On the third day of our marriage, my husband kicked over the table and announced that women have to be beaten into submission. My eyes gleamed. In that case, I won’t hold back.

Chapter 1: The Shattered Heirloom

This is the anatomy of a three-day marriage.

Seventy-two hours after we signed our certificate at City Hall, my brand-new husband flipped the dining table. It went over with a concussive crash. Platters of roast and porcelain exploded across the hardwood.

A wave of brown gravy splattered up the calves of my trousers. A jagged shard of a dinner plate ricocheted off the baseboard and cut a shallow, stinging line across my ankle.

I was still seated, holding a half-empty bowl of rice, my fork suspended in the air. The bite I’d been navigating toward my mouth never arrived.

“I’m talking to you! Are you deaf?” Tom Miller bellowed from the center of the wreckage.

The veins roped up his neck. His face flushed a mottled purple. The stench of cheap whiskey, raw garlic, and onions came off him in a wave so pungent I had to squint.

“My mother told me exactly how this works,” he spat. “You keep a woman on a choke chain. You hit her once, fast and hard, and she learns to submit. You joined the Miller family, which means you fall in line with our hierarchy.

You think you’re still some untouchable princess in your fancy apartment? Time you learned your place at the bottom of the food chain.”

I didn’t flinch. With the deliberate care you’d use handling something volatile, I rested my fork on the rim of the one surviving plate. Then I set my rice bowl on the bare wood of the table frame.

The soft clink was swallowed entirely by his tantrum.

“What hierarchy?” I reached for a napkin and wiped the grease off my fingers before looking up at him.