I walked back toward my private quarters—the very room I had carried Micah to after Rosa sedated her.

She had looked so fragile then, so utterly helpless, but I had forced myself to feel nothing. Women like her used helplessness as a weapon, a velvet trap designed to disarm men like me. Yet, as I’d laid her down on the mattress, she had whimpered a single word into the quiet room: "Mum."

I had caught myself staring at her face longer than I should have, disgusted by my own brief lapse in discipline.

My first instinct had been to move her to the holding cells downstairs, but I’d dismissed it....