She went very still and very calm, the calm of a person for whom danger is not a shock but a familiar room — and she closed her hand around the key and looked toward the sound not with the fear of someone facing the worst night of her life, but with the grim readiness of someone who had been rehearsing for it, in secret, for a very long time.

It was the calm that frightened him most.

A woman that practiced at bracing for footsteps in the night had been braced for a long, long while.

Chapter 5 — The Study

Caspian did not freeze, and he did not waste the seconds asking questions.

Whatever else was true about the marriage, he had spent his professional life reading a room in the half-second before it turned, and this room had just turned.