She was staying because two predators had found the one thing she would suffer anything to protect, and had wrapped their hands around it.

I understood, reading Fitzroy’s file, that Yvaine’s imprisonment and mine were built from the same blueprint — find what she loves, seize it, and call the seizing a kindness.

Hers was a dying father.

Mine was going to be a company.

But it was the same design, drawn by the same hands.

The genius of the leash, the thing that made it so much crueler than any lock, was that it turned Yvaine’s love into the mechanism of her own imprisonment.