Stephanie nodded. It was ... not as bad as realizing your mind wasn't entirely your own, but it was hard. It was also harder to recognize that you'd made a horrible mistake. That you thought you could balance something, enjoy the benefits of corruption while staying relatively clean of it yourself. That it wouldn't just chew you up and spit you out.

That, maybe, deep down, she had value to her father as something other than a tool. She'd nearly forgotten that hope, just to have it brought back and snuffed out again, even more cruelly.

She reached out and took Rachel's hands. "I need my mind cleared. I need to find a way of making sure this cannot happen to me ever again. I'll have to cut any links, ties or benefits I ever received from my father or the Hellfire Club." Not that she'd directly done much with the Club, but she'd indirectly benefitted from those associations several times. But it was becoming manifestly clear that those connections were not at a price she was willing to pay.

"I know Sebastian Shaw has never been, in any measure, a good man." She deliberately eschewed the honorific of 'father'. "But he's become worse, I think, since he's returned. Perhaps that's another illusion too and he's always been like this."

She frowned and struggled not to lower her head in shame, but she kept it up. "They need to be taken down."