And it had been pleasurable. To begin with. Sam had returned her touch and she’d burned for him, and if she were honest, a little of her passion was that she was holding a man who had become a stranger to her. It was the same hard body, the same embrace, although she noticed as he moved above her that he had removed the amulet from around his neck for the first time in their married life. But the warm skin contained a man she loved but didn’t really know. The thrill had been short-lived. Even now, lying silently thinking in the dark, Katie was not sure at what point she had stopped trusting the large man who had been inside and all over her body. Thoughts had come to her as he stroked her back, she knew that much. Dark thoughts. Thoughts of her son and his distress, of Sam’s behaviour, of all the things that were wrong with this picture of a happy normal family. And the darkness of it all had pulled her back from that temporary loss of sentience that sex affords, and made her struggle to move away from him. Had he misinterpreted her squirming? Surely he had. Perhaps he thought she wanted to play rougher; it wasn’t unknown in their repertoire. All she could think of now in the dark was the ugly burning violence of the act, of his penis that was normally a part of them both becoming nothing more than a hard intrusive piece of meat that she was desperate, violently desperate, to expel from her body. It made her feel that the centre of all rage was between her legs, that a touch there was a deliberate and scheming affront from someone who would hurt her. Hurt them all.

Billy. God. Please, never Billy.

She had fought with him, clawing at his back and rolling her head, screaming at him inside her head to let her go, but he held her tighter, punching himself into that pit of her wrath until she could bear it no more and bit him savagely on the shoulder.

Sam had come inside her at the same time she drew blood from him and arched back in a mixture of pleasure and pain.

Then there had been silence. No talk. No holding and laughing and kissing. He had put his hand to his bleeding shoulder and turned away like a wounded dog, leaving her gasping through clenched teeth, staring up into the darkness.

The abused always becomes the abuser.

No. Not true. Yes, true. Maybe.

She had cried softly, too softly for him to hear, and the movement from his shoulders suggesting that he was already asleep made her hate him for an instant.

Jesus, she was falling apart. He had told her his life, and now she was hating him for the truth of who he was.