I did not become someone new in order to survive what Preston did.

I did not have to.

The woman who could do all of this — the investor, the strategist, the one who held the whole thing in her hands and chose justice over revenge — was there the entire time, underneath the quiet, underneath the years of being made small.

She had always been there.

Preston had simply never bothered to look, because the story of my smallness was more comfortable for him than the truth, and he had mistaken my quiet for the absence of a storm rather than the stillness before one.

My brothers had once been feared for the Voss name.