The strange thing Konstantin had never understood — the thing that had made him so sure I could be frightened and managed and robbed — was that he had mistaken quiet for weak, and hidden for small.

I had kept my name quiet for three years not because I had nothing, but because I wanted to know what I was worth before anyone handed me anything.

And the answer, it turned out, was that I was worth exactly what I had built with my own hands on the overnight shift, under a name no one bothered to look up — which was a great deal, and which no one could take, because no one had given it to me.

The refuge was my father’s idea and mine together, and it was the truest thing to come out of the whole wreckage.

I had wanted the newest Larkhaven property to be something other than another luxury hotel, and one evening I had told him why — told him about the arithmetic of my childhood, the sense of being worth only what you could provide, the particular terror of a woman who stays with a man like Konstantin not because she is weak but because leaving requires resources she doesn’t have and a place she can’t reach.

I’d had a driver in the rain and an attorney on call and a father one phone number away.