A person held by force can at least hate her captors cleanly, can dream of escape, can wait for a moment of inattention and run.

But Yvaine was not held by force.

She was held by love — by the fact that the Pembrooks paid for her father’s care, and could stop paying, and had made sure she understood that her freedom would be bought with his life.

Every day she stayed, she stayed out of love.

Every humiliation she swallowed, she swallowed to keep an old man breathing in a bed across the city.

They had taken the best thing in her — her devotion to her father — and turned it into the chain around her own neck, so that the more deeply she loved, the more completely she was trapped.