“We were married six years.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And you spent every one of them teaching me what evidence looks like.”

I watched the sentence reach him, and I watched him understand it, which was the only revenge I had ever actually wanted.

Not the freeze order, not the cameras, not the investigators by the door — those were consequences, and consequences are the law’s business, not mine.

What I wanted, standing there, was for Cassian to grasp the shape of what he had done to himself: that the same six years he had spent teaching me to doubt my own body, to sign what I was told, to trust the loudest voice in the room, had also, without his ever noticing, been six years of training.