A man does not have to intend the worst for the worst to become available to him.

He only has to arrange a world in which he holds every door and you hold none, and then the question of what he intends becomes a question you are no longer in any position to influence.

I was not going to hand him that world.

I had seen what he did with it the first time, in a clinic on the Tagus, to a woman who had trusted him as a brother.

Chapter 18 — Rowena Duncan