She still recoiled at the memory of that brute pressing his foul lips against hers in that alleyway as his fists pinned her wrists to the wall. A dark alleyway her father had duped her into entering. He had denied it afterward, of course, acting all incensed and suitably relieved that she had escaped, but it had been the final nail in his coffin. And perhaps the final nail in hers, too. She had certainly never been quite the same afterward. Any residual naïveté died that night in that alleyway, and a very different woman had stalked out of it.