow me whole. "You like kneeling so much? Now it's your turn. Kneel to Tonya."

He waved a hand. With his permission, the bodyguards' stun batons fell on me like rain. I only raised my hands to shield my head and let them hit me. The pain climbed higher and higher, and I pressed my lips tight and bit down on the tip of my tongue, refusing to let out a single sound.

That broke whatever patience Luke had left. He drove his knee straight into the backs of my legs, and with no warning I dropped, folding down onto the floor.

He fisted his hand in my hair, his eyes nothing but cruelty. "Still putting on a brave face? Then let's see exactly how long you can keep it up."

With that, he ordered the bodyguards to lock me inside an abandoned factory.

He watched, cold-eyed, as they threw me roughly into the car. "I'm going to the party with Tonya soon. Once I've announced the good news that I'm having a child, I'll come collect you myself."

Something raw and unguarded in me tore open again. For his happiness, he'd reduced me to a stone in his path.

"You're going to sit there and reflect on what you've done wrong. I don't want to see that stubborn face of yours anymore."

I chose not to answer. I just rolled up the window, leaving nothing of him but that voice with no feeling left in it.

Soon the bodyguards had me at the abandoned factory, and before they left they released more than a dozen venomous snakes.

The air was thick with the smell of mold. The snakes came toward me, tongues flicking. I could hear, with awful clarity, the dry scrape of scales dragging over the floor.

I could not let them bite me.

I tried the factory door, but no matter what I did it wouldn't budge. I pounded on it, hoping the bodyguards hadn't gone far, that someone would let me out.

But however hard I beat on that door and cried out, no one came. All I could do was claw my way up onto a high platform inside the building.

I watched the snakes twist their bodies and lift their cunning heads, scales throwing back a strange, sickly gleam in the thin light.

It wasn't until nightfall that the factory door swung open, and Luke walked in, his face dark.

"This time I invited prominent people from every circle to share the joy of my having a baby." He looked at me with stone-cold eyes.

"So you threw me out here, in some derelict factory on the edge of town? And to keep me from running, you set loose all these snakes to bite me?" I looked at him, all hope gone.

The breath caught hard in my throat, and for a moment I couldn't get it back.

Luke lowered his eyes. "I can grant you one request."

When I stayed silent, he turned to leave.

Then I shouted his name. "Luke. That island you promised me before. Does the offer still stand?"

He thought for a few seconds, then turned back. "It stands. I thought you said you didn't want it."

I shook my head. "I've thought it through. I want it. The contract's already drawn up. It's under the passenger-seat cushion of that Maserati you're driving right now."

"Sign it, and I promise I'll never bother you and Tonya again."

Luke nodded and went back out to the car. Three minutes later he returned with the stack of papers.

"Signed. Remember, don't go back on your word." He dropped the line and left at once.

I picked up the contract and read it carefully. His careless signature sat on every page. He hadn't even noticed that tucked inside the island deed was a divorce agreement.

Half an hour after the car roared away, I found a long wooden pole, used it to flick the snakes aside one by one, and walked out of that place for good.

The dark swallowed my fleeing shape. I caught a cab to the airport at top speed and booked the earliest flight to Seattle. There, I couriered every piece of Luke's criminal evidence, along with the divorce agreement, to my lawyer.

Before the plane took off, I dropped my SIM card straight into a trash can. I would never need that number again.

Years ago, Luke and I had walked into the carrier's store hand in hand to set up a matching couples plan. He'd said it was the only way to let every man know I was taken, that he wanted to tell the whole world I was his.

Luke, I hope we never see each other again.