Without warning, Lysander reached for the lamp. The room plunged into darkness, and I felt the bed dip as he lay down beside me. I clung to the edge of the mattress, my body rigid with tension. The silence in the room was deafening, broken only by the sound of our breathing.

As I lay there, my mind raced with thoughts of my new reality. This was to be my life now - married to a man I barely knew, a man whose very presence filled me with dread. How did it come to this? My father, the ...