And then I stood in that ballroom, in front of two hundred of his guests, with the man himself coming at me with that old familiar urgency in his face, the look that had once made me smooth things over and shrink myself down — and the fear simply was not there.

I checked for it, the way you check a tooth that used to ache.

Nothing.

Because fear of a person is really fear of what they can do to you, and Roman had already done the worst of it; he had taken my freedom and my name and my father’s company and two years of my life, and I had survived all of it, and come out the far side harder than I went in.

There was nothing left he could threaten me with.