She stood perfectly still, her head high, and watched the man who had caged her be carried out of the last room he would ever try to rule.

She had imagined this moment for ten years — had built it, in the worst nights, as the thing that would finally make her whole: her father brought low, disgraced, dragged away.

And now that it was here, she noticed that it did not feel the way she had imagined.

There was no rush of triumph, no sweetness, no sense of a wound closing.

There was only a strange, level quiet, and underneath it the plain fact of her own freedom, which turned out to have nothing to do with his downfall at all.

That was the thing no one had told her about being wronged for a decade: that the revenge you dream of is never actually the thing you need.