“But he saw her and, God, it was exactly like last night. Everything he'd learn about this particular woman would fascinate him; he was sure of it. He'd want to learn more and more. This was real. [...]He'd take anything, even thirty minutes in a coffee shop, but she was running late. So he'd have to treat the next ten minutes as the most important of his life - without scaring the shit out of her.”

“How could she not know he was thinking about sex? he wondered. It was all he'd been thinking about for the last eighteen hours, give or take a few minutes spent thinking about keeping them both alive. Oh, yeah, and twice he'd thought about food, once about her mother, and once he'd checked to make sure he had an extra mag for his Glock.”

“He didn't go down to dinner at all that night, didn't eat, didn't drink, simply thought of his wife, trying to decide what to do with her. He'd wanted her to suffer, and she'd suffered. He'd wanted her to pay for her deceits, and she'd saved his life. He'd wanted to torment her with the knowledge that she would never see him again and had instead created his own private hell. He wanted her to come to him again, giving herself to him as she had that night before her attempted escape, and he wanted to hear words she would never speak. He'd even started lying to himself as he lay sleepless in his bed, reliving each moment of their last night together, telling himself it was real, that she'd meant every word. He was going mad.”

“This wasn't going to last anyway. He'd have ended things in another fifty or sixty years with her. He'd never want anything permanent with her so this really didn't bother him. This was fine. This was more than fine, he thought as he drove his first through the wall.”

“He'd pushed her. He'd scared her. He'd besieged her. He'd vowed he wouldn't, and he did.”

“But he didn't need to seek visual confirmation of what he'd just heard to know she had. And the truth was, he couldn't blame her. He'd not have let her die, either. He'd have moved mountains. He'd have battled God or Devil for his wife's life. She'd betrayed him. He smiled faintly.”