Three weeks after the wedding, I stopped pretending I still had a choice.

Luciano never asked if I wanted him. He simply took—in the mornings before he left for meetings, in the evenings when he returned smelling of cigars and power, in the middle of the night when he reached for me in the dark like it was his right. Which, according to every paper I had signed, it was.

I learned the shape of his hunger. The way he preferred me on my back so he could watch my face. The way he liked to pin my wrists and make me say his name when I came. The way...