He saw old fading marks around her wrists, scars on her ankles, long pale lines across her back — the kind left by being tied down for days.

“Who did this to you?” he asked, kneeling so he wouldn’t stand over her.

Rosalie pressed her lips together before she answered. “My father did. Along with the doctors he paid to call it all for my own good.”

In that moment Manuel understood that he hadn’t married the woman the whole town called a monster.

He’d married the lone survivor of a family that was still trying to destroy her.

Across town, in his study, Emmett Durham had just discovered that Lorelei’s key was gone.