I did not acquire Ostrander Freight to gloat, or to stand on the neck of the family that had ruined mine.

I acquired it because it had been built, at its very foundation, with money stolen from me — with the ransom paid for a kidnapped infant and the patents stolen in the same attack — and because a thing built on what was taken from you is, in the deepest sense, already yours.

This was not conquest.

It was repossession.

Every dollar Baxter Ostrander had used to found that company had been a dollar taken from the Carringtons in the act of taking me, and I was simply, at last, bringing it home.

And I did not mean to run it as a trophy.