He kept saying it, that word — tricked — as though I had wronged him by not disclosing the full extent of what he was trying to steal.

It is a remarkable thing, the way a certain kind of man can be caught mid-theft and land, instantly and sincerely, on his own grievance.

Konstantin had married me to take my company.

He had spent a year grooming me to be manageable and a wedding coercing me to sign.

And on discovering that his target had been larger and better defended than he’d realized, his honest first feeling was that I had been deceptive — that I owed him full and transparent disclosure of the assets he had been planning to strip from me.

I had kept forty-nine percent of my ownership out of the public register, and in his moral universe that concealment was the betrayal, not the theft it had thwarted.