There was only a slow, unglamorous re-learning, promise by kept promise, of a thing she had been made to forget: that it was possible for another person to have power over you and simply not use it to hurt you.

Chapter 7 — A Contract to Survive

To understand how they had come to be married at all, you have to understand what the two of them had each been before the wedding night.

Caspian Ashmoor had a reputation, and he had earned it: cold, exacting, a man who acquired things and improved their margins and did not sentimentalize.

When the Ravenscroft marriage was proposed to him — a strategic alliance dressed as a romance, a way of binding two fortunes — he had considered it exactly as coldly as everyone assumed.

He had not expected to feel anything for the quiet, watchful woman his new relations spoke of with such casual contempt. The plain one, they called her, when they thought she could not hear. The difficult one.