Do not ruin it by giving it back.

Chapter 6 — The Most Powerful Thing Was Nothing

I turned my stinging face back toward her, and I did not cry, and I did not scream, and I did not lift a hand.

“You just made,” I said quietly, “the single most expensive mistake of your life.”

Marguerite blinked, thrown, because a slap is a move that expects a move in return — tears, or a shriek, or a blow — and I had given her none of them.

I had given her a sentence, delivered in the flat, certain voice I used to close acquisitions, and it frightened her far more than any violence could have, because she could not understand it.