For three years, Beatrice had operated on a single unexamined assumption: that power in that family flowed downward from her, and that Chloe, as the youngest, the poorest in status, the only one not related to her by blood, sat at the very bottom of it, the safest possible target precisely because she had no power to retaliate.

You do not pick on the strong.

You pick on the one you believe cannot fight back, and Beatrice had chosen Chloe for exactly that reason, because a seven-year-old stepchild was, in her calculation, the one person in the house from whom there could never be any consequences.

And that assumption, so central to how she ran her whole kingdom, was about to be turned completely inside out.

The consequence was going to come from precisely the direction she believed was safe.