By the time Alaric Ravenscroft’s men understood the key was gone from the house, the key — and the woman who held it — were already behind a door they could not open, and already, for the first time in a decade, outside his reach.

That night Caspian did not merely hide his wife.

He insulated her, permanently, from the family that had spent ten years treating her as a thing to be stored.

And he did it, she noticed even in her fear, in a particular way.

He did not take the key from her, though it would have been simpler; he let her keep it in her own hand.

He did not tell her to be calm, or to trust him, or to leave the thinking to him now that a man had finally arrived to do it.