“Are you really going to leave me with nothing?” he asked her across the table.
“I didn’t empty those accounts, Dorian,” Odette said.
“I’m just stopping you from emptying my future.”
There was a lesson in the speed of it that Odette would carry into her new work for years.
Dorian and Lyra and Maeve had all believed, right up until the gala, that they were protected — that their money, their name, their reputation, their careful web of mutual silence, made them untouchable.
And it had, for a while.
But their protection had always depended on one thing: that no one with proof would ever be willing to speak.
They had built their whole safety on Odette’s willingness to stay quiet, and they had mistaken that quiet for weakness, when it had only ever been patience.
The instant she opened her hand and let the documented truth into a public room, every layer of their protection turned to paper.
The name meant nothing.