Before Cassian had pressured me into quitting, before six years of being made small, I had been a forensic accountant.

A good one.

It was the one thing my marriage had never quite managed to take from me, because it lived in a part of my mind he’d never thought to reach for.

He’d taken my confidence, my money, my sense of my own body — but he’d left the skill sitting there untouched, the way a burglar overlooks the safe because it’s built into the wall.

Cormac handed me the network’s records, and for the first time in six years, I sat down at a desk that was mine, opened a ledger that was mine to read, and became, again, the person I had been before a man taught me to be less.

I found the theft in eleven days.