Chapter 1 - THE RULES OF BEING HIS WIFE
The belt snapped through the air before Olivia Carter had even opened her suitcase.
Three hours after their honeymoon flight landed in Raleigh, her husband stood between her and the bedroom door, smiling with none of the warmth he had worn for ten days in Maui.
Daniel Mercer loosened his tie.
Then he pulled the leather belt through the loops of his slacks and wrapped it once around his fist.
“Now,” he said, “you learn what being my wife actually means.”
Olivia stared at him.
Her carry-on sat beside the dresser. A plastic lei from their hotel was still looped around its handle.
“Say that again.”
Daniel’s expression barely changed.
“My mother warned me you were stubborn.”
He stepped closer.
“A wife cooks. A wife doesn’t correct her husband in public. A wife doesn’t make financial decisions without talking to him. And when her husband tells her something, she listens the first time.”
Olivia looked at the belt.
“And that?”
“For correction.”
For several seconds, the only sound in the room was the ceiling fan turning above them.
Daniel had proposed after fourteen months.
He had cried when she accepted.
He had stood in front of eighty-seven people at a restored tobacco warehouse in downtown Durham and promised to honor the woman she was, not the woman anyone expected her to become.
Now he lifted the belt.
Olivia unbuttoned her linen travel shirt.
His mouth curved.
“There you go.”
She let the shirt fall across the chair.
Underneath, she wore a fitted black compression top.
Then she crouched beside her suitcase, unzipped the outside compartment, and removed a pair of red boxing gloves.
Daniel blinked.
Olivia slipped them on and tightened the wrist straps with her teeth.
“Perfect timing,” she said. “I need a training partner.”
His face changed.
“What the hell is this?”
“Eight years of amateur boxing. Two North Carolina state titles. I stopped competing at thirty-two.”
“You never told me that.”
“You never asked.”
Daniel stared at the gloves.
Olivia could almost see him recalculating the woman he had married.
Then pride won.
“You think this is funny?”
“No.”
He swung the belt.
Olivia moved backward.
The leather missed her shoulder by inches.
Daniel came again, harder.
She stepped inside the arc, trapped his wrist against her forearm, and drove one controlled punch into the soft space beneath his ribs.
Air burst from him.
The belt fell.
He cursed and grabbed for her.
Olivia pivoted.
Daniel crashed facedown onto the carpet with his right arm pinned behind him.
“Get off me!”
“Stop fighting.”
“You attacked me!”
“You swung a belt at me.”
“I’ll tell the police you went crazy.”
Olivia looked toward the bookshelf.
A small green light glowed from the digital mantel clock.
She had installed the camera six months earlier after packages began disappearing from the front porch.
It recorded locally to an encrypted memory card and backed up to her home security account.
“Please do,” she said.
Daniel went still.
That was when the front door opened downstairs.
Olivia heard a woman’s voice.
“Daniel?”
Elaine Mercer climbed the stairs without knocking.
Daniel’s older brother, Mark, followed behind her.
Neither of them looked surprised by the belt on the floor.
Neither asked what had happened.
Elaine looked at Daniel pinned beneath Olivia and closed her eyes for one long second.
“You were supposed to teach her,” she said quietly, “not lose to her.”
Olivia released Daniel and stepped back.
Mark pulled out his phone.
“We can still handle this.”
Olivia kept both gloved hands visible.
“Handle what?”
Mark looked at Daniel’s reddening cheek.
“Bruises are bruises.”
Elaine gave Olivia a thin smile.
“By morning, you’ll be begging us not to press charges.”
Olivia looked from one face to another.
The rushed wedding.
Daniel’s obsession with combining checking accounts.
His questions about the shares she had inherited from her father.
Elaine asking, three separate times, whether Olivia’s house was technically hers or owned by a trust.
This had not begun tonight.
Her phone vibrated on the dresser.
A security notification appeared.
BACK PATIO DOOR — MANUAL ENTRY
YESTERDAY, 2:11 A.M.
Olivia frowned.
Yesterday she and Daniel had still been in Hawaii.
She opened the camera history.
A grainy nighttime image filled the screen.
Mark was standing inside her kitchen.
In his hands was the red fireproof document case Olivia kept locked in her father’s study.
She lifted her eyes toward him.
May you like
Mark saw the screen.
For the first time that night, he stopped smiling.
