You need to see this before you marry him.

I would understand, later, what that note had cost her to write, and it changed how I read every word of it.

Yvaine had lived for years inside a cage built on one principle: that any move toward the outside world would be punished, and punished not on her but on the one person she’d trade her own life to protect.

She had learned to carry coffee with bruised wrists and call it a fall.

She had learned to eat cold rice in the dark and say nothing.

Every instinct that kept her alive in that house told her to stay silent, keep her head down, give the guests nothing.