My husband beat me with a heavy leather belt just to impress his arrogant mistress. Covered in bruises, I pulled out my phone to call my dad. My husband snatched it, put it on speaker, and laughed. “Let’s tell your pathetic, broke mechanic father how worthless you are,” he mocked. The line connected. But the deep, booming voice that answered wasn’t a poor mechanic. My father said one sentence and hung up the phone. And exactly five minutes later, they begged for forgiveness.

The sharp, terrifyingly crisp sound of the heavy leather belt echoing off the vaulted, hand-painted ceilings of the grand hall was followed instantly by a searing, blinding heat across my shoulder blades.

I bit down so hard on my lower lip that I tasted the sudden, hot rush of copper in my mouth. I refused to scream. I refused to give him the acoustic validation of his cruelty.

The final strike tore through the thin fabric of my cotton dress. My muscles gave out entirely. I collapsed forward, my palms slapping hard against the cold, imported Italian marble floor. I stayed on my hands and knees, my breath coming in jagged, shallow rasps, the agonizing fire radiating from my spine making the edges of my vision vibrate with dark static. A drop of blood from my split lip hit the pristine white stone, looking like a macabre painting.

Above me, standing in the center of the palatial Beverly Hills living room he falsely believed he owned, was my husband, Julian Croft.

I heard the soft rustle of expensive fabric as he casually adjusted the cuffs of his bespoke, navy-blue suit. His breathing was completely steady. He had executed the violence with the cold, detached rhythm of a man hitting a golf ball. He looked down at me not with the fiery rage of a crime of passion, but with the chilling, arrogant disgust of a king looking at a peasant who had dared to track mud into his temple.

“Look at her,” a woman’s voice purred.

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