I want to protect him from embarrassment.

Let me quietly take care of his old debts. He had made his first ask sound like a favor, a generosity, and by the time the favor curdled into complicity, Sabeen was already in too deep to climb out, already holding a thread that connected her to the fraud, already vulnerable to exactly the threat he then made.

It was the identical method he’d used on Linnea herself — the gentle framing, the care that was really capture, the slow tightening of a trap that always looked, at each step, like a kindness.

Dorian did not recruit accomplices by offering them money or thrills.

He recruited them by seeming to help, and then revealing, once they had accepted the help, that they were now bound to him.

Sabeen had been a willing sinner and a genuine victim at the same time, which was Dorian’s specialty: he made people complicit in their own ruin and called it a partnership.