Chapter 1

Ever since I caught Lucas cheating.

Every evening he came home, the first thing that happened was me pinning him against the entryway wall and pulling down his trousers. I'd saturate a cloth with surgical-grade alcohol and work it over him, methodical and cold.

Lucas would go along with it each time — red-eyed, gentle, the face of a man who knew he owed me something. He'd murmur apologies and try to coax me down. He understood why.

But tonight he was two full hours late.

The moment I caught the perfume on his collar, something in me snapped open again. My hands went straight for his belt.

"Last time you came home half an hour late, you'd slept with a woman. Tonight it's two hours. How many was it this time? Four?"

He apologised. I pushed him away. He apologised again. I pushed him again.

Twenty-nine times.

After the twenty-ninth, he finally raised the back of one hand — still red from the drip he'd been on at work — and broke.

"Enough! I'm running a fever, I'm half dead, and you haven't asked once how I am. Every single day with this. When does it end?"

"It was one night. I was drunk, I made one mistake. You act like you've never done anything wrong."

"No wonder you ended up in that alley at sixteen. Sylvia Thornton, you paranoid, hysterical woman — you deserve everything you get."

The spray bottle shattered on the tile beside my feet. The alcohol smell was so sharp I couldn't get a breath in.

I looked at his face. That exhausted, impatient face.

And I felt tired.

All right. This thing between us — this wreck of a marriage — I don't want it anymore.