“[She] was trading sex for print. She certainly wouldn't be the first woman to do that, now, would she, Nikki Heat?”

“She took my heat. Traded it to the devil for some bauble.”

“I actually do have a motto,” said Heat. “It’s ‘Never forget who you work for.'" And as she voiced the words, Nikki felt a creeping unease. It wasn’t exactly shame, but it was close. For the first time it sounded hollow. Fake. Why? She examined herself, trying to see what was different. The stress, that was new. And when she looked at that, she recognized that the hardest part of her day lately was working to avoid confrontation with Captain Montrose. That’s when it came to her. In that moment, sitting nearly naked in Rook’s living room, playing some silly nineteenth-century parlor game, she came to an unexpected insight. In that moment Nikki woke up and saw with great clarity who she had become - and who she had stopped being. Without noticing it, Heat had begun seeing herself as working for her captain and had lost sight of her guiding principle, that she worked for the victim.”

“Betsy hadn't had sex, actual; sex-sex, full sex, in two hundred and fifty-three days. She decided on her thirty-seventh birthday that she wouldn't sleep with anyone unless it was in the context of a committed relationship which had some sort of future, and she was only gradually coming to the realization of what happens when a woman her age makes a decision like that: she never has sex again.”

“Léonie, you will do well to consider. You are not the first woman in my life."She smiled through her tears. "Monseigneur, I would so much rather be the last woman than the first,” she said.”

“She and I would trade books, talk endlessly, drink cheap whiskey, engage in unremarkable sex. You know, the stuff of everyday.”