Ricky felt an unruly despair within him, one that walked at the side of fear.

Rumplestiltskin had attacked his great-niece at a moment of childish vulnerability. He had taken a moment that should be filed in the great vault of memories as one of joy, of awakening-her fourteenth birthday. And then he’d rendered it ugly and frightening. It was as profound a threat as Ricky could imagine, as provocative as he could envision.

Ricky lifted a hand to his forehead as if he suddenly felt feverish. He was surprised not to find sweat there. He thought to himself: We think of threats as something that compromises our safety. A man with a gun or a knife and a sexual obsession. Or a drunk driver behind the wheel of a car accelerating down the highway carelessly. Or some insidious disease, like the one that killed his wife, starting to worry away at our insides.

Ricky rose from his chair and started pacing nervously about.

We fear being killed. But what is far worse is being ruined.

He glanced over at Rumplestiltskin’s letter. Ruined. He’d used that word, right alongside destroy.

His adversary was someone who understood that often what truly threatens us and is hardest to combat is something that stems from within. The impact and pain of nightmare can be far greater than being struck by a fist. And equally, sometimes it is not so much that fist, but the emotion behind it, that creates pain. He stopped abruptly, and turned toward the small bookcase that rested against one of the sidewalls of the office. There were rows of texts arranged there-medical texts, for the most part, and professional journals. Collected in those books were literally hundreds of thousands of words that clinically and coldly dissected human emotions. In an instant, he understood that all that knowledge was likely useless to him.